The appeal of times past
Heidi Thomas reveals how an old Blue Peter – and her mum’s car keys – inspired her Christmas special
BBC
- Gareth McLean
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Every year, before she starts writing the new series of Call the Midwife, Heidi Thomas consults two sources for inspiration: the British Newspaper Archive, to establish the events shaping Britain in the late 1960s, and The Wellcome Trust archive, home to the collected annual reports of the Medical Officer of Health. The latter has detailed – among other things – birth and death rates, infant mortality and noteworthy infectious diseases across London for more than 125 years and thus she can discover what particular afflictions were affecting the people of Poplar.
This research is the foundation on which Call the Midwife’s authenticity and credibility sit. As Thomas says, “attention to detail costs nothing – and it’s our most valuable resource”.
This Christmas, the two-part Call the Midwife special has reached the end of 1969 and Thomas, born in 1962, has another resource to tap for stories – her own life. “I’m now channelling my own lived experience of Christmas through the Call the Midwife Christmas special. It’s extraordinarily self-indulgent – and I thoroughly enjoy it,” she says, impishly. “There are times when it brings tears to my eyes to remember what Christmas was like then.”
What was it like back then? “Invariably, we had two Christmas dinners, because we’d usually have the Christmas Day dinner with my mum’s family and on Boxing Day we would have another full dinner with my dad’s family. On both days, there would be 12 or 13 people sitting down in a tiny room, the wallpaper table out at the end of the table and chairs borrowed from next door. Crackers, paper hats and everybody smoking.
Call the Midwife creator Heidi Thomas. Alamy
“Christmas was very compressed: it didn’t really begin till your dad got in from work on Christmas Eve, then everybody went back to work the day after Boxing Day. But then there was New Year, when my parents threw a massive party. Furniture would be put out in the garage or in the garden, covered in a tarpaulin, so there was room to dance and they had this party album of Burt Bacharach classics, but all with a bossa nova beat.
“And there was always the smell of Batchelors savoury rice. We weren’t rich at all – I don’t think anybody had that much money, but there was a level of comfort with what we had – and there was an extravagant humanity about my family.”
This year, she mines one memorable incident from her childhood as the Turner children, like young Heidi and her brother Jonathan, become enamoured by Blue Peter’s 1970 appeal for brass plugs and toy cars.
“We sent in our mum’s car keys,” Thomas reveals. “She found out not long after we posted them and the trauma of that… I can still remember standing by the post box negotiating with the postman to get them back. They’re not technically meant to return parcels, but I was seven. I can still see the postman trying not to laugh. It was a slightly anti- climactic ending, but… never forgotten, and I don’t think ever forgiven.”
Blue Peter presenter Peter Purves with some of the 16,000 toy cars sent in to the 1970 appeal. Getty
So does Thomas think that all writing is autobiography? “I think all writing is sparked by autobiography because even though I’m 62, I would have run out of material by now if I’d only dramatised my own life. But my imaginative response to other people’s stories is often rooted in the fact that I empathise, and that I can identify with what’s happened to them.”
So, to paraphrase the movie critic Roger Ebert, storytelling is an empathy machine? “Not only that, but unlike most period dramas, a lot of our audience remember the stories we’re telling. When we first started, when it was set in the 1950s, we would get letters and little Waverley floral notelets saying, ‘I remember exactly what that was like.’
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“Gradually it’s become more Facebook messages, emails and tweets. And more often than not, people respond because we’ve told their story. To help people feel seen… It’s such a gift!”
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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