Call the Midwife review: An enjoyable festive tradition, but still as cloying as ever

The period drama has become such a Christmas TV staple that reviewing it feels almost churlish

How to bake a Christmas episode of Call the Midwife (BBC1). Take one aggressively likeable gaggle of nuns and midwives and place them in an unfamiliar location. Combine with suspicious locals, a pregnant woman with unforeseen complications and a troubled youth or two, and garnish with a cloying voiceover. Be sure to overbake the moral message.

If this is all to your taste, you’ll find nothing to complain about in Call the Midwife’s ninth (yes, ninth) Christmas special. In fact, the period drama has become such a festive TV tradition that reviewing it feels almost churlish – like reviewing my grandma’s Christmas card. Still, here goes.

This year, the folks of Nonnatus House have decamped to the Hebrides at the behest of Mother Mildred (Miriam Margolyes, camping it up with the help of some ludicrously lofty dialogue: “I’m on my way to give succour to invalids”; “I detect an animal odour underfoot”). The local midwife has married the local doctor and they’ve both cleared off to the mainland – so the villagers, Mildred decrees, need their help.

It’s a little more of a challenge than they anticipated. Not only is the Christmas tree the amiable Fred (Cliff Parisi) drags in for some festive cheer deemed a “pagan monstrosity”, but the terrible weather means it’s nigh-on impossible to get on or off the island when things inevitably go awry. One poor woman gets through a painful childbirth only to be struck down by appendicitis.

Meanwhile, the elderly Sister Monica Joan (Judy Parfitt) has been left behind, quietly deemed unfit for travel. She is as much of a liability as ever, but there is a poignancy to the way she grapples with her declining faculties. “If age has cost you things, it has replaced them with gifts to us all,” says Sister Hilda (Fenella Woolgar). “It is not a gift to me,” replies Monica Joan, “to be deemed too frail to journey to a place where we are needed.”

Buoyed by Hilda’s false reassurances, Monica Joan decides to pop on a train to the Hebrides alone. “This ticket ran out in Preston,” the train conductor tells her. “Only if you consider travel from a strictly temporal perspective,” she says. ”Mine is not merely a terrestrial journey, it is a spiritual quest.” I must try that one.

Elsewhere, a little girl’s leg is severely burnt; Reggie Jackson (Daniel Laurie), a young man with Down’s syndrome, wants to make paper chains; Jamaican nurse Lucille (Leonie Elliott) faces some subtle racism; and Dr Patrick (Stephen McGann) tries to persuade his wife that they should relocate to the Hebrides for good. There is far too much going on for any of these subplots to really stick.

By far the most affecting scene is between Nurse Phyllis (Linda Bassett) and a teenage girl called Effie (Eilidh Fisher). Effie’s mum died of tuberculosis, and she’s never met her submariner father, so she lives with her aunt and cousin and drinks herself silly through a mix of grief, shame and boredom. Phyllis’s mother was unmarried, too, she tells the young girl. She felt embarrassed at first, but soon realised that “keeping me took courage. So I decided I’d make her proud of me.” “I’ve missed my chance there,” weeps Effie. It’s beautifully acted; Fisher’s sobs are unrestrained but never overwrought.

But before long, that nauseating voiceover is back. I don’t quite understand why Jenny (played by Jessica Raine and voiced in her older incarnation by Vanessa Redgrave) still acts as the omniscient narrator, despite Raine having left the show six Christmas specials ago, but ho-hum(bug).

“Christmas is not a competition,” announces Jenny grandly, as the characters join together in merriment and mirth. She’s obviously never been to my house during a festive game of Balderdash.