Raine feels guilt over babies in ‘Midwife’ series

Call The Midwife actress Jessica Raine has admitted feeling guilty about getting babies to cry on the set of the hit TV drama.

Raine starred in the leading role as bicycle-riding Jenny in the BBC1 series, set in the 1950s in London’s East End, alongside Jenny Agutter, Pam Ferris and Miranda Hart.

She told the Radio Times that her alter-ego, who enrols as a midwife alongside an order of nuns, was “the first rounded character” she had played on TV.

But she added: “I feel very guilty about the way we treated some of the babies on the Midwife set. They were always sleepy and in the scenes where they had just been born we needed them to cry so I had to blow on their face – I felt evil.”

A second series of the drama, based on the memoirs of the late Jennifer Worth, begins filming in June.