Call the Midwife in Hong Kong is still as charming as ever ...Middle East

It has become a modern tradition: as the nation slumps dozily on the sofa in a postprandial haze on Christmas Day, cracker hats slipping slightly over one eye, the indefatigable nuns and nurses of Nonnatus House pop up to offer bucketloads of festive cheer, seasoned by sobering scenes of East End deprivation.

Call the Midwife Christmas specials run like clockwork, always involving a community singalong and picturesque snowfalls everywhere. We might be forgiven for thinking that Poplar is colder than the North Pole come mid-December.

It is more of the same this year in a two-part special that concludes on Boxing Day – yet there is a significant twist. A disaster in the nuns’ branch house in Hong Kong means that a sizeable contingent is dispatched eastwards, leaving lovely social worker Cyril (Zephryn Taitte) and lovely nurse Rosalind (Natalie Quarry) (partners in a charmingly chaste interracial relationship) to keep the show on the road back home. With, of course, the help of indomitable Sister Monica Joan (Judy Parfitt), who hasn’t been given much to do of late.

Sending the ever-gracious Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter) and her team off on a different sort of adventure is a clever idea from writer and series creator Heidi Thomas, but the possibilities of the Hong Kong storyline aren’t explored as fully as they could have been.

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No amount of air miles can make Stephen McGann (Dr Turner) a better actor, nor prevent him from medically mansplaining absolutely everything to his hyper-competent nurse wife, Shelagh (Laura Main). Seasoned viewers will recall that Hong Kong is where the biological mother of the Turners’ adopted daughter May resides. All I’ll say at this point is that I wouldn’t rule out the pair adding yet another winsome kiddie to their family.

Nefarious Triad business murkily swirls around in the background in Hong Kong but Sister Julienne, hardened by years of battles with the local health board, is not the sort of woman to be daunted by the drawing of a gun. Eventually, even the gangsters retreat when faced by the combined acting prowess of McGann and Cliff Parisi as the perma-chirpy Fred Buckle.

As we all know, when the nuns are away, the juniors will play. Nonnatus House hosts a semi-raucous party and the least risqué game of sardines ever, while in Dr Turner’s surgery, a – gosh – female locum sets up temporary shop.

Her medical degree proves no match for the fearsome Miss Higgins (Georgie Glen, glorious as ever) and the fiercely guarded filing system. Miss Higgins could beat Paddington Bear in a hard stare contest and my theory is that Wes Streeting should recruit her forthwith – she’d have the strike-prone BMA brought into line in no time.

Elsewhere in the Arctic tundra of Poplar, a suave Henry Goodman sweeps into town, asking to rent Cyril’s flat for a week or two. For the purposes of dramatic momentum, no one thinks to ask why for a goodly chunk of time, but this subplot ends poignantly, with Sister Monica Joan doing what she does best.

Call the Midwife’s eternal, reassuring charm lies in the fact that the good-hearted characters we know and love always behave exactly in the way we presume they will. Apart from McGann’s acting and Timothy Turner’s hairstyle, there are never any nasty surprises and as series 15 edges into view on the January horizon, I don’t expect there will be.

A beleaguered BBC will surely want to keep the snow falling in Poplar for years to come.

‘Call the Midwife’ continues tomorrow at 8.30pm on BBC One

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