Call The Midwife

Call The Midwife is a brilliant programme, and was in fact a very good book or series of books. The world it described it was certainly of the 1950s but it was not one I was familiar with, even  though my school had a mission to the East End where girls with social work tendencies would go and help out.I imagine that they were carefully protected from any contact with scenes like the full frontal childbirth we saw on television. It  would be silly to suggest that teenagers in the 1950s didn't know where babies came from, or how they got there, but I'm pretty sure we did not know all the details of how they came out. It was not an era  of candid speaking or of letting it all hang out, so overprotected middle-class girls like me  didn't really learn the full facts of life until we were doing it ourselves. I didn't mean to suggest that ignorance is desirable. All the same, I'm not sure that close-up shots between the legs showing  a  midwife or doctor's view of a woman having a haemorrhage  is the ideal family viewing for  a Sunday evening!