Malcolm Hopwood: Tunnel Vision
‘‘You have to be important to be assassinated. Everyone else is just shot or killed.’’
There’s something ironic about one character departing and another arriving, both in the same episode of Call The Midwife
(TV One, Fridays).
It’s even more ironic when the new arrival, Rev Tom Hereward, caused nurse Trixie Franklin to leave. Thank you, Google. It helped me discover Chris Ashton (Tom Hereward) is married to Helen George (Trixie Franklin).
When the seventh series was filmed, Helen was pregnant. No large medical bags or baggy capes could disguise her. And you can’t film her from the neck up. She needed her own midwife. Instead, under the guise of Trixie falling off the wagon, she fell off the series.
However, creator Heidi Thomas tells us Helen will return. That’s good news. Helen, as Trixie, has carried the mantle of being the most enchanting nurse at Nonnatus House for some time.
A mantle is the second cousin of a mantelpiece, which is where Trixie hid her pink gins. Now Sister Julienne has granted her six months’ leave to dry out. She sounds like a brick kiln.
While Call The Midwife is an ensemble series, there’s always one character that must stand out. It’s been nurse Trixie. She’s vulnerable, private, more English than the royals and has a bad habit of meeting the wrong bloke. The last was Chris Dockerill, a solo parent with a daughter who preferred mum to matron. So Trixie was dumped and returned to her second-favourite male, called Jim Beam. However, despite the strong cast and traumatic story lines, Call The
Midwife is treading water. Helen will
have to find a nanny quickly before Sister Monica Joan becomes too confused or discovers Specsavers.
This week Barbara (Mrs Fred) is rushed to hospital with septicaemia. That should do the trick for a couple of episodes. In the meantime, come back Trixie. I’m even happy if you and Tom job-share.
Call The Midwife is set 55 years ago and is taking as much time to catch up as
Coro Street. But it can stay grounded in the 1960s, one of the most fascinating decades last century.
For that reason I viewed The Sixties (Prime, Tuesdays) with great interest. I grew up in the 60s, had posters of the Fab Four on my wall, remember steam trains rumbling through The Square and knew exactly where I was when President Kennedy died.
You have to be important to be assassinated. Everyone else is just shot or killed. The first episode focused entirely on Kennedy’s visit to Dallas, the open car journey and the shooting.
It was told from every angle. There were so many. After a while you couldn’t remember which was north and what was south. Despite the footage, the retelling and the conspiracy theories that followed, The Sixties offered nothing different. Just one new insight would have made the episode worthwhile.
Instead, we saw nightclub owner Jack Ruby kill Lee Harvey Oswald. There were so many media covering the event, they had to interview themselves.
Doctor Death (TV One, Sunday) fitted the same category as The Sixties .It repeated the story of Dr Harold Shipman, Britain’s most prolific murderer, who poisoned more than 250 patients. It put trendy retirement homes back 20 years.
Doctor Death was addictive but offered little new, other than launching more grisly tragedies in the weeks ahead. Tomorrow we have The Philpott Fire:
Five Years On. How we love them. Dame Professor Anne Salmon in
Artefact (Ma¯ ori TV, Mondays) reported on the number of taonga (highly prized objects) that are scattered in collections around the world. Several were gifted to Captain Cook back in 1769.
With the 250th anniversary of his first visit next year, perhaps they can be collected and returned on the replica Endeavour when it sails into Wellington Harbour. Its captain is our daughter’s father-in-law, so I’ll ask him.
The curse of The Bachelor NZ struck again. Firstly Naz in Dancing With the
Stars (TV3, Sundays) was eliminated for monstering him a couple of years ago. Now Zac Franich has been voted out, simply because he was The Bachelor in another series. We’re left with David Seymour, whose legs don’t move, and Roger Farrelly, whose legs do, but he doesn’t know where, why or who’s moving them.