But while "Downton," the enthralling saga of a wealthy, well-dressed aristocratic clan, excels in a field well known to fans of British TV, its new ratings rival lends the spotlight to a less familiar breed of heroine: the (eponymous) postwar London midwife. And as Terri Coates will tell you, that's quite an innovation.
Coates, who is an experienced midwife, is the show's technical advisor and part of its very DNA. Her 1998 essay on the dearth of midwives in literature inspired another real-life midwife, Jennifer Worth, to write her memoirs. The TV series grew out of those memoirs -- and although Worth passed away in the summer of 2011 without seeing any of the shows, Coates now works hard to ensure authenticity on set (with help from a few 5,000 prosthetic babies and other skillfully engineered props).
HuffPost Parents spoke to Coates about how the show was born, and found out that while uniforms and standards may have changed since the 1950s, childbirth itself -- in all its trials, traumas and triumphs -- has always been composed of the same highly emotional parts.
Youve been a part of this project since the very beginning, when you inspired Jennifer Worth to write her memoirs. Can you talk about how the concept for Call The Midwife came about?
In 1997 I was completing a masters degree, and for one part of it I decided that I would like to look at how the midwife was perceived in English literature. After reading an awful lot and writing an 8,000 word essay, I came to the conclusion that the midwife was almost completely absent from literature -- and that I would really have liked somebody to have written some form of a story about what a midwife did, so that the general population would know how we worked and what we did.
Around the same time, the journal of the Royal College of Midwives was being relaunched. The new editor asked me if I could do an article for him with a very quick turnaround. So thats what I did -- I wrote 1,500 words and came to the conclusion that somebody needed to write a story that did for midwifery what James Herriot did for vets.
What kind of response did you get?
The article was very well received, and I got a lot of letters through the Royal College saying that people really appreciated my point. One of the letters was from Jennifer Worth, who was a newly retired music teacher and said that it had made her remember her time as a nurse and a midwife in the late 50s and early 60s and that Id inspired her to tell her story. A lot of the people who wrote to me said that theyd like to write, or that they had written [something], and I didnt really think much more of it.
About 18 months after that, Jennifer wrote back to me; she said shed written her memoirs and asked me if I wanted to read them. I said of course -- and she sent me her hand-written manuscript. The stories just leapt off the page, but there were a lot of things that shed misremembered about midwifery practice. So I got in touch with her and asked her if shed like me to correct the midwifery for her. And that started about 12 years worth of collaboration.
Can you describe the hands-on involvement that you have in the production of the show? What you do on a given day of shooting?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3L51fEF2_fw
Im absolutely delighted to see that its doing well. Jennifer wrote so vividly about life in the East End in the 1950s that I think if shed excluded midwifery and just written about life in the East End, the stories would have leapt off the page anyway. She wrote very unsentimentally, and she wrote an amazing piece of social history. And the popularity of the books has just grown and grown. It has been a vindication. Its lovely.
Watch the Call the Midwife series premiere:
Watch Call the Midwife - Episode 1 on PBS. See more from Call the Midwife.
