I’d call Trixie, the midwife, anytime

Ihad serious doubts that Call the Midwife would survive the loss of Jenny Lee. She was the character based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, a young midwife working for an Anglican order of charitable nuns in London’s East End. It’s the 1960s and the world is waking up to a turbulent era.

When Jessica Raine left, the ratings held their breath. The series could have got on its bike and gone. But it didn’t. The bikes were all the midwives had to get around.

You can’t keep a good series down. Call the Midwife became an ensemble piece and triumphed. There was greater scope to explore each character. As Jenny Lee started to fade, Trixie Franklin, a 1960’s nurse with 21st century issues, emerged.

She held Keep Fit classes, fagged, couldn’t give up luxuries for lent, drank and then sought help. She was real and vulnerable, our sort of girl.

Now in Call the Midwife, Christmas Special (TV One, Monday) Sister Julienne leads a working party to South Africa to save a mission hospital. Trixie is one of them. When the hospital is found at the end of a dirt highway, the team finds a primitive clinic with no electricity, phones or clean water. Trixie can’t wash her hair and preserve her Diana Dors looks. There’s work to do. Despite little medication, the nurses treat people African style, dispense polio vaccinations and confront apartheid. Dr Patrick Turner meets the weary but formidable Dr Myra Fitzsimmons, who collapses, convinced she has terminal cancer. But Dr Turner believes she has a hepatic abscess and, using little more than a knife and fork, drains the abscess and sends Dr Myra to Port Elizabeth for further treatment.

Sister Julienne convinces Stark to let fresh water be piped across his land and Tom, the vicar, proposes to Barbara and ties a blade of grass around her fourth finger. But the drama of the ‘‘special’’ rests with Trixie and Fred Buckle, the handyman.

Fred has been brought to the Hope Clinic to fix everything. While his greatest triumph is keeping the mission Bedford truck mobile, he discovers there’s no TV (toilet ventilation). Instead he wages war on the long drops but finds they’re one drop too long. I’m certain Trixie never visited one but instead she carries out a caesarean on Constance, a local woman who’s lost two previous babies. The episode was gripping and provided relief from endless repeated programmes hosted by British comedians and Australian pop princesses. But now I’m worried about Trixie. She survived the long drop but would the series survive minus her? There’s no suggestion she’s leaving but her departure could be a greater loss than Jenny Lee.