‘Re-birthing Britain: maternal soundscapes in Call the Midwife

Abstract

With its blend of social critique, mid-century nostalgia and sentimentality, BBC’s Call the Midwife has been a staple of middlebrow television entertainment for more than a decade., participating in various peak TV trends, due not only to its prime position on Sunday nights but also its widespread streaming distribution through iPlayer and Netflix.

We argue that not only does Call the Midwife’s soundtrack enable a means of processing the trauma of childbirth, but that it also provides a way for Britain to negotiate its own rebirth in the aftermath of the Second World War, and as the much of the former British Empire was reconfigured as the Commonwealth. Through the use of sentimental, nostalgic scoring, and diegetic communal singing within feminine spaces, the main characters become idealized ‘mothers of the nation’, whether providing care for the experience of childbirth (renewal), elderly community members (nostalgic continuity with the past), or accepting and assimilating immigrants from the former British Empire (the rebirth of racial integration). Drawing on concepts from film studies, maternity, trauma, and postcolonial theory, we argue that maternity in Call the Midwife becomes a metaphor for the post-war re-birthing of the nation. In the context of Call the Midwife’s ongoing popularity in Brexit Britain, we suggest that the show’s soundtrack pushes ambivalently liberal agendas through ascriptions to sonic conservativism, re-narrating the dominant histories of the war, blurring the boundaries between metaphors of rebirth and regression, social conservatism, and liberal progressivism. In the process, it also offers an example of the influence of peak TV’s sound aesthetics on middlebrow television.

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ORCID for Erin Johnson-Williams: orcid.org/0000-0002-3305-5783

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