The Midwives, BBC Two, review

Call the Midwife has a lot to answer for. The drama about midwifery in Fifties London initially looked like standard Sunday evening doze-off fare but turned out to be the most successful new BBC One drama for a decade. And now the women who casually bring hundreds of thousands of babies into the world every year are getting all sorts of attention that they’ve never demanded.

There’s nothing glamorous about midwifery – even the name of the profession sounds incredibly old-fashioned – but TV producers have grasped the fact that there’s something inherently moving about watching women give birth.

There’s Channel 4’s Bafta-winning One Born Every Minute, the fly-on-the-labour-ward-wall documentary series that’s got through three series in two years. Then along comes The Midwives, the new six-part documentary series which began on BBC Two last night and is really very similar to One Born Every Minute except that it focuses more on the women helping to deliver the babies rather than the ones actually popping them out.

With the highest birth rate in the UK for 40 years, and pregnant women being more demanding than ever due to all the options available (water birth? Mariah Carey’s greatest hits on a loop? Live YouTube streaming of the whole thing?), just coordinating the comings and goings at a busy, under-resourced maternity ward such as the one at Saint Mary’s Hospital in Manchester, the setting of the programme, is an enormous challenge. Up to 170 babies burst into the world there every week, and every one of those mothers wants to be a priority.

Still, the staff are proudly unflappable, especially Gill Barras, who heads up the triage desk and is a hybrid of terrifying, matronly Miss Trunchbull from Matilda and Su Pollard at her most quirky. Barras is one of those hugely watchable characters who prevents this sort of series from languishing on an obscure digital channel.

There is a gruesomeness to childbirth TV that I find partly compelling and mildly horrifying. I understand that births where nothing goes wrong don’t make for exciting enough footage but, as a childless, slightly broody 31 year-old, I found some of the scenes pretty harrowing, and had to watch with my fingers over my eyes. There were complications with almost every birth – is this the BBC’s attempt to keep that soaring birth rate down? If so, it’s certainly worked on me… until a cute new set of Harper Beckham paparazzi pictures appear, anyway.