Airdate: Call the Midwife
ABC1 has rescheduled hit UK drama Call the Midwife for next month.
- Published by David Knox
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ABC1 has rescheduled Call the Midwife for next month.
The period drama was originally due to screen tomorrow night, but is now set for 8:30pm Sunday, 2nd September.
This one was a big hit in the UK.
A moving, intimate, funny and, above all, true-to-life look at the colourful stories of midwifery and families in East London in the 1950s, based on the best-selling memoirs of the late Jennifer Worth.
When Jenny Lee (Jessica Raine) first arrives in London’s East End, she knows nothing about hardship, poverty or indeed, life itself. Raised in the wealthy English countryside, she’s previously spent time in Paris and could have done anything. But she chose to become a nurse and now, as a newly qualified midwife, Jenny has come to work in the poorest area of the city.
Attached to an order of nursing nuns at Nonnatus House, Jenny is part of a team of midwives who visit the expectant mothers of Poplar, providing the poorest women with the best possible care. The life that greets Jenny is a world away from what she’s used to – either at home or in the hospitals where she was trained.
The streets teem with children – families of between six and ten children are commonplace – and with just one eight-bed maternity ward to serve the whole district, most deliveries take place at home. Few homes have indoor sanitation and none have hot running water.
This drama follows Jenny as she meets her patients for the first time – women like Conchita (Carolina Valides), who is on her 25th pregnancy and Mary (Amy McAllister), a prostitute and pregnant at just 15. At first shocked by the appalling conditions, Jenny soon learns to love the people who live in the East End.
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3 Responses
Watched the first episode last night – loved it! Bring on the rest of the series.
My Mother would lap this up! Having been a Nurse and lived through the 50s, and being an Anglophile, she’d just fall in love with this show. I shall direct her to it.
Anyone who watched last night’s episode of Who Do You Think You Are? on SBS would have learned about the story of the late Robin (Bee Gees) Gibbs midwife ancestor, who was a midwife around the middle of the last century, and who was censured for breaking the rules in an act of kindness. The program also said that at a time where birth control was almost non-existent, the midwive became as well known as the local policeman, grocer or postman.