As pitches go, it sounds familiar. A large, evolving cast of characters is anchored by a group of noble, dedicated heroes equipped with uniforms, custom vehicles and superpowers. In each instalment they unite to defeat common enemies, battle new threats and save humanity.
Since 2012, when they made their screen debut, they have been drawn into frequent races against time in which the stakes are all too clear. They don’t always wear capes, but they often have one on standby.
Look, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) has had a good run, but we have the (Call the) Midwife Cinematic Universe now. Who needs Iron Man when there’s Sister Monica Joan? She’s much more fun.
That’s possibly not the rationale behind the BBC’s decision, announced this week, to commission both a Call the Midwife feature film and a spin-off prequel series set during the second World War.
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Still, these baby steps towards transforming a television ratings magnet into a midwifery-based franchise – a new MCU – are intriguing. Has the series up to the end of the 15th season, spanning the years 1957 to 1971, which will be shown in 2026, merely been Phase One in the Maternity Saga? I think we need to be told.
There are a few unknowns here and a few misconceptions. I groan when I recall the continuity announcer who introduced one episode with the words “and now for something more sedate”. The process of bringing this hit Sunday-night period drama to the big screen will inevitably be compared to the journey made by Downton Abbey, but Call the Midwife is a very different beast.
RTÉ One is still on the 13th season, with next week’s episode serving up a fairly typical mix of tetanus, slum landlords and destabilising grief. The 14th run, which aired on BBC One earlier this year, was notable for the loss of Nigel the beloved cat, which admittedly sounds like the ultimate teatime plot until you learn he has succumbed to Weil’s disease, an infection spread by rat urine, and that Nurse Rosalind is also starting to feel a touch unwell.
Call the Midwife surfaces the miseries and outrages of the 20th century in a way few other programmes do. I’m still getting over a fifth-season episode that featured both a string of vicious street attacks on women and a kitchen-floor uterine inversion that really should have been avoided, even in 1961.
The first episode of series nine, which aired in the innocent month of January 2020, was another roller coaster. It gave us bed bugs, diphtheria, a callous priest, a baby found in a dustbin and, for light relief, the death of Winston Churchill.
In the 12th season, set in 1968, handyman Fred and haberdashery owner Violet argue about a tin of bright purple paint, which seems innocuous, yet before the end credits it has been used to daub xenophobic signs on a racist march stoked by Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech.
But the Christmas specials, those will be all heartwarming carols and uplifting festive births, right? Not quite. The 2021 edition, for instance, found space for intrapartum haemorrhage, infant heroin withdrawal and the treatment of a swollen eye with leeches. This episode was swiftly followed by one in which Nurse Nancy, played by the Irish actor Megan Cusack, has a surprise encounter with a gangrenous leg.
None of this is to say that Call the Midwife isn’t heartwarming and uplifting. Nor does it undercut its achievement to conclude that however stark and grim its depictions of societal problems, the reality of mid-century life in Poplar, in east London, was almost certainly less kind.
But the secret of its enduring popularity isn’t complicated. It’s set in a world of disease, deprivation and rampant property development in which women work with other women, and some men, to make things just a little better. And, despite its many traumas, the show isn’t visually graphic. It doesn’t need to be – it’s all there in the writing.
Heidi Thomas, who created it, doesn’t seem to be short of ideas about how to extend its life, notwithstanding the fact that the order of nuns at its heart no longer practised midwifery in that part of London after 1976.
The regular series – which will have a 16th season “in due course” – is already a powerful reminder that even in the most chaotic of circumstances, amid the most indifferent of external forces, babies continue to be born.
A wartime prequel, with bombs raining down, can reinforce that theme. It is, after all, one that remains dismally relevant today.
Meanwhile, the cast will be hotfooting it out of Poplar for their big feature debut. If I had to guess, I’d say it will lure an audience to cinemas at least as fast as a guest character with the line “I’m not having the baby in the lift” will have her baby in the lift.
