Call the Midwife Special review – it wouldn’t be Christmas without this slyly majestic drama

The rousing, touching postwar childbirth drama has reached 1967 and is now so familiar it feels as if it’s been on air ever since. Prepare to be moved

There is something admirably stoic about British television’s refusal to budge on to its beloved Christmas TV schedules. On BBC One on 25 December, it’s Strictly, EastEnders, Mrs Brown’s Boys and Call the Midwife, and you’ll get what you’re given, so shut up and be grateful. Much like each family’s rules for the correct time to open gifts (morning, obviously, you afternoon monsters), there is no room for compromise. You’ll get dancing, you’ll get a female impersonator, you’ll probably get a soap opera wedding the day after an ill-advised Christmas Eve stag do. And whether you like it or not, you will get some mildly traumatic childbirth nestled inside a sneakily socialist message about the importance of social care and well-run, well-funded public institutions.

There are far worse traditions than Call the Midwife, which has reached December 1967, and is only just starting to feel as if it has been on telly since then. It barely bothers trying to bring in any more newcomers, assuming that if you’re watching, you’ll know exactly what Trixie has been up to in Portofino, and why it’s nice to see Rhoda Mullucks and the Mullucks family back in the care of Dr Turner. But even without prior knowledge of Poplar’s social scene, this is about as lovely and comforting as TV gets.

As always, it juggles a handful of storylines of varying degrees of seriousness, focusing on a main pregnant woman, a b-side pregnant woman, what the nuns are up to, what the nun-midwives are up to, what the midwives who are not nuns are up to, and what Fred in the shop is up to. Fred is going through the books and trying to work out why there have been so many defaulters on the Christmas saving scheme, before realising that some were caught up in the catastrophic train crash that ended season 11. Since then, things just haven’t been the same. “It’s like … we’ve all lost a bit of heart, or who we are,” he says. But he has an idea to bring everyone back together. Strap in for Poplartunity Knocks, a local talent contest in which all of our favourite cast members get to show off their many hidden skills. Some are so hidden, in fact, that they hardly peep out of the stage curtains at showtime.

Against the backdrop of Fred running around like a Simon Cowell of the 60s, desperately recruiting performers to his show, there is the more familiar business of midwifery and looking after women. A heavily pregnant woman named Cindy is freed from Holloway prison but finds that her boyfriend has disappeared from their flat, leaving only a court summons behind him; the new occupant is less than eager to help her out. She ends up in filthy, slum-like digs, only to be thrown out when the tough-as-nails landlady realises Cindy is further along than she said she was. Eventually, obviously, she ends up in the care of Nonnatus House.

Much of Cindy’s storyline is about bureaucracy and paperwork, and what it’s like to have to prove you exist when you have grown up outside the system. If that doesn’t sound like high drama, that’s where the sly majesty and experience of this series kicks in, because it’s rousing and touching and infuriating in equal measure. The same goes for Rhoda, now pregnant with her fourth child, after her third, Susan, was born with limbs affected by thalidomide (we last met her in season six, when Susan was 18 months old). Not only are they debating what level of compensation to accept – the richer families want to hold out for more, while her father, Bernie, struggling with a lack of work at the docks, wants whatever help they can get, and now – but Susan is struggling at school, within an education system that rejects her at every turn.

The stress within the Mulluck household is palpable, and it takes their good doctor, who has known the family and its history for many years (imagine!), to spot what help is necessary, and when.

It all wraps itself up in a festive bow at the talent show, which is played for laughs, but also with heart, and as always, its parting message is sweet, and it’s hard to begrudge it for that. Poplartunity Knocks opens up the stage for everyone, and there’s a scene with tiny snowmen that is particularly touching. It may not be reinventing the wheel, and it may be something of a Christmas workhorse, but Call the Midwife is rock solid at what it does. It’s the yorkshire pudding on a festive roast. You don’t exactly need it, but you’ll miss it if it’s not there.

Contributor

Rebecca Nicholson

The GuardianTramp

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