I adore Call the Midwife - but it's tired and needs to end

It is news that will shake Nonnatus House to its already much-shaken foundations. This week, Call the Midwife creator and showrunner Heidi Thomas hinted that the BBC’s gentle giant of a juggernaut, now approaching the end of its 14th series, might take some sort of a hiatus.

Every Sunday around six million of us tune in for dose of warming reassurance in a near-historical setting on a Sunday evening, making it one of the most popular programmes in the country. The idea that the indefatigable midwives and nuns of a nursing order in Poplar, east London, might ever stop delivering babies, along with cups of tea and myriad nuggets of sage advice, is almost inconceivable.

For no matter how tough times are in the East End of the 1950s, 60s or 70s, the one thing that expectant mothers are guaranteed is an almost instant appointment with the bewilderingly perma-available Dr Turner, who as far as I can recall has never missed a single birth since the series started 13 years ago.

Lest fellow Midwife fans start crying inconsolably into their neatly served cups of tea (teapots not teabags, thank you), Thomas offered the intriguing hint that the nuns might soon be starring in a franchise to rival the Marvel Universe, via an expansion of “our storytelling world.” Quite what this might entail is thought for another day, but as someone who has followed Midwife from series one (Jessica Raine! Miranda Hart!) I do know this: if the series in its current form does take a break, it will never come back as it currently is.

For there can be no getting round the awkward fact that, unlike Dr Turner (who will go on mansplaining medical facts to his hyper-competent nurse wife Shelagh until the end of time), Call the Midwife is now feeling a little tired. It long ago outstripped its source material, the memoirs of young nurse Jennifer Worth, and with each new series the writing loses a little more of the subtlety and clout that it had at the beginning when happy endings were by no means a given (a common beef among Midwife’s detractors).

Now, storylines often shoehorn in current-day concerns in none-too-subtle ways (this corner of Poplar consistently displays a startlingly progressive outlook in matters of race and disability). Problems are resolved ever more neatly and Nonnatus House’s future is threatened either by an unexploded WW2 bomb or by the cost-cutting (male) busybodies at the local health board at least once every series.

And what of the myriad cast changes? Such is the rapid turnover among the younger generation of its lead actors that scripts simply gave up and stopped mentioning former characters a number of series ago. For while Midwife is a great career calling card, few performers – apart from the indomitable Helen George, who has played Nurse Trixie since series one and has now outlasted umpteen colleagues and suitors – want to commit to it for more than a few series, so a fresh young face is constantly being brought in as a replacement.

These changes can lead to character arcs getting tangled. This current series has seen kindly civil engineer turned social worker Cyril get close to new-ish nurse Rosalind, whereas viewers with a mid-length memory will recall that Cyril technically remains married to Lucille, who went for a two-week trip to the Caribbean three years ago.

The closer Call the Midwife edges to the current day, the more I worry that the series might arrive in the year I was born and, crucially, the less easy it will be for the show to maintain its all-important patina of old-fashioned cosiness.

A large part of its appeal – apart from the utopian vision of medical appointments being available on demand and medical staff having unrestricted time for patients – is its evocation of a screen-free community. This televisual East End is one of endless tea parties, Scout events and genial chats in the newsagents as you buy your daily paper.

Inside Nonnatus House, no new-fangled technology will ever shake the ritual of the midwives sitting down formally around the breakfast/lunch/tea/dinner table and engaging in polite conversation. This is most definitely not a world in which Sister Monica Joan (89-year-old Judy Parfitt) orders a Deliveroo pizza on her iPhone, while simultaneously watching videos on TikTok.

We will, of course, have to wait for updates on what new adventures might be afoot in the Midwife universe. In the meantime, savour its present iteration while you can. Nonnatus House has withstood much – but it can’t and won’t stand forever.

‘Call the Midwife‘ continues on Sunday at 8pm on BBC One