CHRISTOPHER STEVENS critiques final night time’s TV: Midwife trundles alongside like a bus filled with nostalgia on an East End route
Call The Midwife (BBC1)
The odious Dr Threapwood smiled his plastic smile and declared, ‘This is the brave new world. There isn’t an “always” any more.’
In other words, Dr Turner (Stephen McGann) is losing his GP’s practice, and the nuns of Nonnatus House are losing their role as midwives, along with the Poplar maternity home. Does that mean we’re losing Call The Midwife, too?
Thankfully not. Some things, despite the Threapwood axe and the relentless onward march of health service bureaucracy, are eternal.
A new series is already planned for next year, a feature-length film is in the works (rumoured to be shot in Australia), and a Christmas prequel set during the 1940s Blitz is promised.
But the tradition that each new season sees London one year further on, trundling along like a double-decker busload of nostalgia on an East End route, cannot continue much longer.
Fun though it would be to see Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter) and her flock contending with New Romantics, yuppies and Del Boy, a 1980s Call The Midwife would be too much of an anachronism.
Taking the show back to wartime could be a masterstroke, if we meet younger versions of characters such as Sister Monica Joan — played by Judy Parfitt, though apparently not for much longer, after the garrulous old nun went down with galloping kidney disease.
We’ve seen her on her death bed so many times since the show began in 2012 that at first I dismissed the diagnosis as another false alarm.
Trixie Aylward (Helen George) stars in the latest series of Call The Midwife
Sister Monica Joan, played by Judy Parfitt, has been diagnosed with kidney disease
But then she started reciting Shakespeare, at length, which is always a worrying sign in a telly actor or actress: it means they are signalling to casting agents that they’re about to become available for stage work again.
Trixie was hauled from an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting to attend to a wrestler called Harmony Savage (Emma Symmonds) who was feeling the effect of too many batterings in the ring.
The lady grapplers gave me a twinge of something that was more like arthritis than nostalgia, because one of my first assignments as a cub reporter was to interview a female wrestler at Evesham town hall.
Our photographer thought it would be a great wheeze to get a photo of me in a headlock, and she practically dislocated my neck.
Other, less painful memories were triggered by the chimes of an ice cream van playing Greensleeves, and children collecting vegetables for the Harvest Festival.
Call The Midwife is shameless in its evocations of a past that’s just out of reach.
Meanwhile, Cyril’s divorce came through, which means he can marry Sister Rosalind . . . and not a moment too soon, because she is (to use a 1970s expression) up the junction.
This didn’t stop her from leaping on her bicycle and pedalling off to an emergency delivery.
If the nuns and nurses do end up in Oz, they’d better be allowed to take their bikes.
