TV Review
For reassuring viewing, the nuns of Nonnatus House provide lots of safe pairs of hands.
When times are uncertain – and 2020 is certainly the gift that keeps on giving in that regard – it’s understandable to want to settle in with a cuppa and two Krispies for the old-school pleasures of something like
Call the Midwife. The series has tackled confronting issues from domestic violence to female genital mutilation, and yet the jolly health professionals cycling purposefully around the dilapidated-but-doughty East London precincts of Poplar still sometimes seem about as nuanced as Enid Blyton’s Noddy motoring – parp, parp – through Toyland.
It’s season nine. We have now laboured our way, literally and largely without pain relief, to 1965. Safely returned from a Christmas special set, for some reason, in the Outer Hebrides, the nurses and nuns of Nonnatus House find themselves in the swinging 60s. How to convey the a-changin’ times? There’s the Beach Boys on the soundtrack. And midwife Trixie strikes a blow for women’s lib: “I’m going to take the plunge with my new electric lady shaver!”
Meanwhile, there’s a woman about to go into labour in a homeless facility so derelict – “the walls are full of bedbugs!” – that a dead rat attends the midwife’s visit. Not Dickensian enough? The area is also undergoing newfangled urban renewal. “Flaming wrecking ball’s been going all afternoon,” sighs another mum-to-be as Sister Julienne, down the business end, dusts away the falling debris.
Oh, and an era has ended: “Our Winnie has finally pegged it!” Cue a speech on the legacy of the old warhorse from Dr Turner: “The NHS was nothing to do with Churchill and his party!” he declares, as he grooms his rabbit.
These are long BBC episodes. Even so, they don’t half pack a lot in, including a diphtheria outbreak that contributes to a running theme about the erratic progress of social evolution and a lot of typically punishing Call the Midwife dialogue: “We will take every conceivable measure to head off mastitis at the pass!”; “Another placenta for disposal!”; “This woman was lactating!”
Miriam Margolyes’ Mother Mildred, apart from being a mouthful alliteration-wise, took to her role as head nun at Nonnatus House with a gusto that makes her turn back in the day as a fanatical puritan on Blackadder seem understated. She’s a little rotund, which means she’s required by the writers to compulsively scoff teacakes when she’s not motoring through like a mobile marquee to deliver a drive-by sermon: “The relinquishment of a child,” she intones, when a baby is discovered abandoned in the Nonnatus House rubbish bin in yet another hectic subplot, “has little to do with poverty and everything to do with desperation!”
Sadly, Mother Mildred is off back to the order’s mothership, or whatever the technical Anglican term for it is, just as the news comes in that Nonnatus House is to be bowled along with the slums of Poplar in the name of progress. What’s to be done? Well, they are nuns. “It would be a poor show,” says Sister
Hilda, “if I didn’t put in a word for our old chum, prayer.” Sister Julienne looks unconvinced. But no doubt all will ultimately be, as Miranda Hart’s late-lamented Chummy might have said, tip top and tickety boo.
Could this be more British? Still, the show aces the Bechdel test and any other measure when it comes to making womencentred television. No facet of the innate melodrama and fraught politics involved in inhabiting a female body is left unexplored, to sometimes gruelling effect. The slightly stolid public-service broadcasts on abortion, vaccination, contraception, etc, can possibly be forgiven in a time when science and reproductive rights are under increasing threat. As can Vanessa Redgrave’s syrupy voiceover. Downton Abbey with fewer toffs and a lot more gynaecology? We’ll
take all the help we can get.
No facet of the innate melodrama and fraught politics involved in inhabiting a female body is left unexplored.