Call the Midwife

Jennifer Worth wrote these memoirs as a woman remembering her own young working life, and on the page there is no second actor standing between her and the reader. The voice Vanessa Redgrave gives in fragments on screen is the whole book: one nurse's account of Poplar in the 1950s, told as she lived it and as she heard it from the people around her. That personal angle is what the series trades away as it widens into an ensemble drama with invented characters and plotlines. The books keep closer to what Worth actually saw, thought and was told, which makes them a different experience from the show even where the stories overlap, and a way of finding which parts of a favourite episode began in her memory. The trilogy is short next to the long-running series. Call the Midwife, Shadows of the Workhouse and Farewell to the East End are the whole of the source, and reading them shows the original material the show grew from before it went its own way.

Vanessa Redgrave's voice, as the older Jennifer Worth looking back, sits over the pictures of young Jenny Lee, and that split is the adaptation's most telling structural choice. The narrator carries whole stretches of story that young Jenny isn't present for, which, according to one reviewer, shows how much of the memoir's material Worth gathered secondhand rather than witnessed herself. The ending is harder to compare. Nothing in the available sources says the trilogy's close was rewritten, and in that sense the show is largely faithful as far as is known. But the series has run to around fifteen series and more than 130 episodes, and is described as only 'originally based on' Worth's memoirs, so the later seasons move well beyond anything the three books contain. Within the early material, the producers reportedly adapted many of Worth's stories and invented others, adding characters, storylines and extra drama. Some figures, such as Sister Julienne, are drawn from people Worth knew, though their screen storylines are often dramatised, and many other characters are said to be composites or wholly made up. The overall effect, as one source puts it, is a wider picture of community life in Poplar than the books' more personal account. These points rest on a small set of sources, so treat the finer details as provisional.