‘I have to give people somewhere to hide’
With a festive ‘Call the Midwife’ and new version of ‘Little Women’ both imminent, screenwriter Heidi Thomas talks to Ben Lawrence
Twenty years ago, Heidi Thomas was having the most miserable Christmas of her life. Her stepfather was dying of cancer and her grandmother’s dementia was starting to exert its grip on the family. After a very early Christmas lunch, Thomas and her mother decided to take the dog for a walk. “Walking through the neighbourhood, we saw that every house was lit up and everyone looked as if they were having the perfect Christmas,” says the 55-year old creator of Call the Midwife. “And there we were with my demented grandma and about to go home to a dying man. I always write the Christmas episode with that moment in mind. I have an obligation to give people at Christmas somewhere to hide.”
This year’s Call the Midwife special will be, for matriarchs all over Britain, the highlight of Christmas Day. For Thomas, however, the occasion will be laced with tension: at the end of a long day in which she will cook for 16 people at her home in Saffron Walden, Essex, she then has to sit and watch the fruit of her labours. She hates the battle over ratings between the BBC and ITV: “Why can’t we be like those [First World War] soldiers and call a truce at Christmas?”
Thomas’s anxiety is all the more acute because over the past decade she has become the queen of Christmas TV. It started with Cranford, a joyous adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s unloved novel, which took five years to get the green light owing to the BBC’S reluctance to approve any costume dramas that weren’t “slam dunk titles”, but eventually aired in 2007. Since then, we’ve had Ballet Shoes (also 2007), a revival of Upstairs, Downstairs (2010) and this Christmas, a new, three-part adaptation of Little Women starring Maya Hawke (daughter of Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke) as early feminist Jo March.
Thomas laughs when I question the relevance of Louisa May Alcott’s 1869 novel – “I’m always being asked ‘why now?’ The fact is that a classic novel is a classic novel for a reason. We have a duty as a society to revisit the classics every generation.” This Little Women isn’t the Forties version of victory rolls and satin dresses; nor does it beat a self-conscious feminist drum like the 1994 film starring Winona Ryder. Rather, says Thomas, it is “about capturing the defining moment when four young women realise who they are not, and find their place in society”.
When I meet Thomas in a London hotel, it is evident that she is, in an unassuming way, a force of nature. Her voice is light, almost girlish, but she speaks passionately and cogently about her work. She is hot on detail, and it comes as no surprise to learn that she prepares for every new series of Call the Midwife by reading medical reports for the period that she’s writing about; it perhaps helps that she is married to Stephen Mcgann, who plays Dr Turner in the series and who has another string to his bow as a science educator. The seventh series, which starts in January, is set in 1963 when, if Philip Larkin is to be believed, sexual intercourse began. Yet Thomas’s research uncovered some uncomfortable truths.
“Feminism was a done deal by the time I came of age in the midseventies,” she says. “But I didn’t realise how difficult things such as birth control were. People said to me that I would have to stop Call the Midwife once the pill was invented, but it wasn’t like the pill was a silver bullet that civilised the world.
“You couldn’t get it on the NHS until 1974; before that you had to go to your doctor with proof of your marriage or a letter from your vicar saying that marriage was imminent and you would then be referred to a charity that would prescribe it. Most importantly, it wasn’t respectable – it was something you had to apologise for.”
The new series will see the arrival of a black nurse from the West Indies, Lucille Anderson (played by Leonie Elliott), who represents the changing face of Britain. Thomas says that she is not aware of any institutionalised racism within the NHS in the early Sixties, rather that the bigotry – some of it terrible – came from the patients. Lucille will not only have to endure remarks about her skin colour, but must also face the challenges of being a stranger in a strange land – struggling to settle into the church she attends, for example. “Caribbean communities in England were more likely to meet in each others’ homes for prayer meetings with the pastor because they didn’t feel wholly welcome in the traditional churches, which were the backbone of British society at the time,” says Thomas.
Religion is the backbone of Call the Midwife. “I never set out to write a Christian drama,” says Thomas who, since making the series has returned to her Anglo-catholic roots and now attends a theologically rigorous church in Cambridge where she is fully immersed in “bells and smells”.
“I see Call the Midwife as a narrative about goodness. That said, there are episodes where Christianity is a motivating force. I won’t disrespect people of faith, which is very common in modern society.”
Call the Midwife kicks harder than its critics sometimes give it credit for, and Thomas gets infuriated by those who refer to it as “TV Horlicks”. “If you consider a woman with her knees around her ears on the kitchen table having her vagina scraped out by a neighbour to be the equivalent of Horlicks, then you must have a very strange home life,” she says.
The programme is received very differently in America. There it is viewed specifically as a Christian show. However, that creates a tension when it comes to such issues as abortion. “If we show [one], we get quite an antagonistic post bag,” says Thomas. Gay couple Patsy and Delia have also proved controversial. “In Britain, we got angry letters because we didn’t show them having sex. In America, we got angry letters because we featured them in the first place.”
Thomas was born in 1962, which means that she is now writing about her lifetime. Doing so, she says, has made her look at the journeys experienced by her own family in Liverpool. “They were shopkeepers, they were doing OK but there was a concrete ceiling on their expectations. Post-welfare State, we were going to grammar school, we were going to university.” But, while writing the series may prompt introspection, Thomas also finds working on it increasingly liberating, she says, now that, since the departure of Jessica Raine’s Nurse Jenny in series 4, it has become an ensemble piece, allowing for a wider range of characters.
“I loved Jennifer Worth [on whose memoirs the series was originally based], but I knew I was never going to be able to give that character a rampant sex life.”
Thomas says that she would love to adapt a Dickens or possibly George Gissing, the late-19th-century English novelist, who is a writer strangely neglected in terms of adaptation. When I ask her what it takes to be a successful TV writer, she thinks hard.
“You need the sensitivity of an angel and the stamina of a mule.” It’s clear she possesses both.