To think that call the midwife is promoting smoking!

[ScottishJo31]

Just for the record I am no puritan or prude in fact I would consider myself a social smoker... Therefore I am not judgmental about smoking) however in the recent few episodes of Call the midwife... literally every other scene involves the cast and extras smoking... I can understand the need to show how life was in the 1960s ( more people smoked and fewer knew the dangers) but someone is lighting up in nearly every scene.. in the last episode a pregnant woman was offered a fag! ( again I get that pregnant woman didn't know the risks)
However It just seems like overkill, and almost like cigarette companies are advertising through the show!

What are other people's thoughts on this?

I didn't notice quite how smoke heavy last nights episode was, although I did notice the Turners having a stress cig. Earlier episodes were a lot smokier imo, I vividly recall Dr Turner surrounded by a proper old fashioned haze of smoke in either the first episode or a very early one. Now Trixie and I think Valerie smoke - but I didn't think clean living Phyllis or St Lucille do; I'm pretty sure Phyllis has bollocked someone for smoking whilst pregnant before. Trixie is an established frequent smoker - she taught perfect Barbara to smoke- and having bravely overcome alcoholism is the perfect candidate for a "smoking kills" story line, I think.

The nuns seem to like a sneaky one, too. Shelagh did have a couple of puffs on one of Dr Ts, back in the day & admitted to being a teenage smoker and missing cigarettes! She also admits to keeping some in her handbag for nervous fathers and her first act upon de-nunning was to buy a packet of fags. She gives one to a rather grateful Sister Julienne in a private moment, too and I reckon Sister Hilda is the type to slink off to the bike shed and whip a pack out from under her habit .

My parents are children of the 50s & 30s and do recall smoking being acceptable/the haze. My dad started smoking at about 14 in 1949 , I think and still smokes. I still know quite a few smokers between their 20s - 50s despite it being "unacceptable".

My dmum also said that she smoked to reduce the size of the baby.
No harm done apart from the congenital heart defect that I had or the chronic chest infections that disappeared when my parents finally gave up smoking when I was 12. I grew out of them apparently!

Another memory of how normal the convention was that "when you are a grown-up, you smoke". Most of my childhood toys got passed down the family, but I still have the miniature replicas for a dolly's handbag given to me : compact, mirror, and a packet of 20 Capstan cigarettes! That's how conventional it was - although I wonder if the ciggies didn't get passed on like the rest of the stuff because my parents were beginning to wonder if it was quite appropriate...…..

They did an episode about smoking they also did an episode about thalidomide and the rampant sexism. Just women being constantly abused and mistreated.

I do remember pack of cigarette shaped sweets you could buy & my dm sending ds or I to shops for cigarettes when we were in primary school (funnily enough neither ds or I smoke) in the '60.

I was a 60s child and can assure you almost everybody smoked and smoking was allowed everywhere!

My old GP in the 60s had a fag on the go throughout your consultation.

Candy cigarettes were still going strong in the late 70s. At some point they then started calling them "candy sticks" and left off the red tip.

I noticed it too. Of course it's realistic for the time, but also wouldn't surprise me if there's an upcoming storyline (perhaps with doctor) about effects of smoking.

If you've ever watched the documentary "mini" about a young arsonist, we see him smoking with his parents at age 11/12. It's in the late 60s or the 70s I think. That did shock me.

The damaging affects of smoking were known in the 60's.

I am a fervent anti smoker and it doesn’t bother me because it’s a period drama.

My dm smoked throughout her pregnancy with me and when I was pregnant with my own dc1 actually swore at me when I asked her not to smoke around her. I’m in my 40s so my mum was pregnant in the late 70s. I remember going on holiday as a child and sitting in the smoking part of planes - yuck yuck and yuck!

You are being ridiculous, this is how it was in the early 60s. I was born then and my mum told me that then they were actively encouraged to smoke so that they would have an easier birth. My mum also had X rays when she was 6 months pregnant with me.

My grandma (never smoked in her life) told me that the midwife who delivered my dad smoked the whole way through the labour...she literally had a cigarette hanging out of her mouth as he was coming out!

Everyone's saying it's just depicting things as they were and history shouldn't be sanitised. But I think in many ways it's not accurate^^ about the attitudes of the time and so it seems a bit odd that they should sanitise some things and not others. I think people are much more tolerant in CTM than they would really have been at the time. For eg, if anyone is shown to be racist, homophobic or moralistic, they are in the minority and the other characters show us how they are in the wrong.

Judging by my gps and other people I've known from that generation, tolerance was a rare trait. And I would imagine that in nuns it would be even rarer! I had a baby as an unmarried teenager in 1990 and many of the midwives were judgy sows towards me then, so I dread to think what they would have been like in the 1950s.

I don't know what the answer to this would be though, as it would be hard to make a heartwarming series starring characters who have attitudes so at odds to our own.

I was born in 1966. My mother chain smoked her way through two pregnancies. My father was also a pipe smoker. They were teachers. Smoking in the school staffroom and playground was accepted then.

My DH was born in 1963, the eldest of three. His mother chain smoked her way through all three of her pregnancies and through all of her NHS nursing career.

It isn't acceptable now. I don't like that it was then, but it was and the program is depicting things as historically accurate as possible.

As I was growing up I remember smoking being allowed on the back seats of buses, in cinemas, in theatres, in hospitals (had smoking areas), on trains, on planes. Anywhere really. Nobody batted an eyelid either at people smoking in cars with the windows shut and children in the back even smoking whilst driving. My parents did all of that.

I am glad it is all banned now, and I have never smoked. It was how it was though.

If someone is gullible as to want to smoke because of a fictional tv show set several decades ago... then surely they will equally or more influenced by all the anti-smoking campaigning that’s gone on for a long time now, and the horrible pictures and warning on packets of cigarettes etc.

the midwives smoking in their bedroom (yuck). I’m sure they never used to do that

Of course they did! We all did, the best cigarettes ever were the post coital ones.

Smoking was really common well into the late 90's. People smoked at their desk in work, on planes, pubs, cafes, restaurants, everywhere. You just couldnt get away from it.

alsohuman I meant in CTM!! Not in real life.

does anyone remember "The Royal " about a 1960s hospital in Yorkshire ,The Surgeon is smoking a pipe FFS!

Yes! My DF discovered this recently. It's horrendous and the surgeon looks just like Sherlock Holmes with the same pipe he smokes.

I watched Auf Wiedersehen Pet recently and it was 1983. Everyone smoked and you could see the smoky haze everywhere in the pubs and clubs! They even smoked on the plane and there was an announcement to say "would all passengers please extinguish their cigarettes as we are about to land".

My first job in 2004 was in a smoking office, I had an ashtray on my desk

I agree with PPS that they are building up to a smoking kills storyline. It has been briefly touched on that they are bad which is when Dr Turner gave up - he smoked this week as he was stressed.

My dm had a home birth with me in the late 1960s. The midwife took regular fag breaks on the landing! It would be outrageous now but nobody batted an eyelid back then.

"would all passengers please extinguish their cigarettes as we are about to land".
Yes, this was perfectly normal. Where the seat belt sign lights up over the aisle, there used to be a no smoking sign, a cigarette with a cross over it. The seats all had ashtrays in the arm rests, and if you were on a flight with a stop, cleaners came on to empty the ashtrays. I once sat on a 12 hr flight next to a chain smoker, I was green and sick.