The return of Call The Midwife is just what the doctor ordered

Heavens to Murgatroyd! The midwives are back — and sunday evenings are perking up. Like snowdrops, usually the nuns and nurses of nonnatus House are with us by early January, and the past couple of weekends have been heavy going without them.

McMafia, which started so strongly, has been as hot-and-cold as a broken radiator lately — James norton’s enigmatic act is wearing thin, and who cares if another anonymous Indian gangster or Israeli blackmailer gets bumped off?

What we need at this time of year are home truths and heart-warming playlets. Call The Midwife (BBC1) delivers with gusto.

We were plunged into the coldest winter in decades, the one of 1963, which, like London’s smogs and Michael Fish’s unexpected hurricane, has passed into the mythology of British weather.

To evoke that, writer Heidi Thomas cleverly let us glimpse something that must have made millions of viewers say with a laugh: ‘I remember that!’ — little fountains of frozen milk bursting out of bottles on the doorstep.

sister Julienne (Jenny agutter) is still in charge but, as usual, she has mislaid a couple of midwives.

This time, secret lovers Patsy and Delia are on a jaunt around the world, sending their latest postcard from a safari in Botswana. To replace the gadabouts, nurse Lucille anderson arrived from the West Indies, via a training school in Taunton.

In case anyone was in any doubt of her Caribbean origin, actress Leonie elliott is doing an accent that makes the saint Marie cast of Death In Paradise sound like Cockneys.

nurse Trixie (Helen George) is still on duty, all leopard-print coat collar and scent by Dior, trying to smile like Diana Dors as she handles another breech birth.

Christopher, her smarmy boyfriend, is starting to look like a bit of a cad — he propositioned her in the chapel and wants to drag her away for a dirty weekend in epping Forest.

Trixie isn’t that sort of girl and, as she whispered to nurse valerie, she never has been — not even once.

The romances and new arrivals didn’t get in the way of two strong storylines, which built up steadily and gave us time to become involved with the characters.

One was a West end stripper who couldn’t bear to give up her baby for adoption, the other an elderly woman trying to hide the symptoms of terminal cancer as she and her husband faced eviction.

Tears, but no schmaltz; hard reality, but smiles all round in the final scene — Call The Midwife is just what the doctor ordered.

Vera (ITv) is another sunday institution and Brenda Blethyn as the grouchy detective chief inspector in the shapeless hat gives a dependable performance as she solves another murder.

I can’t say I like the character. It grates to hear her dismiss the latest victim: ‘Yer typical middle-class suburban wife — nice kids, nice house, nice life.’ and that accent never seems convincing. ‘Yer’ve got quite the croosh on her,’ she told one suspect. Does anybody say ‘crush’ like that?

Her maverick streak can be irritating, too, whether she’s pouring whisky on her cornflakes or racing off in her Land Rover to arrest this week’s least probable killer.

But all of that — as scores of readers declare whenever I breathe a word against vera — is exactly what fans love about her. and this episode did feature sixties star Rita Tushingham, particularly good as a devious drug smuggler.

You could do a lot worse on a sunday evening.