What would Nurse Crane make of today’s cynical striking doctors?
STICK-In-THe-MUdS are usually right. We’re told to ‘embrace change’ and ‘move forwards’, but the thing about moving forwards is you can never see where it will end.
The redoubtable nurse Crane (Linda Bassett) pulls a face at the mention of ‘progress’ like a woman who has found a kipper in the washing basket — disgusted, cross and incredulous all at once.
She confronted the naive and idealistic Pupil Midwife rosalind Clifford (natalie Quarry), in Call The Midwife (BBC1), and gave her a piece of her mind. The trainee wanted to hand out leaflets, campaigning for better pay. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ huffed nurse Crane, ‘nursing is a calling. not a career. And any suggestion that we are financially motivated will undermine our patients’ trust in us.’
What would she make, half a century later, of nurses on picket lines or junior doctors staging cynical walk-outs to undermine the government, playing politics at the expense of patients’ lives? It would break her heart.
There’s a contradiction at the core of Call The Midwife. Writer Heidi Thomas has progressive instincts, a certainty that better medicines and social care will improve the world by helping to eradicate disease and poverty. But with fierce honesty, the series also shows that many wellintentioned changes only make life worse. Slum clearance, a theme of recent episodes, can leave people homeless, and high-rise concrete complexes built on the cheap are prone to many dangers. This time, one storyline centred on black mould caused by damp in the walls, still a plague today.
The best solution Thomas can offer is a call to community spirit — one of the priceless British traditions that ‘embracing change’ and ‘moving forwards’ has sadly stripped away.
Now in its 13th year, Call The Midwife has seen so many varieties of medical crisis that only the improbable ones remain. That leaves it at risk of becoming a doc Martin pastiche, where a patient’s mild symptoms accelerate into near-fatal complications, and only the diagnosis of an exceptionally rare disease can save them.
Dr Turner, played by Patrick McGann (Heidi’s real-life husband), saved one woman by recognising the signs of porphyria. If he ever fancies taking over doc Martin’s old practice in Portwenn, he can test himself on even stranger ailments: Kawasaki disease, birdshot chorioretinopathy and Guillaume Barré neuropathology were among the oddities identified in the Cornish population.
Chef Tom Kerridge was serving up dishes with equally peculiar names, as Michael McIntyre’s Big Show (BBC1) returned for a new run. In one of the comedian’s madly convoluted pranks, Michael raided the home of ardent home cook Shaun, to steal a few of his many precooked meals from the freezers.
Shaun’s partner darren, who was privy to the joke, treated him to a meal at Kerridge’s Michelin starred restaurant in London’s Corinthia hotel, where they sampled taster dishes such as ‘Toulouse sausage cassoulet’ and ‘DIY surprise’ — concoctions remade from Shaun’s own food and served to resemble daintily pretentious nouvelle cuisine.
There’s a streak of cruelty in all pranks, and the more complicated the set-up, the more the sting will hurt. Shaun took it in good part but I felt sorry for him as he tucked unawares into his own reheated lasagne, and blurted: ‘Horrible! Like it’s been made badly on purpose.’
The gags are funnier when celebs are the victims. dermot o’Leary’s list of phone contacts reveals he knows everyone in the business, which is no shock, and former Spandau Ballet star Tony Hadley could hardly sing for laughing at the trick played on him. Sheer Gold!