Jolly good show
The BBC gives birth to perfect bedtime viewing. By Rebecca Davis
SUNDAY nights can be bleak at the best of times. There’s Monday morning work to dread, and Carte Blanche to watch so that Derek Watts can tell you all the new ways your kids are getting groomed by paedophiles online. But hark! On Sunday evenings on BBC Entertainment, a new season of Call the Midwife strides into the breach — not to be confused with “breech”, which is a type of birth you’ll become very familiar with after a few episodes of the BBC show based in a nursing convent in the 1950s.
There’s a tendency in the ex-colonies to believe that BBC drama series set in the olden days must intrinsically be of a higher quality than anything else on the box. Perhaps it’s an ingrained sense of deference to the Empire; maybe it’s the fact that they do tend to feature immaculate production values; possibly it’s that the characters say classy things such as: “Oh, that’s absolutely top-hole!”
This assumption, in fairness, appears to be shared by the Brits themselves. Call the Midwife debuted in 2012 to a rapturous reception in the UK, the most successful new drama series in a decade. In the UK, as is the case here, the programme airs on a Sunday night. This may be a significant factor in its success, because it is the viewing equivalent of being tucked into bed after a rough weekend with a glass of warm milk. It is comforting and drowsy. In the first episode of the third series now being aired, the dramatic climax of one scene saw three trainee midwives gently splash each other with foam while doing the washing up. And not in a sexy way.
Like other recently successful British period dramas — Downton Abbey comes to mind — the show walks an uneasy ideological tightrope between nostalgia and retrospective social critique. The trainee midwives at the heart of the show are plucky and resolute. In an Enid Blyton novel, they’d be described as “real bricks”. They are top-hole young women who, more than a decade after the end of World War 2, still embody the Blitz Spirit of endurance under fire.
“With great responsibility comes great sacrifice,” Nurse Trixie resentfully tells a fellow midwife who’s just received a promotion. “Shoulders back, and all that.”
Most of the midwives have accents that wouldn’t be out of place among minor Royal Family members, but they stoically minister to commoners. They retrieve baby after baby from the uteri of Cockneys armed for childrearing with nothing more than a few handme-down swaddling cloths and some folksy aphorisms. “Me mum said ’aving me was no more trouble than sneezing,” one mused. That’s the closest you’ll get to riotous amusement on Call the Midwife: any more energetic form of humour might get you all wound up just before your bedtime.
The stiff upper lip of the midwives constitutes the show’s nostalgic dimension. The social critique emerges in the portrayal of just how ghastly the options were for impoverished women in the UK in the decade before the pill became widely available, with the only way out of unwanted pregnancy often lying in the hands of an illegal abortionist. In South Africa, of course, where access to reproductive rights remains theoretical for many underprivileged women, the show’s themes might still feel all too familiar.
If Call the Midwife proves too saccharine on a grumpy Sunday, you can always plunge into contemporary Britain straight afterwards with reality show The Only Way is Essex on BBC Lifestyle. Boozing, brawling and bawdy birds: shoulders back, and all that.