Children's Ward

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Children's Ward (retitled The Ward from 1995 to 1998) was a British children's television drama series produced by Granada Television and broadcast on the ITV network as part of its Children's ITV strand on weekday afternoons. The programme was set, as the title suggests, in the children's ward of a hospital, and told the stories of the patients and staff present there. Aimed at older children and teenagers, Children's Ward was a long-lived series for a children's drama, starting life in 1988 as a contribution to the Dramarama anthology strand, "Blackbird Singing In The Dead of Night", then first broadcast as a series 1989 and running from then until 2000.

The series was conceived by Granada staff writers Paul Abbott and Kay Mellor, both of whom have subsequently gone on to enjoy highly successful careers as award-winning writers of adult television drama. At the time, they were both working on the soap opera Coronation Street, and had recently collaborated on a script for Dramarama.

Abbott, who had been through a troubled childhood himself, had initially wanted to set the series in a children's care home rather than a hospital, but this was vetoed by Granada executives. During the course of its run, however, Children's Ward won many plaudits for covering difficult issues such as cancer, alcoholism, drug addicton and child abuse in a sensitive manner. The programme won many awards, including in 1996 a BAFTA Children's Award for Best Drama, won by an episode in which a murderer lures children to him via the internet and is - highly unusually for children's television - not eventually caught.

As well as Abbott and Mellor, the series was worked on by many writers who have gone on to enjoy successful careers in adult television drama, perhaps most notably Russell T. Davies, who was the show's producer, and writer of several episodes, from 1992 to 1995.

The decision to end Children's Ward came in mid-2000, after transmission of the final series, and ironically came as the sole original cast member Rita May said she had no plans to leave the show.