Call The Midwife To Run For Another 50 Years?

One of the brilliant things about medical period drama Call The Midwife is that it’s about something that will be going on for the rest of time.

That’s the miracle of birth, by the way.

And Heidi Thomas, one of the show’s writers, reckons that this timeless aspect of the show could mean that it ends up being on air for “another fifty years” as it continues to deal with more modern issues.

The series started in 2012, and some critics have suggested that it will be “killed off by contraception”, which the 53-year-old screenwriter couldn’t disagree more with.

She explained: “People have been saying ‘Oh, it’ll all end when the pill comes in’ as though no more babies were ever born again and the entire world was sterilised.

“Call the Midwife could run for another 50 years and we could be covering the issues of today.”

The show has so far covered everything from homosexuality to abortion but the upcoming fifth series is set to be one of the most emotional yet as they cover the use of the drug Thalidomide, which saw a lot of children born with malformed limbs in the late ‘50s.

And Heidi admitted that the topic is so dark that it even affected members of the cast and crew - especially when a prosthetic model of a limbless thalidomide baby arrived on set.

She revealed: “All our prosthetic babies turn up in boxes and we tend to drag them around during filming, but this baby was never dragged.

“She was called baby Susan - we don’t usually name the babies - and when she came out of the box, the whole room was silent.

“They handed her to me and I just looked down at this little thing in the crook of my arm - and it did choke me, it really did.”

Something tells us that we’re going to need our hankies at the ready for this one…