Call The Midwife

Agreed - it feels like it's very slowly building to an end - time for Tim to qualify (or at least finish his degree), and Trixie to *finally* 'get her man', before the nuns wander off to Birmingham...

Today’s Radio Times has an interview with Heidi Thomas that says the nuns continued practising in Poplar into the 70s and then moved to Birmingham, so there is scope for it to carry on further still. 

No spoilers in the interview either, only had a quick glance so far, but apparently it might not get resolved in this week’s episode!

Am caught up now. Well that impending train doom built up didn't it. It said me down a whole side line of thinking of when did a lady with a tea trolley stop being a thing on trains? I can remember it appearing now and again in my dim and distant past.

I'm obviously mean for while Dr Turner is unfailingly nice and encyclopaedic when it comes to diseases I felt Tim had a point. Maybe all those rose tinted stories of medical training hadn't actually done him any favours and of course it would be different enough 20 odd years later. I'm not an absolute heel though, poor Dr Turner's face when he got turned on.

Grant to see Sister Monica Joan stepping up to the plate in a crisis, always a stalwart. I think it's curtains for Sister Julien, her screen time does seem to have diminished somewhat.

I thought I'd missed something until I realised what you meant! 😂

I think we’ll get a nasty suprise & Phyllis for some reason will have been on the train, & will have died

I think just the train driver & tea lady passing away is too obvious

I thought it was sufficiently tense until close enough to the end, but I'm glad I was right about the 3 main characters who were on the train. I wouldn't have missed Dr Turner much, but he is an integral part of the show.

I did think the episode suffered (as last week's did) from having too many strands - the teenage mother storyline was very moving but could have been in another episode and then we might have had time for Lucille to get more than 30 seconds of screen time, Nancy to see her daughter (surely she would have done that as soon as possible after the crash and given that was her whole storyline last week?) or have any follow-up on her wellbeing at all, or Sister Monica Joan to visit Sister Julienne (I found it odd how there was no interaction between those two at all). The midwives are the heart of the show but some of them felt very sidelined tonight.

Hopefully the Christmas episode will see some more storylines for those who didn't feature tonight (and presumably Trixie's return). This year we have the suspense of not knowing at all what it will be about, and a longer wait than last year!

Well that was more jolly than expected. Yes the push recently has been that the close relationship for Sister Julienne is with Mrs Turner rather than Sister Monica Joan (I still am offended on Sister Hilda's behalf that the thought of her organising that how ever many years of nonnatus it was, was so awful that she had to get Mrs Turner to take over and do her grand surprise, of what was it some random singing?).

A new year means another visit to Nonnatus House and having reached the halfway point of the new series, I have to say that even with changes in the casts over the years the writing and acting is as good as ever. Judy Parfitt was absolutely wonderful in last week's episode. Really hard-hitting stories nicely balanced out with some more light hearted moments. A real BBC gem of a show.