Call the Midwife's Heidi Thomas on saying goodbye to Sister Monica Joan – and those secret ghost cameos

The end, when it came, didn’t arrive with a whimper or a bang. Instead, the conclusion-for-now of Call the Midwife will have been met, in living rooms from Aberdeen to Zouch (Nottinghamshire, trivia fiends), with sobs and sighs.

Certainly, it was a tearjerker of an episode in which Midwife’s, er, midwife, showrunner Heidi Thomas, had doubled the usual doses of bittersweet poignancy and shiny optimism, injecting them into proceedings like emotional steroids. From Rosalind and Cyril’s shotgun nuptials and Beryl reconciling herself to being a Sister and never a mother, to Susan Mullucks gaining an independence unimaginable when she was born a thalidomide-affected baby a decade earlier, our 133rd visit with Nonnatus’s nuns’n’nurses delivered.

Well of course it did.

It was never more affecting and tender than when concerned with the passing of Sister Monica Joan. Hers was a death foretold, mostly by Sister Catherine, who was two-for-two in her predictions about Monica Joan’s demise – how her condition would worsen without treatment and who would guide her to the pearly gates. (With prognostics like that, Cathy’d make a mint down Walthamstow dogs).

Yet when Monica Joan died, her death still came as a shock. Death always does – though perhaps it isn’t death that’s distressing but the absence of life where once there was such vitality.

“With the death of Sister Monica Joan, I was very much inspired by the death of her late Majesty the Queen,” Thomas told Radio Times in an exclusive, post-finale interview. “As early as the Platinum Jubilee, we all knew the Queen was going to pass away but there was still this visceral sense when she died that we had all lost something. My grandmother lived to be 101 and there's a different kind of shock that comes in, because you think that when somebody lives that long, they won't ever die.”

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But, with no fear of the hereafter, die Monica Joan did. And her end, when it arrived, came mob-handed, with a host of [checks notes] ghostly nuns in tow. Leading the spectral sisters was none other than Sister Evangelina, whose fatal stroke a decade ago provided quite the finale to series five. A surprising cameo, then, from Pam Ferris, who has retired from acting, it’s a treat of a scene for the show’s legions of loyal fans.

“When I was writing the script, I said to [CTM’s veteran producer] Ann Tricklebank that we should contact Pam in confidence and see if it was something she was prepared to do. She may not have been up for it, in which case I would have developed my final episode differently and focus on other aspects,” Thomas explains. “But the answer came back almost immediately: ‘I will do it for Judy.’”

With Ferris on-board, Thomas finished the script and the scene was filmed, well ahead of the rest of the episode, in September. “It was top, top secret: it wasn't on the call sheet, we put a fake name – Sister Elizabeth instead of Sister Evangelina – and we smuggled her onto the set,” Thomas says. “As soon as we had her back in her old costume, it was as though she’d never been away. Pam was so generous and the scene between them is just magical.”

Ferris’s isn’t the only surprising cameo in the deathbed scene. Thomas herself appears as one of the ghost nuns. “You do fleetingly see me dressed as a nun when Monica Joan is led away,” she says. “I originally had a slightly bigger part, but I cut myself ruthlessly. But spending a day dressed as a nun was an education in itself.”

For Thomas, telling Monica Joan’s story up to the very end was a labour of love.

“With the death of Monica Joan, we had the ability to follow a path to the end of an elderly person's life, which, as I think a lot of people experience, can be a very extended period where the elderly person reflects on what is to come and has feelings about it, and the people around them reflect on what is to come and have feelings about it.

"It seemed to me that that was a very interesting story to tell, and something you don't very often see on television where the story is often about action and surprise and pace. The the idea that we could do something gently and lovingly and slowly was very appealing to me as a dramatist. It was something that we could invest in and share in and part company with a character who's become very important to many people, not just in the show, but beyond the show as well.”

Such was her determination to give Sister Monica Joan an exit befitting the character and Judy Parfitt who played her, Thomas, who is Anglo-Catholic, asked her own priest to give Monica Joan her last rites and to conduct her funeral.

“Rather than ask him to be an advisor, I thought ‘why don't I ask him to actually do the scene?’ So that's a real priest in those scenes who knows exactly what he’s doing and the congregation is people from my own church. They came in a minibus and brought the church vestments. It really elevated the occasion and gave it a perfection and purpose that made it feel like much more than a pretend funeral.”

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When I interviewed Parfitt in November, she was not enjoying playing Monica Joan’s last days and “couldn’t wait” until she was done filming the death scenes. Parfitt, who celebrated her 90th birthday on the set of the show in November, said “I said ‘I’m practising [for my own death]”. How did Thomas deal with what sounds like an emotional situation?

“Judy is a great actress,” Thomas says, “and she'd been very humorous about her deathbed scenes and was always wearing sparkly red toenail polish. But there was a very real moment where Judy and I were sitting alone in this rather scabby dressing room we have in the basement of Nonnatus House. She was in her night dress and I was dressed as a nun and she took my hand and her eyes filled with tears, and she said,’ You see, to me, she is a real person.’ I said ‘To me, she is too.’ We had our little moment then.”

Call the Midwife’s greatest virtue is that it is – utterly, undeniably, gloriously – an optimistic show. With hindsight, we know that things get better for those centred in the stories: women, people with disabilities, gay people. We know medical advances will make childbirth easier – less fatal – and society will grow increasingly tolerant.

We know that the 220 babies born over the course of the series will have, on average, healthier, longer and more prosperous lives than their parents. We know that technological advances will make everyone’s lives better (until they don’t, of course).

Call the Midwife - which began with nurses on bicycles carrying glass rectal tubes ended with ultrasound and an electric wheelchair – has hope baked in. Its last episode (for a while at least) was celebratory, elegiac, joyful, cathartic – and the apt, happy ending that the show and its audience deserves, even if it is just a pause and not an ever after.

Call the Midwife seasons 1-15 are available to stream now on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.

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