Call the Midwife tonight

I'll forgive Dr Turner anything because Stephen McGann is so wonderful on Twitter. Don't think he is out GC but he's terribly sound on all sorts of other things.

I think you'd really have to be GC if you spent all your time working on Call the Midwife with all those storylines focused on biological reality, surely?

Trixie's pronunciation of some words - e.g. "parfect" - drives me mad.

the abortionist genuinely believed she was helping women as much as Val does, and did it for the women, rather than for money etc

I'm not sure that I agree with this. I think she certainly wanted Valerie (and maybe herself) to believe that. Her tragic family history might have been the initial motivation, but £7 was still a lot of money. If it was really altruistic why not do it for a few shillings? I think that her unfulfilled ambitions, maybe to be a nurse like Valerie might have played a part too. I really think that her motives were more complex than purely wanting to help women.

Most jaw dropping episode of CTM that I've ever seen and a big improvement on the last season. Hope it continues!

And yes Ann Mitchel was Marvelous so was the actress who plays Val you could see her heartbreak

Midwifery is certainly not fluffy there is still weeksI cross my legs and go a bit clammy !

Just wanted to applaud Ann Mitchell's acting. She was fabulous. (Also remembers I haven't seen the new Widows film but I bet it doesn't match Ann).

I like midwifery not being presented as fluffy. Because it's not.

I agree Newt. It's really grating. And Trixie's constant calling all the women Sweetie is pissing me off too.
Apart from that it's wonderful!

i find the incidental music very irritating!

VickyEadie I only remember who's supposed to be doing the voiceover because I watch with the subtitles on and it tells me that it's "Older Jenny". I suppose made sense when the plots were still following what she wrote about in her books, but now that they've gone off piste, as it were, I'm not sure why we still need that bit. I find her tremulous delivery really very irritating.

Dr turners scens have always been a bit in your face since the original stories finished he never used to be so preachy.

My criticism of CTM is that often the scripts are a bit clunky, especially with over-use of conversational exposition - e.g. Dr Turner 'explaining to Shelagh how and why the measles vaccine is so important, blah blah - as if she didn't already know. There are better ways of doing it and I think sometimes the writers go for the easiest option.

Also, they should have ditched Redgrave's Patience Strong-style voice-overs as soon as the character she's meant to be left the programme, which was years ago.

I love call the midwife, I've watched it ever since it started. The stories now are having more impact on me because it's coming up to the year I was born & I'm interested to see the issues that women like my mum faced & I can talk to my mum about them, it's like a living history lesson. The abortion thread that has been running through this series has been well thought out & well told, a friend of my dad who I had grown up calling Uncle had a sister who I knew had died young but until a few years ago I didn't know how she had died, my dad told me she died after having an abortion, this would have been around 1953, this really brought home to me how lucky we are to have access to contraception & safe abortion.

I don't even think it is stealth feminisim the nurses especially Trixie have always been women health first.

We watched it last night wasn't it powerful Ann mitchell is a superb actress she was totally believable but she gran just didn't want to see the consequences it was heartbreaking Poor Val .

IShould I think it's more powerful than Handmaid's Tale purely because no one can dismiss it as pure fantasy. These things really happened.

I've just watched it on iplayer - it is fantastic feminism by stealth. Not just the abortion story arc, but women's education, women's place in the world, women within the family, marriage at a time when only marriage was a ticket to respectability, women being with each other, women arguing, not in the cliched "they're being bitches to each other" but about real stuff that matters, where you can see where both characters are coming from and why they feel so passionately the way they do. Yes, it tugs the heart strings and quite blatantly so, and it's written to do so, but it's also very cleverly written and well acted.

To be fair, the thalidomide storyline went on over a couple of weeks and I agree that they can't spend a whole series on a single issue. I do think that, as the details of the midwives' personal lives are carried over from series to series, they could do more of that with other storylines, as they have indeed done with this one. I raised it more as a point of comparison to explain why I thought it was so effective!

If Call The Midwife has a weakness, it's the way the "issue of the week" gets wrapped up and dealt with over the course of the episode and then not much mentioned again.

I don't disagree precisely, but that's a general constraint of episodic television isn't it? Production always has to balance continuity with accessibility for the viewer. Thalidomide they really did give time and space to (in more than one series I think) and handled it very sensitively. Contraception and family planning has also been an ongoing theme. I think they do pretty well really within the confines of the medium.

If Call The Midwife has a weakness, it's the way the "issue of the week" gets wrapped up and dealt with over the course of the episode and then not much mentioned again. We've had episodes about incest, thalidomide, venereal diseases, intersex conditions, and rape, and I've sometimes felt it was all a bit too neat by the end - although they don't shy away from showing the reality of such things. But I'm really glad that they're giving abortion a proper, thoughtful examination and that they've used a new regular character who they've made us care about over the last few weeks. It was a real masterstroke when we found out what had been going on, and it's obviously not going to be presented as a blackand white issue. Great to see this on the BBC in a prime time slot.

Yes, that cosy label is intensely irritating. It's as if people see that it's going to be about mothers and babies and just assume it's going to be all pink and pastel blue and fluffy. Nobody who has been at the sharp end of labour could think that way, surely!

It was awesome. And awful.
When they went into that room, I very nearly vomited from the shock of it and the turn of the story.
but it made so much sense after the conversation at the table about the women's clinic.

steppe Absolutely, it showed how complex the situation was without any access to safe abortion.