We know the pattern by now. As the country drags itself reluctantly back to work in early January, frowning in concentration about New Year’s resolutions and bills and grim weather, a gently reassuring light appears on the televisual horizon: a new series of Call the Midwife, the Sunday-est of Sunday evening television.
When the programme started in 2012 (Jessica Raine as Jenny, Miranda Hart as Chummy – remember them?) it was 1957 in Poplar. Now it’s series 15, Poplar’s in 1971 and the major news is that Women’s Lib has officially arrived in the East End.
The redoubtable nuns and midwives of Nonnatus House were never shrinking violets, but it’s serious stuff now, with a copy of The Female Eunuch being passed around and finding the most unlikely of cheerleaders. Those delightful late-middle-aged friends Phyllis and Millicent (that’s Miss Higgins to you and everyone else) – played by the programme’s most reliably excellent actors, Linda Bassett and Georgie Glen – hunker down for a startlingly frank chat.
“Female sexuality – it’s a thing I spent much of my life being ashamed of,” says Millicent. “I never did, oddly enough,” replies Phyllis. Goodness me. Next thing we know, Vanessa Redgrave will be singing Germaine Greer’s praises in her ever more quaveringly emotion-laden voiceovers.
A family of neglected children takes refuge in Nonnatus House (Photo: Olly Courtney / Neal Streat Productions /BBC)Bra-burning antics aside, there is a pleasingly ruminative note to the opening episode, with two powerful storylines supplying the supporting structure. In the first, newly fully qualified midwife Sister Catherine (Molly Vevers, a fine recent addition to the line-up) delivers a baby at just 28 weeks and struggles with the consequences for both herself and the mother.
The other, which is refreshingly hard-hitting and commendably not all neatly resolved by the end, centres upon a family with four badly neglected children, whose father is angry and mother is pregnant yet again. After a brief blissful sojourn staying at Nonnatus House (a building of apparently infinite space) and watching television with Sister Monica Joan (Judy Parfitt, 90 years young and still going strong), the nippers are cast out into an uncertain future. I’m always impressed when Call the Midwife swerves the saccharine in favour of the uncertainties of life as it is lived by all of us.
Talking of Sister Monica Joan and Nonnatus House, Parfitt has the line of the episode, delivered upon learning of how Americans like maple syrup and bacon with their pancakes: “That continent is a cauldron of all perversities,” she says witheringly, in a manner that would make White House top brass pause for thought.
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As for Nonnatus, the local Board of Health (composed solely of middle-aged white men in dark suits, who definitely have not glimpsed the redeeming light of The Female Eunuch) is once again ominously manoeuvring against the saintly Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter, now in her 15th series of wimple-wearing) and her team.
Trixie (Helen George, another survivor of all 15 series, despite occasional half-hearted attempts to leave) is now overseeing Nonnatus’s budget; her ever-mystifying marital situation continues to bewilder viewers, and I suspect, her as well.
There were rumours last year that Midwife might be coming to an end, but it now seems that this was evil mischief spread by the Poplar Board of Health. After the current run, there is to be both a prequel series (I would place good money upon the central character being a younger sister Monica Joan) and a feature film, but series 16 of this iteration surely beckons.
One day, Call the Midwife will arrive in the year of my birth, and as someone born in east London, I ardently hope that I am delivered safely by the fine Nonnatus team.
Call the Midwife continues next Sunday at 8pm on BBC One
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