Call The Midwife
Ghosts
Robin, Carol, Holly, Noel . . . and Nigel. After the drama of that multiple delivery in the back of an ambulance on Call The Midwife (BBC1), the quadruplet parents were running out of festive names.
Nigel isn’t Christmassy, of course, but he wasn’t one of the new arrivals. He was a cat, hanging around a Poplar slum tenement and begging for scraps from kindly council official Cyril (Zephryn Taitte).
It’s doubtful that anyone, even a cat, has been christened Nigel since 1968, when this episode was set. Come to that, you don’t meet a lot of young Cyrils either. But perhaps, thanks to Mr Farage’s new-found popularity on I’m A Celebrity, there’ll be a whole batch of Nigels in this year’s Christmas maternity wards.
Writer Heidi Thomas, the show’s ingenious creator who has devised a dozen variations on the Nativity story since 2012, was having other fun with names. One baby’s dad was called Mitchell, a nod to EastEnders. Another family were the Shelbys, echoing Peaky Blinders. Thankfully, there were no infant Krays.
Linda Bassett, who plays Nurse Crane, was literally phoning in her performance. Supposedly away on a training course, she delivered monologues by telephone, before returning at the climax on her hands and knees with backache.
Franklin (Helen George) and Jonty Aylward (Archie O’Callaghan) in Call The Midwife
Robin, Carol, Holly, Noel . . . and Nigel. After the drama of that multiple delivery in the back of an ambulance on Call The Midwife, the quadruplet parents were running out of festive names
By good fortune, flamboyant osteopath Geoffrey (Christopher Harper) was treating the convent as a budget hotel, and put her right with a couple of clicks.
It isn’t unusual for elderly drama queen Sister Monica Joan (Judy Parfitt) to hog the attention at Christmas. One year, she ran away from Nonnatus House, dumping her wimple in a bin as she went. Another year, she ended up in hospital with a broken leg.
So it wasn’t altogether a surprise that she was throwing a melodramatic mantle of gloom over proceedings, declaring to all that, ‘This forthcoming Christmas will be my last upon the Earth. I shall not see another festive season this side of Heaven.’
That primed the plot nicely, with the community coming together to cheer up Sister MJ. Fortunately, what was best calculated to put a smile on her face was reliving the Victorian celebrations of her childhood, with men in stovepipe hats and side-whiskers, ladies in crinoline, a horse-drawn sleigh and lanterns on long brass poles.
Ghosts Christmas Special. Kitty (Lolly Adefope), Pat (Jim Howick), The Captain (Ben Willbond), Mike (Kiell Smith-bynoe), Julian (Simon Farnaby), Alison (Charlotte Ritchie), Robin (Larry Rickard), Thomas Thorne (Mat Baynton), Lady Button (Martha Howe-Douglas), Humphrey (Larry Rickard)
The cast recreated an Old Master painting of the scene in the stable. Trixie and Matthew were Mary and Joseph, and Dr Turner was a wise man. Reggie (Daniel Laurie, who has Down’s syndrome) stubbornly refused to be a shepherd and, thanks to a clever reference to art history worthy of Fiona Bruce herself, appeared as an angel instead.
The last-ever episode of the wonderful sitcom Ghosts (BBC1) almost dispatched the entire spectral cast to be with the angels, as an exorcist was summoned to Button House. There wasn’t much jeopardy, though. All it took to foil the bell, book and candle was for the spooks to hide in a cupboard till the vicar was gone.
Ghosts is usually crammed with quickfire one-liners. This farewell was a gentler, more melancholy affair, playing with the theme of relatives who outstay their welcome at Christmas.
