Call the Midwife Notes #1: Why Sunday nights?

by DAVID ROLINSON


Call the Midwife (BBC One, 2012-present) is the best drama series of the decade: one of contemporary television’s toughest, most consistently socially-concerned programmes. It is often misunderstood: despite a few perceptive pieces such as Emily Nussbaum’s description of the devastating fifth series as ‘sneaky radicalism’ in the New Yorker, many critics have passed over it as twee or nostalgic or have omitted it from drama-of-the-year polls.1 These critical tendencies say less about the programme than about perceptions of the timeslot: Sunday night, 8.00pm, on BBC One.2 Therefore, my post, the first of an occasional series on one of my favourite dramas, looks at the current status of the series, taking as a starting point critical responses to its Sunday night slot.


  1. Emily Nussbaum, ‘Crowning glory: The sneaky radicalism of Call the Midwife‘, The New Yorker, 20 June 2016, available at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/20/call-the-midwife-a-primal-procedural. The series has been called ‘twee’ in many reviews, though one that sticks in the mind is an Independent review on 17 January 2016 which was responding to an episode which featured an unflinchingly graphic, angry response to the Thalidomide scandal. The television coverage in The Guardian is unsurprisingly a regular offender but this line was contested as early as 2012 by Sarah Dempster, who wrote that, despite it being ‘couched in the heritage footwear/cableknit bloodshed garb of Sunday evening tradition’, it had ‘a tenderness and sincerity’ and was ‘dedicated to social realism’. The review still described the Christmas special as serving a function as ‘a comforting pool of lamplit nostalgia’, but then the Christmas specials do often operate differently. Sarah Dempster, ‘Call the Midwife Christmas special: A refreshingly sincere treat’, The Guardian, TV OD, 21 December 2012. Even this praise dismisses the form. 

  2. Indeed, BBC One’s own continuity announcer used the words “gentle” and “nostalgia” to introduce Call the Midwife on 4 February 2018. It is surprising that one wing of the BBC should misunderstand its own programme seven series in, and be so unaware of the episode that followed the announcement, but the announcement was an attempt to segue from promotion for Hard Sun and McMafia, which echoes the gendered value judgements discussed elsewhere in this article. 

Giles Cooper

by OLIVER WAKE

btvd_cooper_maigretGiles Cooper is widely recognised as having been Britain’s greatest radio dramatist. He was highly prolific, writing dozens of original plays and adaptations for radio across a period of around 13 years. He was responsible for many of the medium’s masterpieces during the 1950s and his accomplishments were acknowledged posthumously with the BBC’s radio playwriting award being named in his honour. He also wrote for the stage, having particular success with his 1962 play Everything in the Garden, a dark comedy of middle-class suburban hypocrisy and greed.

Experiments in colour and electronic film systems: George’s Room (1967)

by DAVID ROLINSON AND SIMON COWARD

Half-Hour Story Writer: Alun Owen; Producer: Stella Richman; Director: Alan Clarke

BTVD_George's Room_1How and why is George’s Room in colour? Anyone coming to George’s Room knowing the rest of director Alan Clarke’s plays for Rediffusion’s Half-Hour Story strand thanks to the BFI’s Alan Clarke at the BBC set might wonder why this is the only one in colour and why it looks so different from the others.1 In comparison with the inventive compositions, fast cutting (vision mixing) and ambitious camerawork of plays like Stella, George’s Room seems highly conventional in its largely static compositions and its alternation between mid-shots, close-ups and wide two-shots: a reviewer at the time said that the play ‘has almost no movement’ and ‘could easily pass as a radio play’, watching characters ‘speaking or listening’.2 In the circumstances this is perhaps unsurprising. Clarke directed this colour version at Wembley Studios, using the same electronic multi-camera set-up as his black and white Half-Hour Story plays. However, George’s Room adapted this set-up in order to use ‘E-cam’, a system designed to make filmed drama in television studios. There were similar attempts to combine television and film technology elsewhere in the television and cinema industries – as we shall see – but Rediffusion were pioneering the integration of film and the electronic multi-camera studio. George’s Room was the main pilot experiment to test ‘E-cam’, which makes it a fascinating moment in British television drama, a stepping stone to possible futures in the use of colour and the convergence between television and cinema. This essay is the most detailed exploration of George’s Room to date. This might not be surprising, given that those studying Clarke could only access an incomplete version,3 until, as the BFI’s Sam Dunn explained, ‘the missing half […] was discovered hiding in the deep recesses of the National Archive’.4 This essay provides information on different stages – from commissioning to overseas sales – but its main focus is on the play as an experiment in colour and electronic film.


  1. George’s Room appears on both DVD and blu-ray versions, while the others appear only on the blu-ray. 

  2. Henry Raynor, ‘Radio play for television’, The Times, 31 August 1967, p. 5. 

  3. Half of the play, joined with the published script, form the basis of the analysis in Dave Rolinson, Alan Clarke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. 

  4. Sam Dunn, quoted in James Oliver, ‘Sam Dunn, producer of Dissent and Disruption: Alan Clarke at the BBC’, available at Moviemail here. 

The Importance of Being Earnest on television

by OLIVER WAKE

BTVD_Earnest_1
It occurred to me recently that with the obvious exception of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde was surely British television’s most performed stage playwright. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most-produced of his works has been his “trivial comedy for serious people”, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). British television has staged this nine times (including heavily condensed versions) over the years, across three channels, in addition to mounting significant extracts at least three times. It is therefore surprising that, although the play has often been welcomed as a favourite, it has also been described as a play that is not “apt for television”. In this essay’s brief survey of versions of The Importance of Being Earnest, we will see why this claim was made and also get a sense of the shifting status of stage plays on television.

Stella (1968)

by DAVID ROLINSON

Half Hour Story Writer: Alun Owen; Producer: Stella Richman; Director: Alan Clarke

BTVD_Stella_11The BFI’s superb new Alan Clarke box sets contain many treats – they at last make most of the director’s surviving BBC work available to everyone and do so with such loving remastering and restoration that even those of us who have seen these pieces many times have never seen or heard them like this – but I’m particularly pleased with the bonus DVD on the main blu ray set Dissent and Disruption: The Complete Alan Clarke at the BBC.1 This collects several of Clarke’s early plays for the ITV strand Half Hour Story (1967-68), including pieces that were thought lost from the archive.2 I say more about Half Hour Story in my new essays for the blu ray booklet, and more about this and Clarke’s other early ITV work in my book Alan Clarke (2005);3 however, this website essay revisits Stella (1968), one of my favourite Half Hour Story plays, to study it in more detail.4 Clarke is rightly being celebrated by film critics for his filmed drama, but we should not forget that he was also a master of the electronic multi-camera studio. This results in such impressive studio experiments as Danton’s Death (1978), Psy-Warriors (1981) and Baal (1982), but there are signs of his qualities in Stella and the other plays that he made at Wembley Studios in his early days at Rediffusion.


  1. The only BBC piece that is not included in the set despite surviving in the archive is Horatio Bottomley, a 1972 play in the series The Edwardians, but this is already available in the DVD release of The Edwardians. The Half Hour Story plays are a bonus item and the set does not claim to be complete in terms of his ITV work. Although Fast Hands (1976) was released by Network in the Plays for Britain set and Made in Britain has been released several times, most effectively alongside the rest of its original play strand Tales Out of School (1983), there are several surviving Clarke ITV productions – drama and documentary, broadcast and non-broadcast – that still await release. Achilles Heel is currently available online on the BFI Player [information correct as of July 2016], where some Half Hour Story pieces – including Stella – can be found, as well as films and his episode of The Edwardians

  2. The Gentleman Caller (1967), Thief (1968) and the second half of George’s Room (1967); some are also available to watch online at BFI Player. Even more impressively, elsewhere in the DVD/blu ray sets can be found a complete version of Clarke’s documentary Bukovsky. In other words, ‘new’ Alan Clarke that even those of us who’ve been studying him for decades have never seen! 

  3. Dave Rolinson, Alan Clarke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005 [paperback reprint 2011]; David Rolinson, ‘Stella‘, Dissent and Disruption: The Complete Alan Clarke at the BBC (British Film Institute, 2016). 

  4. Half Hour Story: ‘Stella’, tx. ITV, 19 June 1968, 9.00pm. This was the slot for broadcast in the Associated Rediffusion region but there were regional variations, as was often the case in the regional structure that at this stage comprised ITV. The following information comes from listings magazines, though is as-yet unverified. Channel Isles showed the play first, on 8 June 1968; the 19 June broadcast was shared with Border, Grampian, Midlands, Tyne Tees and Ulster; the play was also shown on the same day but in a 10.30pm slot by Granada. Scotland and Southern broadcast the play at 10.30pm on 20 June. It appears that Anglia, Harlech and Teledu Cymru did not broadcast the play, but this has yet to be confirmed. Thanks to Ian Greaves for listings magazine research for the 2005 book.