Call the Midwife creator talks series hiatus: "All of a sudden everybody was really sobbing"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Change is baked into Call the Midwife. Progress is what the drama is about.

Indeed, in last Sunday’s episode there was an exchange between Nurse Crane (Linda Bassett) and Miss Higgins (Georgie Glen) on the subject of change. In it, Miss Higgins notes, “People speak of change as if they’re speaking about rats, as if change is something hiding underneath the house, attempting to get in and gnaw at all that we hold precious… Perhaps we would be better to compare change to the birds that carry twigs in their beaks, and seeds, so they build nests and sow flowers – however accidentally.”

Having often voiced her thoughts through her characters, writer Heidi Thomas now says of her beloved show, “We have made 15 series in 15 years – I’ve known for a couple of years that that situation won’t go on for ever. The sets need repair. The nuns’ habits are worn out.

“It takes 14 months to make every series. For two months of every year, the producer Annie Tricklebank and I work on two series simultaneously and the workload is immense. We call ourselves the Windmill Girls because for a couple of months, usually around September and October, we never close. I work until five in the morning and she gets up at five in the morning, we have an email handover, then I go to bed for a bit and she goes to the set. You can only sustain that for so long.”

Almost exactly a year ago in an interview with Radio Times, Thomas first floated the idea that Call the Midwife might take a break “at some point”.

Talking obliquely about “opportunities to expand our storytelling world”, Thomas said: “If we do take a break, it will be with a view to looking at other aspects of Call the Midwife".

Today, “if” has been supplanted by “when” – and when is now. Or to be more precise, this coming Sunday night when the 139th episode of Call the Midwife is broadcast, and the series as audiences know it will be paused – or as logophile Sister Monica Joan (Judy Parfitt) might say, take a hiatus, from the Latin hiare which means “to gape” or “to yawn”. There will be no Christmas special, two-part or otherwise, come December and no 16th series next January.

Fans of the Poplar saga of nuns and nurses, of which there are legions, will undoubtedly be bereft and BBC One will have a huge
hole to fill in its winter schedule, a situation it hasn’t had to contend with since the series launched in 2012.

Instead, there will be a three-part mini-series prequel set during the Blitz, and a movie set somewhere in the Commonwealth, probably Australia, in 1972. Given Thomas’s work ethic, the prequel could be on our screens at Christmas and the film released a year later. If she started writing the 16th series, it could feasibly return for Christmas 2028. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Back in the present – aka Call the Midwife 1971 – Thomas shares her last act as showrunner. Surprisingly, it was an act of petty theft. Although in the telling, she does not sound especially sheepish.

After the very last scene had been filmed – a poignant vignette in the chapel between Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter) and Dr Turner (Stephen McGann), which isn’t actually the final scene of the episode – but before a small fireworks display that drew a line under filming at the drama’s expansive Surrey campus, Thomas slunk away from the gathered cast and crew to return to the set of Nonnatus House. A woman on a mission.

“I ran upstairs and nicked a picture of a nun off the wall that I’ve had my eye on for about seven years,” she confesses. “So I left the set with this picture under my arm and I thought, someone’s going to stop me and say, ‘Put that back!’ Then I realised that I was the showrunner and I could basically nick anything I wanted. The moment was a funny blend of high emotion and low farce, which summed up all the years we’ve spent together.”

Such a transgression might seem a little out of character for someone who has, since creating the drama from the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, been lead writer and executive producer. But Thomas – fiercely self-assured, frighteningly talented and formidably industrious – offers no further explanation for her secret pilfering. Suffice it to say that emotions were running particularly high.

“I shed more tears during the making of that episode than any other,” she says. “I thought, ‘Am I crying because of the story or am I crying because it’s our last episode for a while?’ In the end, I think it’s a mixture of everything.”

Shedding a tear is, of course, understandable. The stories that have been building all series – Rosalind and Cyril’s shotgun wedding, the poignant exploration of Sister Veronica’s (Rebecca Gethings) desires and disappointments as a civilian, the return of the Mullucks family, and, of course, Sister Monica Joan’s decision to stop treatment for her kidney disease – are paid off in Sunday’s episode.

Last week, Sister Catherine (Molly Vevers) laid out plainly to Sister Monica Joan: “If you refuse your medication, you will progress from chronic kidney disease to end-stage renal failure very rapidly.” Crescendo to climax, fans will not be disappointed, though they will surely be quietly devastated.

The cast certainly was when filming the drama’s final scene – albeit, given the topsy-turvy way that TV drama is made, on the Wednesday of the penultimate week of filming.

“Virtually all of the actors are in that scene and people just started to cry,” Thomas says. “I was crying, Helen George was crying, and then all of a sudden everybody was really sobbing. More than one pair of false eyelashes came adrift. I thought, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to get through today,’ because the whole day was about filming that last scene.

“But then, when we had to change some lighting, the cast went off and within about three minutes, Christopher Harper, who plays Geoffrey, had arranged a game of charades and everybody was laughing their heads off. You realise that the Call the Midwife family are all going through a degree of grief, but there’s also resilience. It was quite a profound moment because we’re parting company for a while, but we also got to look back down from the top of the mountain and think, ‘What a long way we’ve climbed.’”

It has been an eventful ascent, and on a particularly challenging TV landscape. “15 years ago, it was presumed that a period drama had to be about wealthy people or be what they used to call at the BBC ‘a slam-dunk title’,” Thomas recalls. “A book that people had done at A-level. Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Dickens done very much in an Andrew Davies style. Cranford [which Thomas adapted] was definitely that.”

Call the Midwife, emphatically, was not. It was none of the above. And yet it became the BBC’s most popular drama launch in a decade. Describing it as “a show that was instantly loved but took years to be respected”, Thomas says: “There was a point around series two when I asked myself, ‘Why are people dismissing this show that’s getting more than eight million viewers as “this lovely little cosy show”?’

"There’s blood on the floor every week! It’s about high life- or-death stakes. We had this outpouring of love from the public and yet any serious commentary on the show was so patronising. Even if it was friendly, it was patronising.”

Her answer? “It all relates to women – and also it’s about the working classes. Over the years, we have shown lives that didn’t habitually have very much light shone upon them. Small lives contain giant stories. Women’s lives are full of meaning but, certainly in the late 50s and early 60s, were very much put to one side – not just women, but disabled people and gay people – their lives matter. Call the Midwife has been able to tell and celebrate those stories. It has entered people’s homes on Sunday nights for 15 years, and maybe changed the way they think a little bit.”

In the drama’s story, Thomas sees echoes of her own. “I was neither extremely working class nor highly educated. I wasn’t from a council estate nor have I been to Oxbridge. I’m a lower-middle-class, suburban girl with working-class grandparents, with nothing to distinguish me whatsoever. I was always thought of as very ordinary. But I’ve managed to achieve extraordinary things – I had a play on at the RSC when I was 23 – and I realised that Call the Midwife was the same. It looks ordinary, but it does something extraordinary.”

In creating and writing the drama, Thomas has indeed achieved something extraordinary. Along with nurturing talent like actor Jessica Raine, Wuthering Heights director Emerald Fennell and writers Amy Roberts and Loren McLaughlin, who went on to create The Hardacres for 5, Thomas didn’t just tell stories that were rarely told, she rewrote the rule book on what period drama was and what Sunday-night drama could be.

An unlikely radical, she describes herself as “bloody-minded”, so there is no doubt that when it returns, Call the Midwife will come back bolder than ever. Although, if it picks up where it ends in the early 1970s, mobile midwives making an inventory of their kit as the novice Jenny Lee (Jessica Raine) did with Sister Julienne back in the first series (“enema funnel, enema tube, rectal tube – glass… Second rectal tube, in case the first one breaks, also glass”) will be distant memories. It may feel like another drama entirely.

“We’ll come back slightly recalibrated,” Thomas says. “Changes will have taken place, but the change itself is not destructive. It’s
nourishing.”

Recalibrated how? What changes? The seed of an idea has obviously already been sown.

“I’m exploring the notion of a community hospital. They were big in the '70s and I was familiar with one in urban Liverpool; you would go there to see the GP or have your x-ray. By the end of the 1980s, they’d been phased out but they’re bringing them back now because it’s a model that works.

“So, we’ll see. We don’t know when series 16 will be yet because we’ve got the prequel and then the film. And at the moment, I’m still concentrating on getting this one out of the door!”

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Call the Midwife concludes on BBC One at 8pm on Sunday 8 March 2026.

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