EXCLUSIVE: Actor and stand up comedian Sammy T Dobson recently joined the cast of Casualty as junior doctor Nicole Piper but it isn’t her first appearance on the programme.

Casualty newcomer Sammy T Dobson has spoken out about her first appearance in the show playing a patient called Emma Gatts 18 years ago just as a clip of her performance has resurfaced. A fan site for the show posted a snippet of the star in a guest role in the long-running BBC medical drama which aired on April 1, 2006.

Since then Sammy has landed a permanent part on the show and made her debut as junior doctor Nicole Piper a couple of weeks ago. Speaking exclusively to Express.co.uk, ahead of her first episode, she recalled being desperate to go back after her first appearance on the programme when she was just a teen.

“I really loved doing that two weeks that I was there and I said to my agent after I did the job, ‘how long is it before I can go back?’ And at the time it was two years I was like, ‘I’d really like to go back and be like a nurse or a doctor.’

“She was like, ‘Well if it ever comes up’. Obviously, more than a decade went by and I hadn’t given it any thought,” she laughed. However, there was no big reunion as all the cast members who were in her original scenes have since departed the show.

“I had just missed people or it was sort of a slightly different medical team that tended to me. Though Josh (Griffiths – played by Ian Bleasdale) was my paramedic – who came back for Charlie’s episode. He was such a lovely bloke,” she recalled.

Sammy T Dobson recently made her Casualty debut as Nicole Piper (Image: BBC)

Responding to the throwback clip, which was posted to the @holbytvofficial X account, Sammy wrote: “Goodness me! A throwback indeed!

The snippet shows her interacting with nurse Kelsey Phillips (Janine Mellor), who was on the show for four years from 2005 until 2009. They discuss her family situation as Sammy’s character takes breaths through an oxygen mask.

Now a permanent fixture in the drama rather than a guest Sammy is loving it although she admits it was frightening at the start.

“It’s incredible when you first land there, because everyone gets it. Everyone’s been there for ages. Everyone knows that job so well.

“And there’s sort of an expectation of just fitting into ‘the machine’ and you go, ‘I don’t know this machine. I’ve never met this machine’. “And it’s really, really frightening to start with and then after a week or two weeks, I was like. ‘yeah, we’re in.’

Sammy T Dobson played a patient in Casualty in 2006 (Image: BBC)

“You get it really quickly because it’s so well run,” she admitted. “Even though it’s quite intense in that you’re always sort of filming two episodes at the same time.

“There’s multiple blocks and whatever, because it’s so well run you don’t see that or feel it as much as it could be felt.

“The only I think the only slight stress or pressure for me is I live in Newcastle so I live in the Northeast of England and film in Cardiff. So I’m commuting every week, driving back and forward between Cardiff and the Northeast.

“That really is the only very stressful bit of the job. So when that’s when the commute is the worst bit of your job I think that’s a pretty good job,” she said.