Call the midwife

Grandma70 you’re not a lone voice. I too felt manipulated. The orchestrated way the SW brought the Barbara’s death to a crecendo felt too arranged. I knew she was going to die at the beginning.

Yup I'm with you NFK and Grandma70. It felt even more saccharine than usual. Blatant manipulation. That doctor is so wet I could smack him. The only interesting character in it is sister Monica Joan.
Only watched it this pm as I'd watched everything else due to being stuck in.
I'm sure you others all felt the better of a good cry. Now - get a grip!!

Forgive me Jane10 and NikD, if you don't like the programme, why do you watch it? I don't like certain programmes, so instead of watching them and pulling them to bits I don't watch them!

Yes, I wondered about that too nigglynellie.

Jane10 I gave Celebrity Big Brother, Collateral, Marcella and Requiem one or two viewings before deciding I wasn't going to warm to them. Then I stopped watching them.

What is the point of continuing to watch a programme that you think is full of uninteresting characters and which you believe to be manipulative?

And really you're not just pulling the programme to bits - you're also sneering at people who do like it.

We often find there are two or three things we'd like to watch on at the same time and record one or two of them - all ready and waiting for when there is nothing else that appeals. Otherwise it's the radio or some music.

I agree, Barbara's parents would undoubtedly have been informed and summoned as she was SO ill!

That is one thing that always puzzles me about these kinds of series - no-one seems to have relatives who come to weddings, parties, sickbeds or come to stay at all! Yet we know that Barbara had parents who surely would have rushed to her bedside but only Tom and work colleagues were there for her.

Now - get a grip!!
Sorry, not yet, we have next week's episode to get through first!

Didn't Barbara's parents work abroad somewhere remote as missionaries? Or maybe be that was another character.

We watch it because we loved the other series and most of the characters are really good, but it's getting more and more sickly sweet. I think we're on the verge of going cold turkey and quitting.

Sickly sweet ? A young woman dying, a teenage boy becoming a father and being sent to prison , a woman from Jamaica trying to cope with racism , a middle aged single, childless woman grieving ? this is sickly sweet ? and Hitchcocks Pyscho was a comedy I suppose ?

Thats pretty much what happened to me NFK. As I said I only watched it yesterday having run out of dramas to watch. I didn't mean to sneer. I suppose I'm irritated at what feels like a pretty cynical bunch of writers manipulating the emotions of Sunday evening viewers, mostly women. We deserve better.

Do not most writers manipulate ?

I agree with Anniebach that the themes she lists are all genuine human situations, which are still current.

The Jamaican midwife's dilemma was interestingly complicated by her strong sense of duty . Should she stay on at the snobbish church and try to get them to change for the better, or should she go with her heart and worship God in the way she knew? I replied to you in another thread that I am not a churchy person but I was envying the small Jamaican congregation that they had such good religion.

Because a story and its clever writer makes you cry does not mean that the story is dishonest. It's when the themes are simplistic or lying that a story is a bad story.

Anniebach, certainly they do! It's human to be unable to be completely objective.

Surely there should be room for all sorts of TV with out people being judgmental. On Sunday we had Call The Midwife followed by Strike.

Some people read Shakespeare, some murder mysteries, some fantasy and some Mills and Boon. And, the viewing figures show they are doing something right.

Greatest manipulator must be Dickens and I love his books and all the tv series over the years , he makes me laugh,cry, angry.

Surely any writer of fiction, (and sometimes non-fiction) is manipulating our feelings? That's the whole point - to make you experience something other than your own life, I'd have thought.

I love CTM but I've really had enough of soppy Dr. Turnoff.

If the series makes it to the late sixties I hope Timothy drops out and becomes a hippy.

Phyllis reminds me of the stern but kind midwife who delivered DS at home. She asked my mother to sterilize some empty jam jars. Apparently they were to be used for keeping cotton wool buds and other bits and pieces clean and accessible.

I don't think she was very impressed when Mum muttered, 'I thought she was having a baby, not tadpoles.'

Yes, Phyllis reminds me of the midwife I had for postnatal care back in the 70's, Miss Thomas. An older spinster, kindly but no nonsense.

She didn't agree with the then new-fangled fashion for putting babies to sleep on their tummies and encouraged mums to put their babies on their backs to sleep. I sometimes wonder how many babies' lives she saved with that advice.

I haven't read everything, so apologies of it's been mentioned. Does anyone remember Linda Bassett in Larkrise to Candleford? She was the village wise woman and herbalist with the dodgy little man, Twister, for a husband. She's been great in both parts, mo.

...if it's been mentioned...

I think those of us who can remember the 1960's from start to finish will recognise a lot of the issues on C.T.M. People were prejudice, snobbish, disapproving. Kindly people were!! Approved Schools were draconian, the panel at the young man's hearing would have been exactly like that in 1963, I worked for a Probation Officer in the early 1960's, and the court hearings for young people were very - terrifying!! some of the misdemeanours heartbreakingly trivial, with Borstal as the 'punishment'! I agree Dr Turner is a bit soppy, but at least he is cast as caring, (a lot of medical professionals weren't) in an often uncaring world, if you were poor, from overseas, handicapped, a perceived misfit in one way or another. Why hope that Timothy becomes a hippy? In order to wreck his life, cause his parents heartache? die of an overdose? How disingenuous is that?! I hope Timothy becomes a first class physician and like his father, works amongst disadvantaged people, does a lot of good in this world and is a credit to his parents. Why would you wish otherwise?!

I'm currently working to help a young homeless man who has a court hearing on Friday; attending a woman who is receiving end-of-life care; running a house church AND I have a very pregnant daughter! Throw me back to the 1960's and I could be part of next week's storyline on CtM.

Thanks Blinko that's where I've seen her before - and in other things too, but that was what I was trying to remember.

No, I don't think it's been mentioned previously and if it was I missed it!

Our very nice young neighbour in the 1970s had been 'a Borstal boy' and he reckoned that it put him on the right path in life.

And lots of young people went through a 'hippy' stage, not all took drugs.
Some of them even went on to become doctors, teachers, engineers, scientists