Baby boomers! BBC has commissioned three more series for Call The Midwife

Call The Midwife has just been named best TV drama of the 21st century by the British Film Institute in association with the Radio Times. 

It is a remarkable accolade for a series that attracts 10 million viewers and was the most-watched programme on Christmas Day last year. 

And the good news for its many fans is that the BBC has commissioned three more series as well as three more Christmas specials of the drama that features a group of midwives rolling up their sleeves in the East End of London. 

Series seven, eight and nine will consist of eight 60-minute episodes that will take the nuns and midwives right into the intensity of the Swinging Sixties. 

“In the 1960s Britain was a country fizzing with change and challenge and there is so much rich material – medical, social and emotional – to be explored,” says Thomas. 

Originally based on the memoirs of the late Jennifer Worth, a midwife who wrote a best-selling trilogy about her work in the East End, all her stories were used up by the end of the second series. 

Fortunately she gave Thomas her blessing to breathe new life into the characters should more material be required. 

Thomas revealed at the weekend that casting is under way for an actress to play a West Indian nurse in the seventh series. 

Lucille will be the first regular black character. 

“My research is continually bringing up new things,” Thomas told the BFI & Radio Times Television Festival. 

“It has made me very aware of the contributions made by West Indian nurses to the NHS in the early 1960s. 

She is going to bring stories with her and a different cultural point of view.” 

Jennifer Worth, who died seven months before the first episode of the first series was broadcast on January 15, 2012, had written her first book in response to an article in the Royal College of Midwives Journal which argued that midwives had been underrepresented in literature and called on “a midwife somewhere to do for midwifery what James Herriot did for vets”. 

And with the diaries – which have sold more than a million copies – and their television adaptation she did just that. 

The Wall Street Journal wrote in 2012: “This immensely absorbing drama is worth any trouble it takes to catch up with its singular pleasures.” 

After all, who would have imagined that stories of traumatic deliveries, lighthearted incidents at the convent where the babies are delivered and historical commentary would become so popular that the series would be sold to more than 100 countries? Certainly not its creator. 

“I can sort of believe it but when you take a step back and you think, ‘My God, I’ve been doing it for six years now, it’s amazing,’” says Thomas.

British reviewers have described the show as “the torchbearer of feminism” and lauded its ability to “tickle the middle of the brow while touching the most anguished parts of the human condition”. 

Others have remarked upon its unflinching portrayal of the “terrifying, dreary and vile” lives led by working-class women. 

Many of its fans love a show where babies feature in each episode, others are moved by its incisive handling of social issues such as rape, prostitution, domestic abuse and abortion. 

The wistfulness with which the characters approach courtship appeals to those who celebrate nostalgia, as do the 1940s fashions, up-dos and red lipstick.

Jennifer Worth was a midwife at the Royal London Hospital in Whitechapel who wrote of the shock experienced by a young woman on first encountering the East End of the 1950s. 

In the series she becomes Jenny Lee (played by actress Jessica Raine), who starts out as a 22-year-old midwife hired for her first nursing job, while the voice of her mature self who reflects on events in each episode is that of Vanessa Redgrave.

Jenny Agutter plays Sister Julienne who is in charge of Nonnatus House, where Jenny Lee lives with the other young midwives, and helps them through their lives, including the knock-on effects of the post-war baby boom, the wave of immigration, the introduction of gas and air as a form of pain relief, the thalidomide scandal and the introduction of the contraceptive pill in 1961. 

Executive producer Dame Pippa Harris says the Call The Midwife team are “delighted” with the recent honour. 

“I am personally thrilled that a show which takes an unflinching look at the lives of women and is created by and stars so many talented women, should have struck a chord with such a huge audience,” she enthuses. 

Fans are now waiting expectantly for a Christmas special before series seven arrives in the new year.