Call the Midwife: a good reflection of modern times
You can always depend on the sisters of Nonnatus House to reduce you to gulping sobs. Never more so than during the series eight finale of Call the Midwife (BBC One, Sunday). Those who weren’t should probably check in to see Dr Turner to make sure they have a heart. While Vanessa Redgrave’s gasping narration has become a little predictable, Heidi Thomas’s stories remain clear, consistent and reliable, providing a social history of Britain that hold up a mirror to the modern day.
This series, set in 1964, has featured subjects such as immigration, cervical cancer screening and sexually transmitted infections. The second episode, on sickle cell disease, prompted a 46 per cent spike in blood donor registrations, while Annette Crosbie’s suffragette hoarder left viewers “in pieces”.
Its triumph, though, has been bringing the delicate issue of abortion to the fore, with Nurse Valerie (Jennifer Kirby) and Nurse Trixie (Helen George) treating patients of botched backstreet terminations. So last week’s reveal was all the more shocking when Valerie discovered that her nice nanny Elsie (Eastenders actress Ann Mitchell) was responsible for performing such procedures.
Val’s fury was powerful; Trixie’s righteous, as they reported Elsie to the police. A court hearing followed, but Elsie too was given a voice. What is the alternative for women when abortion is illegal?
Sensitivity and tact prevailed as she changed her plea, removing the need for her granddaughter to testify and was sent to prison for six years. The show’s subject matter reaches an international audience – Call the Midwife has been sold to over 100 countries – including the US where abortion rights are constantly challenged by activists. And while there continues to be calls for the decriminalisation of abortion in Northern Ireland, the world of 1964 seems not so far away after all.
Elsewhere, there were more jubilant times with a Come Dancing-style fundraiser. This was music to the ears of fashionista Trixie, who had been missing the cinched-in waists of the Fifties. Handyman Fred (Cliff Parisi), meanwhile, had a problem with his waterworks and provided, quite probably, the first time a prostate exam has been seen in TV drama.
Call the Midwife is a show that many have taken to their hearts. The nuns are based on sisters from the Anglican Community of St John the Divine, who left the East End in 1976 and now work with the homeless in Birmingham. Before she died, Jennifer Worth, whose memoirs inspired the series, set up a trust for the order so they receive an income from the profits of the books and the TV show. Long may it continue.
With its spectacular mullet of hair, the woolly mammoth was like the Chris Waddle of the Ice Age, but the ancient beast vanished from Earth 10,000 years ago. And while you might think that we’ve seen the last of the shaggy herbivore, it is, rather startlingly, about to make a comeback.
Ice Age: Return of the Mammoth (Channel 4, Sunday) was an attempt to explain how, but not so much why. Deep in the Arctic Circle, a group of scientists enter a set of tunnels wherein lies a cemetery of perfectly preserved remains. Tusk hunters have been digging there for years, since one tunnel can provide up to five sets of tusks worth £50,000. But more mindful geneticists are looking to take samples of DNA.
Their finds were quite remarkable – the frozen remains of bison, woolly rhinos and mammoth, as well as a cave lion cub with its 40,000-year-old tongue and whiskers still intact. They also, with rather destructive force, unearthed a soup of mammoth bones buried beneath the quicksand of the Siberian riverbed.
The film moved from cave to classroom in order to track the animal’s ancestry, but there was no real fanfare for their findings. Harvard University geneticist Professor George Church has dedicated the last 10 years to bringing the woolly mammoth back to life. He plans to engineer the Asian elephant with the DNA of the mammoth to create a hybrid. Within the next decade, his “mammophant” is a very realistic prospect, but while the research no doubt revolutionises our picture of the Ice Age world, the endgame all feels a bit Jurassic Park, and we all know what happened there.
With the ethics of gene editing and the risk of the new species becoming a sideshow, it comes down to not whether they could bring the woolly back, more whether they should.
Call the Midwife ★★★★
Ice Age: Return of the Mammoth ★★★