TV Preview: Call the Midwife | 15 Kids and Counting | Crusades

Published on Monday 16 January 2012 00:00

Andrea Mullaney

In one respect, Call The Midwife is deeply familiar: just a few weeks ago, Young James Herriot showed us a similar newly trained young professional who would go on to write popular books about their career, on a first assignment amongst a poor community. Inevitably, there are mistakes made and lessons learned, friendships forged, some comical bits and a mainstream lesson in social history. Substitute babies for animals and the memoirs of veteran midwife Jennifer Worth for the All Creatures Great And Small series, chuck in Miranda Hart in a supporting role and there you have the latest Sunday night drama.

But in another way, Call The Midwife is quite different: for this is not just a woman’s story, but a working woman’s story, about a rather universal aspect of life but one only relatively recently (with programmes like One Born Every Minute) considered appropriate or interesting enough for TV. And while it hews to a familiar template, that fact alone makes it different – as does the lack, so far anyway, of an obvious love interest for its heroine. That shouldn’t be news in 2012, but given that it’s still tediously common for women’s roles on TV to be bland girlfriends, or, say, naked dominatrixes who need to be rescued by Sherlock Holmes, it’s refreshing to see a clutch of female characters relating to each other about work, rather than love.

“Midwifery is the very stuff of life,” says Vanessa Redgrave’s instantly recognisable voice, narrating the older Jenny’s reminiscences. Jessica Raine plays the young version, arriving at the convent where the nuns specialise in delivering the local infants. Raine is sweet and her character earnest, but this is really a show for mature character actresses to let rip: Jenny Agutter as the calm, inspiring Sister Julienne, Pam Ferris as the doughty Sister Evangelina, Judy Parfitt as the dotty Sister Monica Rose.

Giving birth then was, needless to say, very different. The sisters express shock at a father electing to remain during a birth; the pregnant women smoke happily; enemas are a primitive affair; and as for pain relief – what pain relief? It’s not entirely realistic, with the usual spotlessly clean newborns. Not much else is, though. The grimy 1950s East End London setting, carefully recreated, seems a very long time ago: this isn’t the snappy, slick-suited Fifties of The Hour or Mad Men. The slums seem more like something out of the Thirties, with sacks of coal in the bath, women on their 25th pregnancy and babies parked outside in unattended prams. Perhaps what’s most shocking to a modern sensibility is the resignation with which the patients put up with baby after baby, close on one another, before the arrival of birth control.

Horrified by it all, Jenny exclaims: “I didn’t know people lived like this!” “But they do,” says Sister Julienne, “and that’s why we’re here.” While it’s not the most groundbreaking of dramas, perhaps that sums up the purpose of Call The Midwife – to remind us that people did.

But by a timely scheduling coincidence, Channel 4 brings us a reminder that some still do, at least in terms of production line babies. 15 Kids And Counting is real cross-your-legs stuff, as it shows modern families who believe bigger is better, or at least that it’s in God’s hands. The titular family (the other one featured have “only” nine, with twins due) are the Radfords, who have been having babies together since their teens and felt compelled to keep going. Both families seem happy, if tired and having to organise their daily lives like a military operation, but don’t really seem able to explain why they’ve chosen what most modern families are happy to avoid – it’s just what they do.

In a quite different way, Crusades also attempts to evoke the past. Historian Dr Thomas Asbridge has a big task, as while the Crusades is frequently referred to – particularly by doom-laden commentators on both sides of the supposed war between the West and the Middle East – few of us really understand what that means. Certainly, after watching part one of this new series I had a better grasp on the facts of the First Crusade, begun in 1096 when Pope Urban decided to whip up anger about the Muslim invasion of Jerusalem, a mere 400 years before. But I still didn’t get it: what really lay behind Urban’s call? Why – other than religious fervour – did people respond so dramatically? And what impact did the absence for so long of so many men (many never to return) have on Western Europe?

Asbridge is a personable presenter, obviously an expert, but he could do with taking a step back for those of us who are not, for this episode leaves more questions than it answers. It does, however, seem to be something of a revisionist view, away from the modern image of rapacious Crusaders arrogantly marching into Jerusalem. He admires the crusaders’ persistence on the long journey there and points out that, after battles on the way, it was hardly an invincible force but half of those who’d set out, their horses killed, staggering into the city on scavenged donkeys and oxen.

Pitching this kind of historical documentary correctly is tricky, and perhaps it’s impossible to really convey what went on in the medieval mind, so radically different in its conception of the world from our own. He’s hampered, too, by having to cover the bizarre story of the Holy Lance of Antioch, which to any post-Monty Python viewer immediately triggers sniggers.

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