Holby City boss Simon Harper reveals 2019 spoilers and 20th anniversary plans

What are your plans for the future of the show?
Well, we’ve had a great year with the exciting Gaskell storyline which was quite genre-busting for us - a dark thriller indeed – so it’s safe to say things get jollier again, with perhaps less of a body count than 2018....People often ask if Holby City is a soap opera or a continuing drama – I’d say it’s both to a degree, the operative word being “opera” – where stories are full blooded, passionate and larger than life, rooted in explosive secrets and lies – which are some clues for what you can expect from storylines in 2019. You’ll see classic returns and event episodes to celebrate our anniversary, sometimes playing with our format – which we did very successfully with the Sacha mental health episode – as well as an exciting influx of new characters to shake things up. There’ll be a bit more romance and some more collaborations with Casualty - with something very exciting coming up in the spring! And the show will, of course, remain true to the question that has always summarised it – how do you balance work and personal life in a profession that demands everything in the pressured landscape of the modern NHS.

What’s life like off screen on Holby?
Behind the scenes, some of the cast are so unlike their characters! By which I mean nicer, not the other way around! Guy Henry, for example, is hilarious – he couldn’t be less like Hanssen! He makes everybody laugh on set. He’s such a brilliant actor, he can be joking around but then immediately slips into the iceberg that is Henrik. Also Rosie Marcel as Jac – even after knowing her for years if I bump into her in the corridor, I somehow don’t recognise her for the first couple of seconds, she looks exactly the same, but it’s because she’s not wearing that mysterious outer shell she somehow adopts from the inside as Jac – it’s the same with Amanda Mealing on Casualty, and shows how clever their performances are. Bob Barrett is even nicer than Sacha, were such a thing possible, and the lovely Alex Walkinshaw IS Fletch.

What is the secret to Holby City’s success?
It has a very special tone - it is first and foremost a medical drama set in the NHS, but there has always been something heightened, glossy and aspirational about the series – dare I say even sexy. It has a wit and panache tand it thrives on comedy, humour and risk-taking, as well as intense emotional and medical drama. For research purposes I watched the first episode written by Tony McHale – and there’s an iconic moment in which we see Anton Meyer [played by George Irving], having just completed the show’s first heart transplant, delivering a swathe of machine-gun fire, highly characterful medical handover, while struggling out of his scrubs into his tux for a night at the opera. It was such clever, stall-setting writing to establish the tone and ambition of a new show. People also love the gore – thanks to our brilliant prosthetics team, it’s all so realistic you’d never think some poor soul was crouching under the operating table pumping a valve to make all the fake blood spray out of that ruptured aorta!

What are you particularly proud of from Holby’s 20 years on screen?
There are so many things! But recently I was watching Mo’s [Chizzy Akudolu] return episode and I texted Chizzy to tell her what a fantastic response the episode was getting on social media. In response Chizzy forwarded me a lovely text from a friend which said: “Yay! A black woman saving the day!” We’d never even thought about that, as it’s a perfectly normal scenario here with a hugely popular character like Mo - and Chizzy said “that’s what makes it a great show”. Something as simple as an empowered black female supersurgeon saving lives and being brilliant sends out an important message. Twenty years before the current discussions about diversity in the industry, the creators of Holby [Tony McHale and Mal Young] created a show that was already ahead of the game with on-screen representation. Sharon D Clarke often talks very graciously about Holby in her press and what it meant to her at the time to be cast as a Consultant.

I believe we have also been groundbreaking with LGBT representation with the #Berena storyline and David Ames’ character Dominic. There was also Malick [Jimmy Akingbola], who was a black, alpha-male surgeon who just happened to be gay. The showrunner at the time, Justin Young, created the character as there was a sense there hadn’t really been one like that before. Another first was casting a non-neurotypical actor - Jules Robertson - to play our non-neurotypical semi-regular character Jason. This inclusivity is really something to celebrate.