Agutter stole the show in this reborn Sunday drama
Five series in and a stalwart of the Sunday night TV schedules, Call the
Midwife is renowned above its other qualities (engaging social history, sincere emotional heart, beautiful design and well-written female characters) for making us cry.
But oh boy, if you thought previous series were pushing your tear ducts to their limits, last night’s episode will have turned your eyes inside out and rendered you a dehydrated husk.
It was 1961, and the first chilling signs of the most devastating European medical disaster of the last century were becoming apparent. The horror of the Thalidomide scandal was front and centre in this episode, as doctors began to look for links in a cluster of babies born with seemingly inexplicable malformations. The show’s creators portrayed the disaster in the most sensitive possible way.
The medical staff didn’t know how to deal with Ruby Cottingham’s new baby, so maimed by the drug that it was very unlikely to survive, and impossible for the medical staff even to determine the child’s sex. One midwife, thinking it kindest, initially left the baby to die by an open window. But Sister Julienne (played with sorrow, concern and compassion by Jenny Agutter) discovered the babe still living, and in horror she took the child in her arms and cradled it for as long as it was still breathing.
Sister Julienne opted not to tell Ruby the whole, cruel truth about her child, instead telling her that it had been a girl, and that “when she took her last breath she was warm, and she was safe, and I believe she was aware she was loved”.
The storyline has been backed by the Thalidomide Society, with its director Dr Ruth Blue taking on a role as script advisor. Specialist animatronics technicians had worked hard to create an extraordinarily lifelike moving model for the child who suffered the fatal malformations, showing viewers up-close just how devastating the drug’s effects could be.
Secondary plotlines galloped along with Call the Midwife’s usual emotional-rollercoaster pace and varying levels of refinement and success, but the storyline at the heart, and Jenny Agutter’s performance, made this one of the most memorable episodes in the show’s history.
Affable explorer Simon Reeve specialises in cheery travel documentaries. Now he was back in his overgrown-gap-year-kid uniform of combat trousers and chequered neckerchief, heading for Greece. He had a bash at flying drones, free diving with sponge fishermen, and shooting with a priest on Crete, who moonlighted as president of the local gun club.
Reeve’s confidence and charm with local characters often exposes a different side of familiar countries. It’s tempting for Brits to imagine there’s nothing new to learn about Greece, popular holiday hotspot that it is, but the country has changed rapidly in the wake of its financial crisis. What shocked Reeve most, while meeting impoverished families living in shipping containers, was that it didn’t look anything like the Europe he thought he knew.
The most eye-opening scenes were in Lesbos, filmed when the refugee crisis was beginning to swell last year. As Reeve drove along the coast, hundreds of discarded life jackets lined the roadside. Almost every shot of the beautiful marine horizon was dotted with a flimsy, overburdened boat. It was a powerful moment when Reeve stopped to help passengers swimming ashore, and when he spotted a woman struggling to walk in the midday heat, offering her water. There were no authorities and no border patrols in sight.
In a holiday village close to the refugees and migrants (by no means all Syrian – Reeve spoke to young Afghan men who had heard that Europe’s borders were now completely open, and wanted to take their chances), Reeve said, “I think I’ve lost numbers on the scale to explain how surreal this is.”
The documentary was eclectic in its mishmash of stories and ideas, from bomb-strewn protests in Athens to shepherds living in the mountains of Crete and blaming Germany for all of Greece’s problems. It’s hard to depict a whole country in one programme, and Reeve’s adventures didn’t gel into a clear narrative. But maybe that’s the only truthful way of telling Europe’s story at the moment, and the sight of Reeve with tears in his eyes as he helped refugees to come ashore was the one that stayed with me.