It’s probably safe to assume that by 8pm on Christmas night, viewers slumped in front of their TVs aren’t at their most alert. Digesting unusually large meals and possibly onto a second bottle of whatever, concentration is not at its sharpest. However, this year’s Call the Midwife Christmas Day special was a very busy affair that required close attention.
Pinballing between a surfeit of storylines was not the most relaxing hour of television. There was a young family chucked onto the streets by bailiffs, a patient with infected episiotomy stitches, a pregnant fairground worker, two escaped prisoners, the discovery of the body of a lonely old woman, and Reggie Jackson (Daniel Laurie) going missing on his way back from Sussex. And that’s before we got to a mince pie competition, the Turner children collecting for a Blue Peter appeal, an outbreak of Hong Kong flu, Trixie’s return from New York, and a budding romance between Nurse Corrigan (Megan Cusack) and a pharmaceuticals salesman. And a partridge in a pear tree.
The setting was Christmas 1969, the so-called “Hong Kong” flu outbreak being the only overtly topical reference. The evicted family carried echoes of Ken Loach’s pioneering 1966 homelessness drama Cathy Come Home, and, as narrator Vanessa Redgrave’s opening homily spelt out, “home” was going to be this year’s theme. “What do we mean by ‘home for Christmas’?” asked a worryingly frail-sounding Dame Vanessa.
For Reggie, who has Down’s syndrome and is now in residential care, home meant Poplar, Fred Buckle (Cliff Parisi) arranging to meet him off his bus. However, the escaped prisoners led to police road blocks which in turn led to Fred missing Reggie’s bus.
For the fairground worker, home meant an on-site caravan, to which an officious hospital administrator had prematurely discharged her with an alarmingly jaundiced newborn. The evicted family meanwhile tried to do their best in rat-infested temporary accommodation, their lot worsened by the father contracting flu. Happy Christmas everybody.
The usual round of labour and childbirth was as unblinkingly realistic as ever – the cast of newborns (apparently acquired through a talent agency) having only recently themselves been delivered. And of course there was our familiar cast of nuns, sensible and reassuring as ever. Pondering the lonely death of the old woman, Nurse Crane (the splendid Lina Bassett) asked: “What does life amount to when there’s no love at the end of it?” TV dramas don’t often go in for moral or philosophical questions like this. Call the Midwife asks them on a regular basis.
I remember once asking the show’s writer, Heidi Thomas, when she thought her creation would finally come to an end. “If it ever became soap,” she replied. “That’s the moment to shut up shop.”
Call the Midwife is still a long way from becoming a soap, or even a sort of period drama version of Casualty. But this first of two over-stuffed Christmas episodes, the second of which will air on Boxing Day, finished with what you could call a classic soap cliffhanger. Fred, having failed to meet Reggie’s bus, discovered a deserted bus station with Reggie’s bag forgotten beneath a bench. Reggie himself was meanwhile seen forlornly wandering the streets. If the drumbeat intro of the EastEnders theme tune had followed, we might have been forgiven for not batting an eyelid.
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