Last modified on Thu 27 May 2021 11.14 EDT
If television were the real world, no one would want to live in the global homicide hotspot of Midsomer. Every woman, though, would beg to be a patient at Nonnatus House clinic in Poplar, East London, because the standard of healthcare is so extraordinary.
So far in season 10 of Call the Midwife, which concludes on Sunday, Dr Patrick Turner (Stephen McGann) and his team of midwives have diagnosed a case of gestational diabetes, a condition little understood at the dramatised time of 1966, and a very rare enzyme disorder, phenylketonuria.
Two exceptional illnesses in a few weeks were unlikely to worry personnel who have previously identified the uncommon genetic disorders osteogenesis imperfecta (season four) and achondroplasia (six), and encountered mothers suffering from leprosy (seven) and puerperal, or postpartum, psychosis (three). Even more impressively, Turner and his team spotted these problems by simple observation, without the pi
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Here comes the alphabetti spaghetti again. There’s a BBA in E14 send for the ladies of the RCM, PDQ.
Call The Midwife (BBC1) went all Line Of Duty, with a scattergun of initials, as Nurse Lucille Anderson (Leonie Elliott) broke off from training students from the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) and raced away by express bicycle to a Born Before Arrival (BBA) in Poplar (postcode E14).
With tensions mounting, there was a real danger Lucille might barge into the office of head nun Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter) and address her as ‘Guv’. Mother of God!
Luckily, a BBA is just an impatient baby that doesn’t hang around waiting to be delivered by a woman in a plum uniform. It’s got nothing to do with an OCG (organised crime gang), which in the East End of the 1960s meant the Kray Twins and their associates.
Sunday, 23rd May 2021 at 7:45 pm
Over the last few seasons, Call the Midwife has covered the topic of abortion across multiple storylines – and always with great thoughtfulness and care.
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We’ve seen the effects of desperate self-induced abortions (or attempted abortions), with skewers and drugs; we’ve seen the backstreet abortions, carried out in unsanitary conditions with unclean instruments. And we’ve also seen the safer (but still illegal) option of abortion secretly carried out by doctors at private clinics.
Alongside that, we have followed the stories of so many desperate women who feel they have no other choice but to terminate their pregnancies – whether that be because of poverty, or abuse, or because they are unmarried, or because they are just not ready to be mothers.