Re-Birthing Britain: Sounding Middlebrow Trauma in BBC’s Call the Midwife

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. The show participates in various peak TV trends, due not only to its prime position on Sunday nights and widespread streaming distribution through iPlayer and Netflix, but also due to its focus on female trauma. 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 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, trauma studies, 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 post-Brexit Britain, we suggest that the show’s soundtrack pushes ambivalently liberal agendas through ascriptions to sonic conservativism, thus re-narrating the dominant histories of the war and 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 aesthetics on middlebrow television.