Similar Rain on the Roof, Christabel, The Nigel Barton Plays, Brimstone and Treacle, Pennies from Heaven | ||
Emergency – Ward 9 is a Dennis Potter television play first broadcast by the BBC in the Thirty-Minute Theatre series on 11 April 1966.
Potter had praised the storylines and sense of urgency of the ITV hospital soap Emergency – Ward 10 in his television reviews for Daily Herald. He was inspired to write a play that connected his experiences in a National Health hospital with events depicted in the series. The play featured —specified in Potter's script— an "Alf Garnett-type" character who suddenly finds himself sharing a ward with a black man. The play was controversial for its unflinching depiction of institutionalised racism but was critically applauded.
The play was repeated eighteen months after its first transmission. For many years, a recording was thought not to have survived, but the play has resurfaced and was screened at the BFI's Missing Believed Wiped event in December 2011.