Call the Midwife’s Linda Bassett
Actress Linda Bassett, who plays Call The Midwife’s no-nonsense Nurse Phyllis Crane chats about school days, her memories of the swinging Sixties and filming for the next series!
If you were suddenly taken ill, injured in an accident or, indeed, about to give birth, you’d definitely want a Phyllis Crane at your side. Calm, caring and oh-so-capable, the no-nonsense midwife and nurse may be a tad old-fashioned but you’d just know that she would do everything in her power to help you pull through and come out smiling.
“Phyllis so obviously wants to make the world a better place,” says Linda Bassett who plays her. “She is oldfashioned, stern and rigorous. She’s not modern, lax or free and easy – the way people can be nowadays. She is quite fixed but has a fun side which I especially enjoy playing and which I also recognised in the adults I knew when I was growing up.
“Phyllis actually reminds me of the teachers I had at school – dedicated women who were still wearing Forties’ clothes. They looked odd to us. Phyllis is still in flat shoes and sensible skirts in the Sixties but we do see her in a rather nice dress at times. She is, however, more Fifties than Sixties. She is not a young woman, remember. In 1965 – the year this series of Call The Midwife is set – she is 65 years old and so the idea of the free and easy mid-Sixties isn’t always easy for her to understand.’
Linda herself became a teenager during the Sixties. “It was an extraordinary decade for me,” she recalls. “I was ten at the start and 20 by the end. In the Fifties and at the start of the Sixties, children were dressed in smaller versions of adult clothes.
‘I try to be as human and compassionate as I can when people approach me’
I remember wearing a bodice, twinsets and A-line skirts. My mother, her friend, her daughter and I all went to the same hairdresser and had exactly the same style – like the Queen, curled and set. I looked appalling! As a teenager, though, I had a front-row view of the fashion revolution. We lived in Chelsea and my school was on the end of the King’s Road. At the beginning of the Sixties the
road was sombre, mainly antique shops.
“Then Mary Quant opened her shop, Bazaar. I saw it from the bus on the way to school and felt so excited. We then discovered Biba when it was in Barbara Hulanicki’s first shop in Abingdon Road.
“It was thrilling to find clothes that were meant for me instead of my mum! The designs also suited my body type. I was very skinny, with long, thin legs. I wore miniskirts and blouses in bright colours with white collars and tight sleeves with big white cuffs. I also began to grow my hair – first into a bob and then long curtains – the Joan Baez look.”
Like many young people of her age, Linda loved Sixties’ music.
“My favourite band then was The Beatles,” she recalls. “I went to see them with my friends and remember agreeing we wouldn’t scream like all the ‘silly girls’. Within three minutes, we were screaming like banshees and running down the street at the end to try to glimpse them as they left!”
Linda says it feels very surreal to be appearing in a period drama set during an era she actually lived through.
“It does feel weird, being in something called a period drama when I was fully aware of things during that time. We featured Churchill’s funeral in episode one of this series and I clearly remember that happening.
I was 15 at the time. I queued up to walk past the coffin, not on the funeral day but as he lay in State. I didn’t have any particular emotional engagement to it but it was history and definitely felt like it.” Unlike some of her Call The Midwife co-stars, in the flesh Linda looks pretty much the same as Nurse Crane.
“Because I am very recognisable,
I do get people coming up to me and telling me about their babies and births,” she explains. “One lady, I remember, talked about losing a baby and how her midwife had helped her. I just try to be as human and compassionate as I can when people approach me. I try and live up to the Nonnatus House way.”
Speaking of which, when does filming for CTM series ten get underway?
“We start filming again in March/ April,” Linda (69) replies. “It will be 1966 – World Cup year. Another series has already been commissioned for the year after that.”
Call the Midwife is the BBC’s most popular drama. Can it just go on and on and on?
“The real nuns of Nonnatus House left there at the end of the Sixties, I think,” says Linda. “So strictly speaking, the nuns and midwives can’t stay in the building they’re currently inhabiting forever. Our writer, Heidi Thomas, has cleverly included the threat to the house in the series nine scripts and this carries on throughout the episodes. The whole face of the East End was rapidly changing in the mid-Sixties – what with all the demolitions going on – and this is nicely reflected in Call the Midwife.”
As is so much else. Long may one of our very favourite series continue!
■ Call the Midwife is on BBC1 on Sunday evenings at 8pm