'I realised I had created the story of my own family'
For writer Heidi Thomas Call the Midwife is a labour of love born from growing up with her brother David, who had Down’s syndrome. So how does she feel about giving it up?
- Gareth McLean
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Heidi Thomas is thinking about the future, albeit the future of on-screen 1970. Specifically, she’s thinking about Nancy Corrigan’s future, which begins in this week’s episode of Call the Midwife with the fan favourite’s return to Poplar for her wedding to her fiancé, Roger.
“Given the journey she’s been on, the obvious next step for Nancy was happiness and marriage,” says Thomas, the show’s creator. “And I deeply believed that she should meet a good man. Good men are so much more interesting than bad men because you go on a longer journey with them: they give more and they bring more. So Roger was absolutely devised as a springboard for a whole new chapter for Nancy.”
While that new chapter isn’t quite the one originally envisioned by Thomas, the episode –the last in the series – is classic Midwife, delivering everything the show’s large and loyal audience could wish for – and then some.
The end of yet another series has made Thomas think about the actual future. “One day, I’ll be able to look back and say, ‘God, I was lucky.’ For Call the Midwife to be my mission, my defining show, my hope, my joy, my torment, for X number of years, I just feel really lucky.”
Jenny Agutter as Sister Julienne in Call the Midwife. BBC/Neal Street Productions,Olly Courtney
As legacies go, it’s not a bad one. Since its launch in 2012, the series charting the lives and work of midwives, nurses and nuns in London’s East End, from 1957 onwards, has been one of the most popular dramas on British television, as well as one of the UK’s most successful TV exports. Thomas likens her love of the show to “the love within a marriage”.
“There’s a depth of love that grows over time, more complex and more resonant. There’s a huge amount of emotional investment that goes on when a show has run for as long as this.
So when she says “X years”, has she a number in mind? Has she been thinking about the end of Call the Midwife? “Those of us who are most invested with the show, cast and producers alike, who have been there since the beginning, it is our lives,” Thomas says. “I don’t believe Call the Midwife will ever end. But I do think we might take a break at some point.”
A break? The usually forthcoming Thomas is suddenly circumspect. “I’m not in a position to talk about things really,” she says. “There is a sort of a rolling, ongoing conversation that we always have at this point every year, which is: is there an end point? What are we working towards? Increasingly, we do see opportunities to expand our storytelling world. So if we do take a break, it will be with a view to looking at other aspects of Call the Midwife.”
So Call the Midwife will rest and a spin-off will take its place? “Watch this space,” Thomas says, enigmatically.
You could hardly blame her if she did want to take a break from the show she’s been writing since the summer of 2009. It takes 14 months to make one series, which means there are two months when Thomas is both putting the finishing touches to the series that’s being broadcast and beginning to storyline the next.
“January and February are my hardest working months,” Thomas explains. “I take the tree down on Twelfth Night and start writing the next Christmas special.”
She’s been keeping to this relentless schedule for the past 14 years – and will keep to it for at least the next two because the drama is commissioned until series 16. If 2027 heralds a hiatus Thomas might, not unreasonably, want to write something else entirely. Lest we forget, her career before chronicling Nonnatus House’s residents was wide-ranging. After starting out in theatre, she began writing for television on Lucy Gannon’s Soldier Soldier. From there, she adapted Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, which cemented her ascent to the top rank of TV dramatists. An adaptation of Noel Streatfield’s Ballet Shoes followed and then a reboot of Upstairs Downstairs, a hit until it wilted in the shadow of Downton Abbey. And then along came the memoirs of former midwife Jennifer Worth.
Call the Midwife's 2024 Christmas special. BBC
While Thomas may talk about Call the Midwife taking a break, her words are not those of a writer tiring of her subject. “It’s my duty to deliver the sense of passion and surprise I feel about the show to the audience so they can continue to feel as strongly about it as they do,” she says.
Thomas’s default is industrious. But what keeps her going? The answer perhaps lies in the story of the Mullucks family, from Call the Midwife’s fifth series, set in 1961. The Mullucks had a baby, Susan, born with phocomelia, a rare congenital disorder that doctors would later determine was caused by the drug Thalidomide.
“When I saw that family’s photo that we used for the first episode, the mother Rhoda (Liz White) is sitting in a hospital bed holding a baby,” Thomas explains. “There is an older sister in a yellow dress with her hair in bunches, and a brother, the middle child. I realised then that I had created the story of my own family. I put myself and my older brother in the picture though I hadn’t done it consciously. I thought I was working to a historic template about something factual that had happened to other people, but the story of the Mullucks family was my family’s story – although my little brother David had a different disability.”
Thomas’s brother David was born when she was seven. He had Down’s syndrome as well as being severely disabled physically. “That was a lot to come into a family in 1970, when 50 per cent of disabled children were relinquished into institutional care,” says Thomas. “Me and my brother Johnny absolutely adored David and to be the sibling of somebody who has Down’s syndrome is just wonderful.
“One of the lovely things was that he never stopped believing in Father Christmas. So, at 14, he’d wake up and shout, ‘He’s been! He’s been!’ Every year, he’d ask for the same two things: a Rupert Bear and a dart board, which would be completely mashed by the next year because he loved to play darts. Every Christmas, we’d plead, ‘David, you can open one present. It’s four o’clock in the morning. Choose one present.’ He’d say, ‘Dart board’ and we’d give him the dart board to open and we’d all go back to bed for a bit. So, he kept Christmas alive for us – he kept childhood alive for us.”
For her mum and dad though, “it was different. Emotions are very conflicting, and I’m sure my parents felt very isolated and very challenged. Until David went to school, they didn’t know anybody else who had a child with the condition. I felt the emotional temperature change with David’s arrival.”
David kept Christmas alive for us – he kept childhood alive
As David grew up, Thomas’s family had to deal with the attitudes and language of the time. “I can remember someone in a shop said to my mum: ‘Your little boy is lovely. Is he a Mongol?’ It wasn’t meant unkindly, but my mum said, ‘The correct term is Down’s syndrome and I don’t care whether you think he’s lovely or not!’”
In retrospect, Thomas thinks that by telling the Mullucks’ story, she was telling her mother’s story. When babies have been born with Down’s in Call the Midwife, Thomas ensures the stories are historically accurate but told sensitively. “We have used the M-word for Down’s once or twice, but always in the context of making it clear it’s not acceptable. In series 10, Dr Turner and Nurse Crane discuss how to break the news to the parents about a baby born with the condition and he says the word is horrible and outmoded. That’s because, in 1965, the World Health Organisation decided that the term Down’s syndrome should be used. Having had first-hand experience of the way language evolved at the time, I’m very sensitive to the way we use it now.”
Thomas says all the stories she’s told about disability – including that of series regular Reggie (Daniel Laurie), who has Down’s syndrome – are very much inspired by her brother David. Crucially, the show’s approach to telling stories about people with disabilities is a collaborative one.
“Whenever we work with an actor who has a particular disability, we always talk to them after I’ve written the script to make sure that they’re happy with the content, and to make sure there’s nothing we’ve missed.”
Thomas recalls a story told about a character called Jacob, who had cerebral palsy and started a romantic relationship with someone with Down’s. “I felt we were telling a story that showed how attitudes to disability had changed,” she explains. “And Colin Young – the actor who played him – felt that it was showing how nothing has changed. That was quite a profound moment for me, a big learning thing, both as a human being and as a dramatist.”
Thomas was devastated when David died aged just 15, having a heart operation. “We all just sat there, saying the same thing again and again: ‘What are we going to do without him?’ When he died, he left a void that I don’t think was filled for me, until I started doing Call the Midwife. Then Reggie came along, so now we have Danny in our lives. He was at our son’s wedding in August and we couldn’t get him off the dancefloor. Indefatigable!”
He isn’t the only one. Through telling the Mullucks’ story, Thomas hopes that people “either see themselves reflected back, or they find out something they didn’t know about how society works, or how the parents of disabled children are treated or how they might feel.”
The same applies to all the stories of Call the Midwife. Fundamentally, it invites us to empathise – a radical ask nowadays.
While Thomas says she doesn’t use writing the show as therapy, she has, nevertheless, “learnt an awful lot about my own life – and my own family – by working on stories set in that time period.”
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Her series is undoubtedly of therapeutic value to its audience, as all good stories are. It’s abundantly clear what writing the show means to her, so any break the drama may take will surely be brief. Because for the “lucky” Thomas, Call the Midwife – her joy, her hope, her torment, her mission – is ultimately a labour of love.
Authors
Gareth McLean
Gareth McLean has been writing about television for nearly 30 years. As a critic, he's reviewed thousands of programmes. As a feature writer, he's interviewed hundreds of people, from Liza Minnelli to Jimmy Savile. He has also written for TV.
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