Prepare to blub! Call The Midwife is back to its tear-jerking best . . .
Down Soho’s Carnaby Street in 1965, colours were bright and hemlines were high. Back in the East End on Call The Midwife (BBC1), though, the Sixties remained more obsessed with sinning, not swinging.
Brenda the housekeeper, who washed the dishes and sewed on buttons for the priests at the presbytery house, was pregnant. Punishment rained down like hellfire: she was simultaneously sacked, disgraced and damned.
To make matters worse, squarejawed and dashing Father Duncombe (Alec newman) was secretly the father. Fleabag didn’t invent the ‘hot priest’, you know.
To keep her newborn daughter warm, Brenda wrapped her in a Terylene nightie and placed her carefully in a dustbin. occasional viewers might imagine this is an overused plot device, so Trixie (Helen George) was careful to point out over the dinner table that, ‘abandonment is very rare in Poplar. It’s only the second case I’ve ever heard of’.
It could never happen nowadays, of course: we’ve got eight types of recycling bin but there are strict rules about what you’re supposed to put in each — and thankfully none of them is suitable for babies.
Fred the handyman (Cliff Parisi) found the infant and became very attached to her. He’d been getting all choked up recently about Betty, his first love, who was killed in the Blitz, so naturally he wanted to call the baby... Primrose. no, I didn’t follow that either.
Though the storyline was slightly strained, this was Call The Midwife back to its tear-jerking best after a lacklustre Christmas special. Everyone who clapped eyes on Primrose melted into sniffling blobs, even gruff Sergeant woolf (Trevor Cooper) and battleaxe Mother Mildred (Miriam Margolyes).
There were tears, too, for winston Churchill, as the great PM’s funeral cortege in 1965 was televised winding through London. nuns stood to attention in front of their tellies and the men saluted. over this patriotic footage, Californian hippies The Byrds played their jangling hit Turn! Turn! Turn! which probably wasn’t the soundtrack to the original BBC news broadcast.
It wasn’t exactly inappropriate: those Biblical lyrics about ‘a time to be born, a time to die’ fitted the moment. But I can’t imagine winnie was a big fan of psychedelic pop.
If George Clarke needed a song to accompany his renovation antics on Old House, New Home (C4), he might have picked You’ve Got A Friend In Me, from Toy Story.
To strip black paint off beams in a Cotswold cottage, he donned a massive green helmet and visor that made him look like Buzz Lightyear. Then he switched on a ‘microblaster’ that fired jets of compressed air and fine sand to scour the oak back to its original colour and texture.
To me, that looked more like vandalism than restoration. Those beams might have been painted smooth and black centuries ago — Buzz didn’t bother asking before switching his microblaster to full power. He attacked that wood like he was laying waste to Emperor Zurg’s alien armies.
Homeowners Tim and Emily had bigger problems to worry about. when they tried to peel off the Seventies woodchip wallpaper, the ancient lime plaster came away, too, revealing the wooden lath strips.
And when Tim tried to show the cameras a bulge that had appeared in the ceiling overnight, he unwisely gave it a poke . . . and the whole thing came down in an avalanche of dust.
The couple ended up spending £65,000 more than they planned. That’s when the budget goes to infinity and beyond.