Hey, that’s our sewing machine and sideboard on Call The Midwife

You know the jig is up when you start to recognise your furniture in television dramas set in the old days. My first experience of this was in a recent episode of Doctor Who, in which the time travelling boffin went all the way back to the 1960s to inspect our old coffee table, relocated for the purposes of planetary invasion into the home of a genial inventor living in rural England. Clearly the past, clearly another country, and yet I felt strangely at home.

As to Call The Midwife, I’m so busy watching the fixtures and furnishings in the Turner home that I can barely keep up with the comings and goings at Nonnatus House. So far, I’ve spotted our sewing machine, our sideboard, several cups and plates and a pair of curtains that I’m pretty sure graced our home when I was very young. I keep expecting the many Turner children to start arguing over who ate the last butter cream and whether or not they will be allowed watch Wanderly Wagon (it would more likely be Doctor Who in their house, but I presume the producers want to avoid creating a hole in the space-time continuum by cross-referencing BBC shows from the past.)

In any event, the Turner children probably have more important matters on their minds, given that their father has spent the last week lying lifelessly on the floor of a shattered train carriage on the railway bridge just behind Violet Buckle’s shop. If none of this means anything to you, then you might want to skip to the end — but for the legions of Call The Midwife devotees, it’s fair to say that adding something as dramatic and violent as a train crash to our Sunday evening hour of new babies and nice nuns has been more seismic than the impact of the crash on Violet’s shelving displays. With a heavy dinner on board on a Sunday evening, all I’m fit for is poverty, social history and a guaranteed supply of gorgeous, squirming newborns.

I’ve probably learnt more about pregnancy and childbirth from Call The Midwife than I did from having three children. I know so much that now when I watch the show, I’m usually a good three scenes ahead of the nurses and midwives in diagnosing whatever ails the people of Poplar that week.

And while I didn’t exactly foresee the train crash, I did know there was trouble ahead when poor Lionel Corbett — a man clearly on the verge of a brain hemorrhage — climbed into the driving seat. Usually, once I’ve reached my professional diagnosis, I shout it at the television in order to try to move things along a bit and so the nuns and nurses can marvel at my medical knowledge.

But it’s the stuff I didn’t know that keeps me coming back. The show’s characters and plots might be fictional, but the drama is rooted in the real social history and geography of the East End of London in the late Fifties and now, a decade after it first aired, into the late Sixties, where my furniture comes in. So we’ve had tough storylines about thalidomide and TB, anti-semitism and back street abortion, all told through the prism of a public health service that might be flawed but was still light years ahead of anything we had here.

This season, for example, a patient’s cervical cancer was picked up on a routine smear screening. Imagine that. The NHS was providing free cervical smear testing in 1967. Do you know when it started here? 2008. Forty one years later.

Last week, before the train derailed the Sunday night fuzziness, the Irish midwife, played by Meghan Cusack, read out a report in the newspaper about abortion legislation going through the House of Commons. When the show has handled abortion stories in the past, it has done so with commendable bravery and sensitivity, even if it makes for tough watching. Presuming Dr Turner and Sister Julienne (head of Nonnatus House and also currently on the train floor) survive, I’d imagine the show will go there again.

I’ll stick with it anyway, in spite of last week’s shock to my Sunday night system. Not only because I want to keep an eye on my furniture, but because I’m now practically in the show. In an earlier episode this season, at the Easter 1967 Bonny Baby Contest, I looked at the chubby six-month-olds propped up in their Silver Cross prams, and I realised that from the age of the babies and the make of the pram, that could have been me on screen. As the young people say, I’ve never felt more seen.