Call The Midwife Christmas Special

Published: 13 November 2019

It was so magical filming the Christmas episode in the Outer Hebrides, it was possibly the most beautiful place I’ve ever been in my life.
— Heidi Thomas

Heidi Thomas (Creator, writer, executive producer)

“It was so magical filming the Christmas episode in the Outer Hebrides, it was possibly the most beautiful place I’ve ever been in my life.

"The best thing about filming the Christmas special for me was, very unusually I stayed in the same hotel as the actors, there was the cast and myself in this rather amazing castle, it was just us at breakfast every morning and it was just us at dinner every night. It was like a thriller, I kept thinking it really was like a PD James.

"The interesting thing about series nine is that our characters will challenge their own expectations of the jobs they do. Some of them have been working at Nonnatus House for years, with medical and scientific developments making life quite comfortable. I wanted there to be a challenge to their certainty which works so well in the Christmas Special. The Outer Hebrides didn’t immediately spring to mind, I briefly considered Hong Kong because our story could take us back there, but it wasn’t going to tick our magical Christmas box and in my research I discovered the role that triple duty nurses played in the Hebrides at that time. A triple duty nurse is a midwife, a district nurse and a health visitor all rolled into one which is exactly the skillset our midwives use in Poplar.

"The locations are incredible, Annie Tricklebank our producer went up on an advance visit and she found a lighthouse and the most incredible pre-historic standing stones. She found an incredible medieval church which had been used for a long time as a youth hostel, it was deconsecrated but it was possibly one of the most magical and holy buildings I’ve ever been into. The scenery itself, the coastline, the views, the rocks, even the trees and the vegetation were just magical."

Pippa Harris (Executive producer)

“I think the Christmas episode is a real treat this year, in the past, we’ve normally stayed in Poplar and once ventured further afield when we went to South Africa but this time, we’ve gone to the Outer Hebrides which I think is extraordinary. It’s an extraordinary backdrop and the cast really relish this new opportunity for them to do good in a different part of the UK.

"In terms of why we chose Scotland, it was really down to Heidi, as most things are, who thought it’d be a terrific place, both in terms of the reality of what healthcare was like in the Outer Hebrides in that period, but also just the landscape and the characters that we were going to encounter up there. In the story, of course, it’s Mother Mildred who feels the calling to go and minister to people in the Outer Hebrides.”

Helen George (Trixie Franklin)

“Filming in the Outer Hebrides was pretty interesting. The scenery is so cinematic, I think we captured some really beautiful moments. We’d go to work, and, on our way, we’d see loads of deer and eagles and that was just everyday by the end of filming. It was the most amazing place, the people were wonderful, and I think it’s a really interesting surrounding for us because South Africa was so warm, this was a completely different background for us. The Hebrides are so archaic and whilst we’re in London, our normal setting is progressive, we realised that this community is so far behind what we’re encountering in Poplar, even the fashions - Claire Lynch our designer did an amazing job again.”

Jennifer Kirby (Valerie Dyer)

“Filming in the Outer Hebrides was wild and woolly, that’s not just the sheep! It was amazing, the scenery is absolutely breath-taking and that’s what we all noticed as soon as we got there, I think it’ll just look beautiful. It was very cold and very rainy but magical as well and I think that you’ll really see that. It’s such a different landscape, in Poplar and the East End everything is crammed in and we live at such close proximity and suddenly we have all of this space and it’s different, certainly very different for Valerie, this is not like the kind of place she’s ever been before, she’s very much a city girl so it’s surprising for her.

"This year for the Christmas photo shot, we had little babies in little Christmas stockings, wearing Santa hats, and it was really nice because we’ve never done that before, it was just so cute to see them in the stockings. Some of them really liked it, some of them not so much, some of them fell asleep. It’s funny to have the babies in the pictures because they’re absolutely mesmerised by all the lights and everything, they can’t believe where they are - I don’t think they know where they are. My baby was sound asleep, happy as Larry!”

Leonie Elliott (Lucille Anderson)

“Scotland was fun, it has the most amazing landscape, it’s beautiful. The people were lovely, we got held up a few times going to set by cows and sheep which was fun. It was rainy and cold on a few days but on the last day the sun came out and we got to enjoy it which was really nice.”

Jenny Agutter (Sister Julienne)

“We had a lot of fun filming the Christmas episode in the Outer Hebrides. We were there in April and it was very cold, but absolutely stunning - what an extraordinary place. There’s something very special about being away on location, it just brings everybody together, despite the cold, it was a very good atmosphere - everybody works very closely. We fought the winds and the rains and went to some strange and wonderful locations. The storyline itself has a very magical quality about it, it’s quite different from anything we’ve ever done, it’s very imaginative, it’s also very honest and real but it’s dealing with a completely different community, it’s dealing with a different move for Nonnatus House and the nuns there, although they leave Sister Monica Joan behind because it would be too difficult for her to do that as well.”

Miriam Margolyes (Mother Mildred)

“It is the most beautiful place I’ve ever been to and possibly the coldest. We were there in April, but it felt like January! The beauty of the people and the beauty of the place was fantastic. We saw the standing stones and the old churches, and we stayed in a castle, so we really had the full experience there. Staying in the castle was all about the gin! I like gin, it’s the only drink I really enjoy, and they make a delicious gin on the island and we drank a considerable amount of it - whether we were nuns or not! My father was born in the Gorbals in Glasgow so whenever I go to Scotland, I feel as if I’m going home but I’d never been to the Outer Hebrides before.

"I think the Outer Hebrides would be a wonderful place to have Christmas because there is a simplicity and warmth about the people, that for me is what Christmas should always be about, being kind - and they were.”

Stephen McGann (Doctor Turner) and Laura Main (Shelagh Turner)

Stephen: “Making a Christmas special away from our normal Nonnatus House, even for a part of it is an experience that we’ve had before, when we went all the way to Africa. But this is very special, it’s part of our own nation but it’s a very different part to the experience that most people usually get and for our cast and our characters, they are thrown into the wilderness, with what happens to them at Christmas. The really interesting thing about when you go to a dreamworld like the Outer Hebrides is that it can make you think about where your life is going. I think for the Turners, there’s a lot of that at Christmas, it gives them the time and the peace to think, so there are interesting challenges there at Christmas which was great to play.”

Laura: “I’m from Aberdeen, the East coast and we’re way out West in the Outer Hebrides. It’s so beautiful and it was a bit of a culture shock coming back to London. I couldn’t get over the buildings and the people, it really suited me actually, I really liked being in the Hebrides, it didn’t suit everybody, some people found it too remote, but I think most of us fell in love with it. The beaches that you find are out of this world. We film at one which is known as one of them most beautiful beaches in the world, it’s really stunning.”

Stephen: “I think everyone will really love this kind of a British Christmas which is really interesting, it’s a beautiful thing to have on this special time. In the episode, we capture some of that dream of the wilderness, that beautiful solitude that you find. We film a programme about Poplar and it’s about community and neighbourhood but that’s what we found when we went to this beautiful island, a fantastic neighbourhood full of locals.”

“We ended up in this beautiful village, by the sea, really evocative place, there were many sheep that had to be herded while we arrived as a cast. Our wonderful director Syd Mcartney had arranged for a shepherd to come by with a flock of sheep, sounds fantastic, when you write it on a script it sounds perfect. But these sheep wouldn’t ever keep still. There were lots of passageways, poor Syd tried to control these sheep, it got funnier and funnier and no disrespect to brilliant Syd but we were watching this man descend into despair while these sheep were just winding him up. In the end, he was prostrate on the front of this minibus, just couldn’t do anything else.”

Laura: “There was an actor who had a small role, I think it was his first professional gig, he had to basically herd the sheep and then deliver his line to Miriam, I mean what an introduction to the business.”

Cliff Parisi (Fred Buckle) and Annabelle Apsion (Violet Buckle)

Cliff: “We had a fabulous time, but I did miss Annabelle. We would see wild deer, stags up on the mountainside, beautiful countryside, you could drive for miles without seeing another car, stunning. I’d recommend anybody to go there for a holiday.

"Steve McGann and I got a bit competitive rowing the boat, we got our timing wrong and so the boat went around in circles quite a lot and we had a lot of shouting from cliffs above. We were running out of daylight and so we filmed into the night and eventually we got it ashore. It was eventful, we were rowing backwards and it was quite important that we didn’t hit these rocks and that we got it into this cove and they needed us to come in line with the shot that they’d set up - but we never really did that, sadly. I hope you enjoy it, but we do veer out of shot.”

Annabelle: “Violet and Reggie are together before Christmas, but they are very much missing Fred, they have fun together which you will see in the episode. They actually have a very nice time although Violet is a bit cross that Fred’s gone away at such an important time.”

Cliff: “There were days when the weather was just unbelievable, a lot of the places that we filmed at you couldn’t get to by car so we had to walk and so the camera stuff was all being pulled up by quads, it was great fun. It was an amazing experience, it’s like being on another planet up there. The sheep were funny because sometimes there were no sheep and you had to imagine there were sheep so someone would shout ‘sheep’ at you.”

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