‘You have a vaginal haematoma … about the size of a tangerine.” Merry Christmas, everyone: Call the Midwife (BBC One) is on hand to put you off your pud while doling out a slice of timeless social commentary. I love Britain more than I can say for accepting this as its Christmas Day staple. Watching nuns and midwives and nun-midwives run around east London in the early 60s imparting valuable lessons on human nature and kindness is festive enough, but it always manages to pack a punch of genuine emotion that feels neither cynical nor sickly. In spite of all the good will, it maintains a tart edge that means it never drowns in its own syrup.
This bumper episode kicks off the eighth series with every standard of social care we have come to expect, from emergency street births to lonely women in need of help finding the pockets of light in the world. After the tragic loss of Barbara at the end of the previous series, a moment sweetly alluded to in the emotional handing over of a cardigan, Trixie is back and the women are ready to serve their people. The looming spectre is the growing popularity of hospital births. One expectant mother, Mavis, explains how her sister persuaded her of its benefits: “Breakfast on a tray, ashtray emptied every time she clicked her fingers.” What’s not to love?
Still, it wouldn’t be Call the Midwife if everything went to plan. It is always fun to watch them contrive fresh Christmas scenarios and ingenious plot devices that get in the way of a breezy clinical birth, especially when they have exhausted being snowed in. But even with two nativity plays, this is less manic than Call the Midwife Christmas specials gone by. This year, Fred finds himself in charge of a donkey with a taste for brussels sprouts, a gospel choir belts out the carols and a baby is named Nicholas, in honour of Father Christmas. The fly in the ointment is only minor; there is fog on the road and the hospitals are full. While Mavis eats her words and has her vaginal haematoma dealt with almost on the spot by Trixie, Valerie and Lucille, Sister Julienne is called away to the seaside, to the Mother House and orphanage, where the Mother Superior is stricken with a brain tumour and will not last long.
Miriam Margolyes, whose chatshow appearances are notably ebullient and worth a Christmas special of their own, joins as Sister Mildred, who announces on arrival that she is “indefatigable”, “except when I’m arriving from the east carrying orphans”. Same!
As is tradition, a vote will soon be held to determine who should replace Mother Superior. Julienne, the most suitable candidate, realises she has no desire to swap the grit of social work for a desk job. (Insert timely satirical joke about implementing a referendum result despite the fact that it will make no one happy.) It is Mildred who gives the loveliest speech in an episode full of lovely writing. “Embrace the quarrel … the quarrel will lead to the answer. It is everything we are.” (Insert timely … oh, you get the idea.)
It feels like a more cerebral episode than an action-based one, but it hangs on to a quiet power. The births are frantic, but not terribly traumatic, while the storylines are really about home, from the abandoned Chinese children finding new families in Britain, to the woman sent to Australia from the orphanage where she felt she had known true happiness, to Winifred realising where her calling is taking her. There is no freak weather, no catastrophe, only the ambiguous creep of modernity.
In fact, there are plenty of contemporary points being made, from worries about the convent being bought by atheists or builders and converted into flats, to an overreliance on centralised, anonymous healthcare that moves away from community practices and people working with those they know. There are nods to adoption scandals and to the ethics of placing a Chinese child with a white family, but it is handled with enough care to remain just about in its time.
Call the Midwife is a cosy blanket in the cold and I often take its easy familiarity for granted. But it is better than that. This has been a fractious old year; a drama as warm and open as this is just the tonic.
