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'Call the Midwife' cast interviews, previews for Sept. 30 PBS premiere
By April MacIntyre Sep 28, 2012, 14:28 GMT
In 1957, a young Jennifer Lee was hired as a staff nurse at the London Hospital in White Chapel in the East End of London. It was a transitional time, with returning soldiers starting families, immigrants, wretched poverty, unemployment, child labor, prostitution and record levels of infant mortality.
Make sure to tune into PBS' exciting new drama airing September 30. "Call The Midwife" is a huge hit in Britain, and now you can watch as the period drama brings us compelling true stories and beautifully crafted characters.
In 1957, a young Jennifer Lee was hired as a staff nurse at the London Hospital in White Chapel in the East End of London. It was a transitional time, with returning soldiers starting families, immigrants, wretched poverty, unemployment, child labor, prostitution and record levels of infant mortality.
Earlier in the century, it was the subject of Jack London’s novel The People of the Abyss.
Lee worked as a midwife tending to the poor with a strong group of Anglican nuns. In a 2002 memoir entitled Call the Midwife, Jennifer Lee Worth recalled her experience.
This memoir, along with the two that followed, became instant best sellers with over 1 million copies sold in the U.K. alone.
Watch Call the Midwife - Preview on PBS. See more from Call the Midwife.
The PBS Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/pbs), which has nearly 1.2 million fans, is an active forum for fan discussion and excitement leading up to the series premiere.
Call the Midwife is a moving and intimate insight into the colorful world of midwifery and family life in 1950’s East London. We are introduced to the community through the eyes of young nurse Jenny Lee as she arrives at Nonnatus House to live and work as a midwife alongside an Order of Nuns.
As Jenny comes to terms with her new life, we meet some phenomenal people who prove that their warmth, resilience and determination are to be admired beyond measure. At the heart of this world are the Sisters of St. Raymond Nonnatus who have been active in the East End as Anglican nursing nuns since the beginning of the 20th century.
The Sisters and the midwives of Nonnatus House carry out many nursing duties across the community. However, with between 80 and 100 babies being born each month in Poplar alone, their primary work is to help bring safe childbirth to women in the area and to look after their countless newborns.
Starring newcomer Jessica Raine as Jenny, the cast includes Jenny Agutter, Pam Ferris, Miranda Hart and Judy Parfitt. Three other new faces, Helen George, Bryony Hannah and Laura Main complete the regular ensemble cast.
Vanessa Redgrave provides the narration as the mature Jenny.
Earlier this year, the BBC and Neal Street production of Call The Midwife had 11.4 million viewers for its peak episode, making it the highest rated BBC new drama debut on record.
Now PBS brings this wonderful recollection of a time past to you Sunday, September 30th. Written by Heidi Thomas (“Cranford” and “Upstairs Downstairs") and directed by Philippa Lowthorpe and Jamie Payne, this beautiful series is currently shooting its second season in the U.K. Pippa Harris and Heidi Thomas are the executive producers.
This past summer Monsters and Critics was at summer press tour for the Television Critics' Association, and took part in the panel featuring Hugh Warren, whose work includes “Above Suspicion” and “Survivors;” Laura Main, cast as Sister Bernadette, the youngest of the nuns in the series, Laura began her television career in “The Forsyte Saga” in the year 2003. Also attending was Jessica Raine, cast as Jenny Lee. Jessica’s screen credits include Ridley Scott’s “Robin Hood.” Following her professional debut in “Harper Regan” at the National Theatre, Jessica was selected as one of “The Observer” newspaper’s “Hot List 2009,” and the “Telegraph” newspapers “Stars to Shine” in 2009. Helen George was cast as Trixie. Helen’s stage career began when she was cast by Trevor Nunn in “The Woman in White.” Helen made her Hollywood debut recently in “The Three Musketeers” and also appears in Danny Dyer’s forthcoming “7 Lives.”
On edits or changing anything for the USA version of this series:
HUGH WARREN: Yes, but for simply the pragmatic reason that a BBC hour, because there’s no adverts, it’s a 60 minute hour. So we had to cut the shows down to roughly 52 minutes. So we had to cut out eight minutes. But I think we did that without taking out any major stories or anything. And, in fact, after we’d done that, I showed the first episode that I cut down to Pippa Harris, the exec, who was completely nonplussed because she couldn’t remember or couldn’t see what had gone. So I don’t think you will really miss anything. I think there is a plan, actually, to put when the DVD comes out here, that that will be the 60 minute version. So there will be some added little beats in there on the DVD.
On the actors research to play midwives and if they had children:
JESSICA RAINE: We don’t have children.
HELEN GEORGE: Neither of us, no. So it was quite a challenge. I think, historically, we did a lot of research. I remember trailing through “One Born Every Minute” as well just to get myself used to the idea of someone giving birth, and we also had a wonderful midwife called Terri Coates, who actually was the cast list for the series. For the book coming about, she inspired Jennifer Worth to write the memoir. So she it was fantastic that she followed it through and was on set all the time to not only care for the babies but give us professional advice.
JOHN WILSON: Jess, how about you?
JESSICA RAINE: I watched a lot of there’s a documentary called “One Born Every Minute,” and I watched so much of that. And I really remember, one, being moved every time there was a birth, feeling moved to tears and realizing that it’s always, always a miracle moment when a child is born and to never forget that being a midwife and also noticing that midwives are the center of calm in the room. And that’s the most important thing. I mean, in terms of delivering the babies, it’s all angles. So it’s Philippa and Jamie have done an amazing job. They look so realistic. And Terri was on hand all the time with, you know, where your hands should be and the burning of the baby’s head. And we had incredible props as well where they would tell us what everything was and how they would use it.
On the interest in childbirth and any similarities with modern delivery:
HUGH WARREN: I think it’s probably both, but I would say the difference is I mean, the thing about 1957 is not that long ago. Certainly, in the U.K., it was very interesting how a lot of personal stories because, on one level, it’s a social history we are dealing with. And an awful lot of the audience, they would have been alive in that period. They would have given birth in that period, or their mothers would, or their aunties would. So there was a real I think, for a contemporary and a younger audience, it’s a shock to see how different that world was both in terms of how midwifery works but also the poverty that the East End of London was still living in.
They were still that area of London, Poplar, where Jennifer Worth was based, when you read the books, it’s almost Dicksensian. You know, you can’t quite believe that it’s only 60 years ago. And so I think people are fascinated by that and drawn to that, at how very different the world was and also on another level how people had a lot of babies.
In that first episode, we have a woman having her 24th baby, and the average family size in Poplar in that era was eight children, and there was quite a high infant mortality rate still. So birth is a universal thing, and it happens every day, obviously, but it was very different then, and I think people are fascinated by that.
On the fact that the drama of the show was how Jenny Lee was just thrown into this career, and what experiences helped Jessica's role:
JESSICA RAINE: I guess walking onto set on the first day of this job was it felt a lot like Jenny Lee. She I remember we started the morning our first AD held a minute of silence for Jennifer Worth because she died about two or three weeks before we started shooting.
And I was really pleased she did that, but it also really brought home what we were doing. We were bringing to life this book of memoirs, and you certainly feel the responsibility. And I have been doing I had been doing mostly theater work, a lot of fantastic theater in London, and I had done some filming but not much.
So walking onto a set and going, “Okay. I’ve got to be the lead in this huge series,” I felt a bit like Jenny Lee, walking into Nonnatus house going, “What am I going to do?” So that was a similar feeling.
On how the series went over in the U.K. against the backgrounds of cuts in the National Health Care system:
JESSICA RAINE: I think the program really champions the NHS because it was very new. It had only just come about. And I think it’s difficult to imagine England without NHS, but they didn’t have one. And so it was a really exciting, new thing that the poor in East London were really benefiting from. They had not experienced that before.
It champions nurses. It champions the people going out on the streets, which I personally am really proud of because I don’t think people in that industry get enough. I don’t know. I guess they are not celebrated to me.
I love that midwifery has come to the forefront because it’s such an undocumented profession, weirdly. Because it’s so exciting, and you get to go into families’ houses. Home visits and every situation is different, and you are just thrown in, and, you know
HELEN GEORGE: The most fantastic thing is that it seems to have increased midwifery. People have been applying for midwifery since the show. So our numbers of midwives have gone up in the country, which is just fantastic. It is really encouraging a lot of younger women to go into it.
And on the street, I mean, we have teenage girls and teenage boys that come up to us and say how fantastic, and they love the show. So it kind of appeals to all age groups as well, and to men. We’ve had a lot of husbands and fathers that enjoy it because now they are allowed to be present in baths. And as you see here, it was very much a female issue.
On the use of prosthetic babies:
HUGH WARREN: Some of it is shot in the East End of London, but not very much. Because the reality is that was popular as the Aisle of Dogs, which is now Canary Wharf, so that world disappeared in the ’80s, really. It’s just not there anymore. So we did film some parts, the Victorian terraces and tenements and so on in different parts in Stepney and Bow and places.
But, primarily, we shot in a disused seminary in Mill Hill in North London, which is where the Nonnatus house set is. It was like a precinct for us, and we built a lot of sets there. And the docks and the bigger scale that you see are a combination of a maritime museum, which was Chatham Dockyard, which is about 30 miles southeast of London, and also combined effects. As you say, CG, that’s part of the other side of the river and the cranes and the docks.
As far as the births were concerned, we had a number of prosthetic babies made, which I have to say were incredibly convincing, and they are quite disturbing, actually.
HELEN GEORGE: Yeah, lifeless.
JESSICA RAINE: They are really heavy, and we had we got one baby with a detachable willy so it could be a boy or a girl baby. So, occasionally, you’d find a little
HELEN GEORGE: It had its own box.
JESSICA RAINE: thing on the side. You’d be, like, “It shouldn’t be there.” And like I said before, it’s all angles, and it’s off and on. The midwife is kind of crouched behind a girl, holding the baby in place with oh, yeah, and they had that was a prescribed position to give birth in, which is often on your side with your legs like that. So Terri, our midwife, is often behind, and we are all very close together. And I have a prosthetic baby.
You saw in that clip a head and sort of pretending to maneuver it out of the woman’s body. So it’s really clever. I can’t believe how good it looks...because you are doing it going, “This is crazy. Is this going to work?” And, obviously, I can’t I’m not by the monitor. And everyone is, “Huh,” like that at the monitor. So it is working.
HUGH WARREN: But I think that wasn’t just because the monitor people were there is something extraordinary about birth and what’s even, on set, very moving. We come to set sometimes, and there will be very experienced grips and spots with tears in their eyes.
And the sleight of hand, I mean, the tickle birth, the breech birth and upside, too. It still amazes me that you see the sleight of hand going from the prosthetic to the real baby. Because we used a lot of newborn babies, obviously. It’s so effective that you feel like you’ve really witnessed it.
HELEN GEORGE: And Terri, the midwife who is on the set, often she’ll watch the monitors. And she still cries, and the woman has delivered thousands of babies.
JESSICA RAINE: She’s crying.
HELEN GEORGE: And she still cries at the birth. I mean, it’s incredible. So, hopefully, we are doing a good job.
On any sort of changes made in adapting the material from a memoir to a narrative series:
HUGH WARREN: That’s a very good question, and that was part of the huge success when Neal Street first became aware of Tara Cook, who is the coproducer, who worked with Neal Street, suggested they were thinking about it as a film partnership.
But Pippa Harris, the executive producer, and Neal Street recognized very quickly that it’s an episodic story and that it was much better suited to television. But the problem is that it’s a memoir, and it’s written from one person’s perspective, and an awful lot of the book is written with a lot of backstory, you know, people’s back history that’s hard to dramatize in a way.
And ...Pippa got Heidi Thomas in, who’s just a master of converting and making those stories come alive and making them telling them dramatically in the present tense in a way. But it was a challenge, but I think I give full credit to Heidi for doing that because I think for people who know the books, the stories come off into the series really clearly and really well.
On any big changes that were made in things that happened that either wouldn’t work well on television or things that you felt would work well that were not in the book:
HUGH WARREN: There were some things that were not in the book. There’s you know, some of the stories were too difficult to tell in a way. So Heidi had to be very selective in the stories. And we’re shooting a second season now. The interesting thing is we’ve probably got the same series of stories directly from the book now. But inevitably there was some fictionalization and some material added, but I think the key thing was that it really remained true to the spirit of the books and kind of reflects Jennifer Worth’s memoir.
LAURA MAIN: I think with adaptations, quite often people know a book and they end up feeling “That’s not how I remember it,” and I’ve not heard one person say that about our television series, that it’s so true to the essence of Jennifer Worth’s book, which is a great hit.
