Call the Midwife, series 8, review: If only they paid as much attention to the script as to the props

Forensic attention to period detail has become a mania in British TV, but it can’t distract here from the vapid writing

I’m not quite sure what Call the Midwife (BBC1) is actually supposed to do for its viewers, but it sure as hell depresses me. Just a quick resume of the latest storylines may offer you a hint as to why: a backstreet abortion gone wrong, resulting in an emergency hysterectomy, without patient consent; a newborn baby that almost dies from “foetal distress”; a generous slice of senile dementia, and one really bad case of piles (or “pals” as super-posh nurse Trixie Franklin, played by Helen George, calls this uncomfortable but in fact easily pronounceable condition).

Being of a squeamish disposition, I shifted a little uneasily on my sofa when a placenta sloshed onto my screen, albeit glimpsed only momentarily as identical twins slid out. Miracle of birth and all that, but surely there are limits to just how much obstetric splashback we have to endure for the sake of authenticity? After all, placentae haven’t changed that much since Harold Macmillan was prime minister, have they?

When it comes to chasing period detail, Call the Midwife certainly delivers. It dresses its sets supremely well, and this is surely a main factor in its success. You are convincingly transported to the Poplar of 1963, complete with all the important social context, such as the beginnings of what was called then “New Commonwealth” immigration, the tower blocks going up, working London docklands with proper boozers with a joanna and a knees-up on every corner.

This forensic attention to historical detail has become a mania in British TV. It is crowding out creativity and innovation. It is almost as if no one much cares what the people are doing or saying, provided there’s a Ford Anglia or a bloke in flares involved. In rare cases – such as A Very English Scandal, about the Thorpe Affair – there is no detriment. In too many cases, though, there is damage.

Think of CTM, then, as Heartbeat, but with more rosary beads, suppositories and a higher infant mortality rate. It is rather like spending an hour wandering round one of those giant antiques centres you get in market towns. All around you are charming reminders of days gone by – Roberts radios, Bakelite telephones, big leather midwifery bags, starched aprons, luncheon meat, Routemaster buses, Austin motor cars, bottles of linctus, thrupenny bits, the welfare state, and Freddy and The Dreamers records. But that's it.

Would that the dialogue and characters enjoyed the same loving attention as the preggers ladies or the props. They are invariably crudely drawn, even given Britain’s class-ridden state. Working-class characters talk common, and complain about pains “down there” and being “in the family way”; the nuns, nurses and doctors tend towards RP and say things such as “self-doubt is a very good seed bed for progress, and humility the perfect fertiliser”. Even with the magnificent Miriam Margolyes as Mother Mildred, that perfectly crafted line of dialogue with a novitiate had a slightly contrived air about it. So did old odd-job geezer Fred Buckle’s helpful advice to a bicycling nun: “Have you tried tucking your scapular into your belt?”. Maybe he’d just been to the flicks and been inspired by Sid James in Carry On Nurse. Or Carry On Midwife. Conceivably.

The shaky scripts are the work of screenwriter Heidi Thomas, as most of the material left behind in the original memoirs of retired East End midwife Jenny Worth, the basis for the drama, has long since been exhausted. Fittingly, I will leave you with the words of the epilogue. They are intoned beautifully by Vanessa Redgrave, no less, and played in over strings and light piano, presumably on behalf of an “old” Jenny Worth, looking back. Yet they are as vapid as any collection of aphorisms you might find in the 1963 People’s Friend annual:

“There are too many things of which we do not speak. There are too many secrets, too much shame. Perhaps we are cleaner, brighter more polished versions of ourselves more often than we think. When we gaze outward and not inward, when we are open not closed, not everything is possible but there is hope. When the light shines in, hope is another chapter, hope is what comes next.”

Not exactly pregnant with meaning, is it? Besides, what actually comes next, as we well know, isn’t so much hope, whatever that is, as another East End gel with a beehive hairdo, up on stirrups, groaning her way through a breech birth. It’s what I’m expecting, anyhow.