Call the midwife- brand new series starts tonight!!

[Soubriquet]

At 8pm

Who's ready for it?!

I see. They wouldn't do that though on CTM Would they?

Maybe she have a child with a learning disability? It's not something they have covered yet what with her being an older parent and all. Think far to mean to kill any of them off!

Enjoyed tonight's episode. Really like Nurse Crane now, wasn't too sure of her at first.
Patsy is my girl crush

They've already done it! With Jenny's first fiancé. And it's standard stuff in drama. They did it tonight with the blinded father.

Is she that much of an older mother? I mean, I guess they would have thought so then, but in my head she's somewhere 30-35? Dunno.

I agree, Nurse Crane is growing on me.

PAtsy looks so different n ow though. i cant get my head around what is different. no make up? put on weight?
At least we have the lovely Trixie back

Last week's didn't record for me!!! Anyone know where I can get a summary (no iPlayer here). I've read the comments here but would like a summary!!

Stupid recordy box - I was looking forward to watching it yesterday followed by last night's.

um, Sister Ursula brought in while they went to South Africa, has demoted Sister Julienne and taken her job Sister Ursula is very mean, although she was nice to a little boy.
it was a DV episode as yhou may gather fromthis thread.
and Sister Bernadette, or whatever she is called now, Doctor's wife is amazingly pregnant.
Sister Patsy's father is dying and needs her back in ? Hong Kong

We love Sister Crane

I cried too . Though one thing started pissing me off mightily ;the incidental music. Not the pop music they played at the end I LOVED that but all through there was the effing music WHY WHY ????

Has it always been there and I just noticed it?Is it me?

norma, that was last week.

This week it was:

Sheila got caught up in an explosion at the docks. Two men were badly hurt - one died at the scene, the other had bad burns to his eyes. His wife was having a little boy the same day. There was no first aid material or even running water for first aid, and Sheila got called in to court to testify about it all, and eventually got some changes pushed through. She was with a woman working as a barmaid who used to be a nurse in the war (which war? Does anyone know? Too late for WWII now, I think!). I wonder if she's going to be a new character as they kept dropping hints about Nonnatus being short-staffed.

Sheila still being sick but looking extremely trim. Still not convincing me on the miracle pregnancy storyline, but hey ho.

The other patient storyline is a woman with achondroplasia (sp?) who has a baby - she'd been recommended a termination by her old doctor as there's some risk of stillbirth, but she has a healthy baby.

The new nun in charge is still making petty rules and banning everything, especially anything that isn't strictly nursing or midwifery. Sister Julienne has gone from raising eyebrows to actively disobeying, and packs a bag of extra food for the burn victim's wife who's struggling while he's in hospital.

Patsy's storyline was that she doesn't want to go back to Hong Kong to see her sick dad, partly because she doesn't want to leave Delia and partly because (as she eventually admits to a patient) she's always found it hard to let herself love him, after losing her mum and sister. In the end, though, she does go - partly because the new nun catches her doing more for her patients than strictly necessary, and threatens to dock her wages.

Nurse Crane has obviously noticed Patsy and Delia are, ahem, 'close'. She seems quite sympathetic and gives Delia a book of love poems, which sounds very mawkish, but it was actually a really lovely scene and quite funny in parts too.

I think that's all the plot stuff.

Going back to last weeks episode, the one concerning domestic violence. I was born in 1948, we lived in a Victorian terraced two up, two down house. The area was earmarked for demolition and new council houses/estates were springing up everywhere. One of which was the estate my family moved to in 1956, my mother was overjoyed to have an inside toilet and a plumbed in bath and hot water on tap. I remember her delight at living in the 'countryside', surrounded by fields and rolling hills. It was just a short bus ride away from the town where we'd moved from but to us we were in the countryside. Our neighbours came from all kinds of backgrounds, one of whom was a young mother with three small children. I didn't know it at the time but she was a victim of domestic violence, she was on her own with her kids. She had a job and mother took her under her wing a bit and helped her out with babysitting, school runs, veg and eggs from my aunts allotment.
The council estates were built on farm land sold off by the big private estates to pay inheritance taxes after the second world war, when these big estates went to wrack and ruin due to the big social revolution caused by the war.
The point I am making is social housing was plentiful back then and Trudy could have been our neighbourl. (She wasn't, wrong end of the country)

The war they refer to is WW2, still very fresh in the minds back then. I was six when rationing ended in 1954.

Do you think? That woman looked to me no older than 30, so surely at the end of WWII she would have been about 15? Not old enough.

She couldn't have been a nurse in ww2 could she? This series is set 16 years after it ended

Wiki tells me we were part of the Korean War, the mau mau uprising and the suez crisis during the 50s?!

And the barmaid who is really a nurse and who helped Shelagh with the injured men is obviously going to join NH as a nurse to replace Patsy.

Gah! didn't refresh before I posted so missed the last few posts

You could be right, I didn't think of the Korean War.

Patsy will be back though won't she?

Patsy will be back though won't she?

Gallavich has part of the answer to her own question but it is worth remembering that in addition to the Korean War, there were security operations in Cyprus between 1955 and 1959 (944 security force casualties), Malaya between 1948 and 1960, with 4,341 casualties and the actions in the Arab Peninsula were beginning at about that time. In Kenya there were 1,166 casualties between 1952 and 1960. (Figures from The British Way in Counter-Insurgency, David French.) Suez and Korea were, I suspect, too long before the period of the current series for the QARANC nurse to have served in them but a real nurse of that period would have had only too many opportunities to deal with wounded men. If she was old enough for Korea there would have been another 4500 opportunities. I think I am right in saying that there have only been 2 years since WWII when a British soldier has not been killed in action, one of them last year.

How old is Patsy supposed to be? She doesn't look older than 30 to me yet she was a child in a Japanese POW camp.

If 30, born in 1933 so between about 8 and 12 during the Japanese war.

I recall reading on the BBC website that Patsy was born in 1933 to a shipbroker father and a socialite mother. They lived in China. After the war she attended boarding school in the UK.