Call the midwife

[NimbleHiker]

The Christmas special of call the midwife is on bbc 1 in 2 parts again. The first part is on at 20:15 on Christmas day and the second part is on at 20:30 on boxing day. I am not a fan of the Christmas special been in 2 parts. I wonder how doctor Turner and his simpering wife will save the world.

Who is the man staying in Cyril’s flat, are we supposed to recognise him from a previous episode?

Tim is looking very grown up all of a sudden!

Don’t like that they’ve made the female GP useless, feels entirely unnecessary.

Well that was certainly an episode of Call the Midwife

I was just thinking the same thing. Also, I find the Buckles worse than the Turners!

Not sure we need the travellers or the Cyril/old man storyline but I’m sure there will be a tenuous link somewhere and saintly Dr T will sort out the situation in HK. Nice to see Sister Hilda again.

@Needmorelegoso did I! They were very thin!

Violet has a son in the HK Police. Timothy has taken up smoking. Geoffrey has a Harley Street Practice. Trixie and Jonty live together who knows where while the elusive Matthew stays in the US. Sister MJ is allowed to interfere in practice despite her 15 years of Dementia (I've been watching the early series again and she's the only person in medical history whose dementia gets better the longer she has it... Dr T should be publishing papers on this!)
And the white saviours swoop in to help the Chinese and take on the Triads.

I still love Nurse Crane

Either I've clearly had too much sherry and I'm delirious... or I haven't had enough!

Can you imagine standing up in front of the coroners court/ 1971 equivalent of the NMC and saying that you took medical advice from a nun in her 90’s who’s not practiced in years and is supposedly supposed to have dementia, and didn’t contact a different doctor or call 999

I enjoyed it!

I bumped into Jenny Agutter on holiday a year or 2 ago,

And…?

i had to leave the room, i found it really bad
i did notice that the men were all growing their hair which was a nice touch to accuracy
but otherwise so contrived

Good to see Sr Hilda, Timothy.

Nurse Crane, Miss Higgins, Sr Julienne as excellent as ever.

The cubs practising for Christmas was a nice touch of realism, as were the fashions such as the hairstyles of Timothy and Trixie’s brother.

Disappointing that the female GP was shown to be out of her depth. Would it have been normal for a doctor who’d studied in the 1960s to be uncomfortable with that situation? I genuinely don’t know. Obviously the midwives would have been more competent but that’s to be expected.

I respect the writers’ attempts not to be complacent and to do something different (HK) but for me, Poplar is a character in its own right. And again, would those characters have been jumping on a ‘plane to SE Asia like that in the very early 1970s? Again, I genuinely don’t know.

I enjoyed it, with the usual glossing over. But was a bit perplexed by one minute Shelagh saying she was needed at home and wouldn't be coming to Hong Kong, and the next minute she is in the rickshaw next to Dr Turner. I think I must have missed something!

The children told her to go !

Yes but Trixie is female and she's saved the day!

I felt like I'd been on summat watching that. I'd only had a few cans and some port. Oh and have a bottle of champers. But over the whole day with far too much food.

I'm not sure I'll bother tonight? Just seemed silly.

I thought that nurse Crane was good last night. I was surprised that the female gp didn't call 999.

I gave up a few years ago, but caught some of it last night. It hadn't improved.

But Trixie made a point of saying she studied under Dr Turner didn’t she?

I still think we could just have a competent female doctor but then again I’m very fed up of Saint Turner so that’s probably half the reason

I wouldn't look good.

We know this is all going to come good but there is a massive cognitive dissonance with loving, caring, principled Shelagh and Dr T abandoning their three young children as they head off half way around the world to look up May’s birth mother and save the sister house. Who the hell does that just because their kids tell them to? It’s not even as if Dr Timothy wasn’t on ward duty and too knackered to see to them properly when he got home.

Then there’s the sheer unnecessary waste of flying over a truck load of woollen baby clothes to help children in a tropical country. Even the medical supplies were unnecessary as when they were stolen it turned out the stuff they needed was available locally anyway.
all they seemed to do was disinfect wounds, re-bandage people, vaccinate and pass on anything difficult to the hospital. All of these things would have been more efficiently achieved by resourcing local people rather than adding the pressure of food and lodging for an extra half dozen people (who could have stayed in a hotel).

I meant to say it instead of i.

Since HK was a British Colony at the time I’m presuming it was a pretty well developed place and would have had access to the stuff that was taken out anyway.

It was silly. I am only bothering tonight because i want to know if the Turners will adopt May's brother. I will also need a break from the football lol.

It’s pure shite now, but I still watch.

I bet they are.

All the characters are utterly tedious. Why are they speaking sooooooo sloooowly as if the people in HongKong they are interacting with are a little dim and slow. So grating.

The whole things is utterly ridiculous, I used to love the series and even read the original book.

In this day and age the way colonial attitudes are shown seems wilfully tone deaf. ALL the characters are annoying aaaaarg 😩