How Do They Get the Babies to Look So Realistic on Call the Midwife?

3. When temperatures soar, Helen George, who plays Trixie, hires an ice cream van to serve the cast and crew frozen treats.

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iv. It takes several days to prepare the backdrop for winter scenes, with wooden frames, textile, fake snow and plastic icicles hanging from lampposts.

5. Nonnatus Business firm was named afterwards St Raymond Nonnatus, who was born past caesarean section and is the patron saint of childbirth and pregnant women. Non natus is Latin for "not born".

6. The nuns are based on sisters from the Anglican Community of St John the Divine. The society is withal active, though the remaining sisters left the East End in 1976 and now work with the homeless in Birmingham. Earlier she died, Jennifer Worth, whose memoirs inspired the serial, set upward a trust for the order so they receive an income from the profits of the books and the show.

7 .Jennifer Worth'due south books only provided one-and-a-half series worth of material. After series one, the team hired a researcher to interview people who'd written into the show with their own stories. Heidi Thomas (the series' creator and writer) calls it oral testimony, and information technology has provided her with roughly half the stories for the drama.

8. Heidi was inspired to bring Call the Midwife to the screen later she suffered a serious disease 14 months subsequently her son Dominic was born, to accolade the care and kindness she received from the nurses.

9. For serial one and 2, St Joseph's College in Mill Hill, north London — built by Father Herbert Vaughan in 1866 as Britain's first Catholic missionary college — was used as the setting for Nonnatus House. In 2013, the edifice was sold to a programmer, then the team decamped to the Manor House at Longcross Film Studios in Surrey, formerly the site of an Modern tank exam track.

10. During filming in spring 2016, Call the Midwife shared the studio with the Millennium Falcon, with filming for Star Wars: The Last Jedi taking place on an outdoor lot.

11. Theed Street near Waterloo station in London is the location for exterior shots of terraced houses that open direct on to a street.

12. Manor House was an officers' mess hall afterward the Second World War — and the first floor is reputed to exist haunted.

13. Most street scenes are shot in the Historic Dockyard Chatham in Kent. Staff have renamed one street Chummy'due south Hill, later on the scene when Camilla "Chummy" Browne (Miranda Hart) tried to ride a bike and crashed into PC Noakes.

fourteen. It takes around vii hours to movie every birth — real infants tin only film for xv minutes at a time so the team has worked with thousands of children.

15. All of the on-set food is existent, with cakes brought in from an artisan baker to give the right look to a Victoria sponge.

16 Mary Drupe offered to bake the cakes for the prove when the current producer, Ann Tricklebank, ran into her at the National Television Awards last twelvemonth.

17. The nuns' Royal Doulton Cascade tea gear up has a bigger mail bag than some of the actors. Viewers either share memories or complain they've broken their sugar bowl. Members of the squad's fine art section buy a lot on eBay, and if they find a spare sugar basin they pass it on.

18. Heidi Thomas is a stickler for period accurateness. In series two, while the show's usual set dresser was off sick, at that place was a scene with a family unit eating Sunday lunch and the stand-in dresser put broccoli on the table. Because nobody ate broccoli in 1959 they used an editing tool and decolourised the broccoli and so that it looked like cauliflower.

Phone call The Midwife writer Heidi Thomas

19. Directors who are new to the bear witness receive a mood board, which ever includes pictures taken by Nick Hedges in the belatedly 1960s as role of a housing entrada run past Shelter, the homelessness charity.

20. The character of Reggie Jackson, who has Down's syndrome, was inspired past Heidi Thomas'south tardily blood brother David, who also had the condition.

21. For the Thalidomide storyline, two silicone babies were made to play baby Susan, ane of whom is animatronic. Both the silicone babies accept now been donated to the Thalidomide Lodge.

22. Most on-screen births involve both a real and a prosthetic babe. The testify has three prosthetic babies, which toll £5,000 each to brand from the same medical-class silicone used in artificial limbs. It feels like homo skin to the bear upon.

23.In that location's a drawer full of umbilical cords on prepare — different sizes of baby require different sizes of umbilical cord.

24. Minced beef was once used as a broken-up placenta. Afterwards, the bear witness's midwifery adviser, Terri Coates, insisted the room and the crew exist sterilised before the baby came in for filming.

25. When waters break during a delivery, either Terri or the actress punctures a rubber total of water to squirt out fake amniotic fluid.

26. With a couple of rare exceptions — hello, Anita Dobson! — the prove isn't bang-up on big-name cameos. That doesn't cease celebrities' agents writing in to inquire for their clients to exist in information technology, although this approach has all the same to work.

27. Cliff Parisi, who plays Fred Buckle, qualified for his private airplane pilot'southward licence while working on the show.

28. Max Macmillan, who plays immature Timothy Turner, is an expert pianist and often plays the on-set piano for the cast betwixt scenes.

29. Jenny Agutter'due south son is a real-life dr., working full-fourth dimension for the NHS.

30. Stephen McGann is left-handed and that makes some procedures hard for him to replicate as medical tools are made for correct-handed people, so he practises again and again using his "wrong" mitt. For really complex procedures, Terri Coates's paediatrician married man puts on a mask and plays Dr Turner to get the details right for the camera.

31. Stephen McGann is an expert at the art of origami — he folds all the paper animals that Dr Turner makes.

32. Despite the fact that Heidi Thomas and Stephen McGann are married and Heidi works from home, Stephen doesn't read a word of the scripts until they get in in the mail.

33. The Call the Midwife soundtrack album, which featured the cast singing their version of Lift Stone originally sung by Tommy Steele, was a hit in 2013, shifting more sixty,000 copies.

34. In November that year, on-screen husband and wife Stephen McGann and Laura Main followed up the anthology with a unmarried, When I Fall in Love, released for Children in Need. Laura also won a Children in Demand Call the Midwife Strictly special.

35. The children pictured on the front of the get-go DVD encompass and in lots of publicity shots, running behind the midwives on their bikes, are executive producer Pippa Harris's daughter Ella McBrien and her friends, Mae, Sam, Laurence and Henry Topley.

36. Hayley Squires, who made her screen debut as Conchita Warren'southward daughter Maureen in the very first episode, went on to get a Bafta nomination and win a British Independent Film Award for her role as Katie in I, Daniel Blake.

37. Now anile four, Alice Brown has played Angela Turner since she was a few months erstwhile. Producers one time hired a body double so that she could attend a friend's birthday party.

38. The location for the Hope Clinic in Due south Africa was actually a children's school — the Phone call the Midwife team gave the kids enough meal vouchers to become them through the winter, too as warm coats and shoes.

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39. While filming in S Africa, cast members were surprised to observe people living without electricity in the townships knew who they were. Township shabeens (illicit confined) often show the drama on communal televisions.

40. Phone call the Midwife has been sold to over 100 countries. The 2017 Christmas Special as well aired on Christmas night across the USA, and on Boxing Twenty-four hour period in Australia.

41. The testify has a global cast. Actors from People's republic of china, Islamic republic of pakistan, Somalia, Nippon, Republic of india, People's republic of bangladesh, Russia, Ireland, Sweden, Nigeria, Kingdom of norway, St Lucia, Jamaica and South Africa take all appeared.

42. Victoria Yeates who plays Sister Winifred, became engaged to musician Paul Housden while filming the 2016 Christmas special in South Africa.

43. In the United kingdom, the bear witness is often described equally comforting and cornball, but in the US it's seen equally a radical argument for gratuitous medical intendance. An LA Times reviewer described the bear witness as "a timely valentine to socialised medicine".

44. When series one managing director Philippa Lowthorpe won the Bafta best director honour for her work on the testify in 2013, she was the first adult female to be awarded the fiction directing prize past the Academy. In full, 11 women take directed episodes of CTM.

45. Heidi Thomas, Pippa Harris and Ann Tricklebank first worked together some 25 years agone on ITV's Soldier Soldier.

46. The Duchess of Cambridge and the Duchess of Cornwall are both said to be fans, and a DVD of the festive episode is sent to Sandringham at Christmas.

47. When Trixie became engaged to Tom Hereward the vicar, the show's costume section struggled to find the right 1920s ring, so Heidi lent Helen George a ring from her own jewellery box. Awkwardly, in the story, Trixie hated the ring.

48. Almost of the bear witness'due south guest female characters — who announced in one or two episodes — go far on set with highlights of some kind in their hair. The team accept them to a salon for a color wash, then pay to accept the highlights put back in again after shooting. This accounts for the largest part of the hair and make-up budget.

49. Information technology takes 2 hours to do each of the midwives' hair with backcombing and lacquer. Information technology's all their ain pilus, with a couple of judicious extensions here and there.

l. In the 1960s the midwives would have worn masks when they were with the newborn babies but the production team decided to overlook this, as information technology was felt viewers would struggle to tell who was who in a lot of scenes.

51. Celebrated events are rarely referenced, with one big exception — the Space Race, starting with Yuri Gagarin in series five. In series seven, the beginning woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, gets a namecheck in episode four. She went into orbit in the summertime of 1963.

52. The producers are fanatical virtually secrecy and spoilers. They often put out simulated call sheets and then the public won't know where they're filming, as hundreds of fans plough up to lookout outdoor location scenes.

53. Production on the show centres around a total script read through the twenty-four hour period before shooting, which is ever themed. When sex teaching classes were part of the story, the room was busy with birds and bees; for Lucy Chen's Chinese community storyline there were Chinese snacks and everyone got a fan.

54. Helen George's dog Charlie comes to every read through and loves the sound of applause. When the read through wraps and everyone claps he leaps into the centre of the room.

55. Judy Parfitt, who plays Sis Monica Joan, has a white poodle called Freddie who appeared in episode 5 of series six. Unfortunately, Freddie hates Stephen McGann….

56. The best-legs-on-set competition was won by Judy Parfitt, who hitched up her habit and trounced the youngsters.

57. Celebrity fans include Lena Dunham, Whoopi Goldberg and Paul McCartney, whose mother was a midwife.

58. Heidi Thomas used to assist the Akela of her local Cub pack — hence the many storylines involving Cub Scouts.

59.For the first series, the team asked midwives at a maternity unit if they knew whatsoever women who would be happy to bring babies to the set. Past series two, regulations had tightened and so all babies are now recruited through licensed agencies.

threescore. The bear witness'due south first breech nascence, with Chummy helping the delivery, took a whole solar day to film, and is now used for pedagogy purposes by trainee obstetricians.

61. All costumes are made in triplicate to cater for blood, dirt or rips that might occur in scenes that are filmed out of chronological order.

62. Costume designer Amy Roberts met the nuns of the Order of St John the Divine to check period details earlier designing outfits. The original habit for the serial was bright bluish just had to be toned down for the cameras.

63. Over the beginning six series — a total of 51 episodes — of Call the Midwife, Terri Coates estimates that at that place have been 91 on-screen births filmed (including two still births), which ways that the 100th birth should fall in series seven!

This article was originally published in February 2018

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Source: https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/drama/call-the-midwife-behind-the-scenes-facts-trivia-filming-secrets/