Call the Midwife has the baby formula for success

If someone suggested that a drama based around the lives of a group of young midwives living in a convent of nuns would provide the perfect formula for Sunday evening television, you’d have made a call for the men in the white coats.

But Call the Midwife has been a phenomenal success – a sort of Walton’s of the delivery room, a gynaecological Glenroe, where even the grit and grime of post-war Poplar cannot cast a shadow over the feel good factor that makes it both compulsive and inoffensive every Sunday night.

The latest series came to an end on BBC1 on Sunday, but it’s already been commissioned for a fourth series to go out next year – and no doubt there will be another Christmas special to whet the appetite before that as well.

That’s down in part to a stellar cast of familiar names like Jenny Agutter, Pam Ferris, Stephen McGann and Cliff Parisi (Minty from Eastenders) but most of all the supremely versatile Miranda Hart as Chummy, the aristocrat who turned her back on wealth and married the local policeman while pursuing her vocation as a midwife.

Then there are the young, impressionable midwives themselves – Jessica Raine as Jenny Lee (in essence, Jennifer Worth, the author of the memoirs on which this is based), Helen George as foxy Trixie, Bryony Hannah as dowdy Cynthia and Laura Main, who starts out as Sr Bernadette but ends up as Shelagh, wife of Dr Turner, after she decides the religious life is not for her.

All of this is set in London’s East End of the 1950s, when poverty and deprivation still abounded in the post-war era. So while the nurses and nuns live in relative comfort at Nonnatus House, their rounds – always made by rickety bicycle over cobbled streets – take them into the tenements and dives where poverty and disease abound.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Sentinel.