Call The Midwife Series 13 Part 2

[PinkFrogss]

Or Call Saint Turner, as the show has really turned into.

I want to see it get back to midwifery. It feels like its the Dr turner and sheila show now.
It was the late 60's they could have covered stuff like the push to get babies bottle fed. the issues with midwives being forced more into hospital and hospital based births. The growing medicalisation of births. Poor women having welfare stamps and feeding their babies national dried, because it was subsidised.

Much as I look forward to CTM on a Sunday evening, I'd rather they ended before it turns into drivel. I was a massive Endeavour fan and I was sad to see it end last year but it was teetering on the point of jumping the shark with some silly storylines. I'd rather be left with good quality episodes to rewatch than new rubbish ones.

Another vote for 'Playgroup' here. Born 1970... Mum helped to run one and I also went to another... both called playgroup.

'Playgroups' were volunteer run and not necessarily every day, I think. Whereas 'nursery school' was Mon-Fri with paid staff - and in this case may well have fed on to a linked prep school.

Also just seen on the Insta CTM feed that the beach scenes were filmed during Storm Agnes last year... hence the rather windy day!

I sadly feel it does need to end soon before it peters out entirely. I would like another feel good Sunday evening 1950s/1960s programme though. The BBC could just film The Brighton Mysteries, hint hint.

I have vivid memories of playgroup and I do remember the mums would help run it. My favourite memory was having a biscuit and squash!

Can"t see Jonty at a playgroup somehow. Surely his education would have mapped out before he was born.

I wondered the same. Mentions of a headache last week got me thinking about a brain related catastrophic event too.

I used to love the way they styled Trixie but not loving it any more. Maybe because we know that’s a wig with a lot of dark hair under it in real life, but it looks awful.

'Playgroups' were volunteer run and not necessarily every day, I think. Whereas 'nursery school' was Mon-Fri with paid staff - and in this case may well have fed on to a linked prep school.

No, I went to a play group in the very early 70s where the staff were paid. It ran every morning in a church hall. In the term before you started school they ran a Friday afternoon class which involved counting buttons and learning to write your name 😁It certainly wasn't linked to a private school. We all moved on to one of two local state infant schools.

I can only assume that bringing Mae's mother back into it is to retcon the story to fit with modern views on the importance of birth families.

In reality, I doubt the mother would ever have been given the chance to hear about how her daughter was doing, the agency would have had full custody and got her adopted into a "naice" family quick smart.

The Turners would have been considered Mae winning the lottery and there would have been scant oversight of how a lovely, British, middle class professional family was treating her, never mind being informed when she was taken into hospital.

Mae would have been expected to assimilate and forget about her heritage and if she had trouble processing her adoption years later, or it turned out that the Turners had actually been neglectful parents, then would have been told "it was what we thought best at the time".

But that would make the Turners complicit on what was a pretty dark time for looked after children, so lets have a completely anachronistic storyline instead.

From conversations I've had on here before playgroup/toddler group/nursery/pre-school seem to mean different things depending on where you live.

When I was a child in the 80s we went to toddler group which was once a week in a church hall. There was someone in charge, and usually some older ladies from the church who used to help. But parents had to stay.

Nursery (which is mainly called pre-school these days) was 5 mornings or afternoons per week and was run by qualified staff.

I'm afraid so much of the series is now anachronistic that I am giving up watching it. It is now so wet. I lived the earlier series and the books and felt they managed to hold a mirror up to life- good and bad. Last night was ludicrous- the speed with which the agency found out about May, spoke to her mother and the suggestion the Turners were unsafe just would not have happened at that time. I'm done.

Yes I do too. I played the Archangel
Gabriel in the nativity.

And...and...those balloons at the start wouldn't have stayed floating upwards, I don't remember helium in balloons in the 60s? ( yes, lots of other more major annoying things, and I just ended up laughing at the overacting of the turners)

Last night's storyline irked me too (more so than usual).

So they all go to the beach. Mae nearly drowns and ends up gravely ill. So ill that there are concerns as to whether the St Turners can keep her.

And yet....in other news, Lady Mayoress is cock-a-hoop that the Gazette want to run a story on the beach outing and everyone else thinks wot larks too! So much so they are already planning next years' jolly

Surely, surely, they cannot think the beach day a success?! It seems the only reason for the outing was so that Phylis could develop her photos and discover little Danielle's eye problem.

It was so spurious and really really annoying!

Even when Matthew's getting married he looks like he's been sent to the Headmaster

CtM is turning into a parody of itself. I'm not enjoying that much.

In defence of the Turners, at around the time the beach episode was set I'd have been around the same age as May and when I went to the beach with my family I wasn't supervised all the time, I was sent off to play, sometimes with a younger sibling in tow. This was considered quite normal. My parents did have the sense to forbid inflatables in the sea, but nobody was watching when I got stung by a jellyfish that I was trying to scoop up into my bucket with my spade. I was 4 at the time. There was no suggestion it was a safeguarding issue.

But Dr Turner came across as a nasty piece of work with violence just beneath the surface during that episode. I wonder if that was deliberate, or just ham acting.

Fred's near death experience got me by the heartstrings. May? Nope. Totally not invested in the character.

The Mae storyline is ridiculous. There's no way the adoption society would be bending over backwards to accomodate the concerns of a poor Chinese mother thousands of miles away.

This was at a time when authorities were still exporting children to Australia and Canada, often lying to them that their parents were dead. Many of them were exploited and abused.

At a time where children and babies were wholesale be shipped across the world we are meant to think anyone gave a stuff what their birth family thought? We had the story of the neglected children being shipped to Australia, can’t imagine they were sending home reports.
and why was Cyrll cuddling the midwife who ran into the sea, as if! They don’t know each other that well, it was very public and they both have social standing.

I was more worried about anyone trying to give birth at home when all the qualified midwives and the dr were at the beach.

I think it must be the quality of the writing and general production because everyone's acting was overly dramatic and clunky - it was almost like French and Saunders do 'Call the Midwife'. I was laughing at the high drama - sweaty Matthew, Mae drowning in 1ft water...

I was born in 1970, probably a bit posh like Sir Matthew and I went to a "kindergarten"!

Where is Cyril's wife? Have they ever said that she's not coming back?

I think Matthew will have a brain tumour. Cue tragic death. Wasn't he complaining about a headache last week?

I've watched from day one, but I don't think I'll bother anymore.

It's not about babies or midwives. It's a crap soap opera now. Such a shame.

What I don't understand is that, births of babies still gives a huge variety of options to write stories for. It's been going on since the dawn of time and each time has something different.

Even very similar circumstances often trigger different family reactions and so (imo) it would be OK to have repeats of medical conditions etc, but with different family outcomes.

There's far more options that way for the writer, than trying to give the Turners more drama when there is only so much a single family can experience.

Also is there going to be a romance between Nancy and Dr Timothy?? What's the age gap?

Of course not! It would have been a "didn't you give us all a terrible fright!" - the older women would probably have told her off for putting the good doctor and his wife to all that worry and trouble (with an undertone of "aren't you lucky" and a whiff of racism - but of course, Poplar is now a wonderful fully integrated community don't cha know, and racism is only for seasons past).