‘Call the Midwife’s writer Heidi Thomas is confident the medical period drama could go on for another "50 years."
The 53-year-old screenwriter has shot down whispers suggesting the midwifery series, which started in 2012, will be killed off by contraception, as she believes she has enough content to keep it going for another five decades.
She explained: "People have been saying ‘Oh, it’ll all end when the pill comes in’ as though no more babies were ever born again and the entire world was sterilised.
"’Call The Midwife’ could run for another 50 years and we could be covering the issues of today."
The popular programme has covered everything from homosexuality to abortion but the forthcoming fifth series is set to be the most tear-jerking to hit screens yet as it covers the dark history of the drug Thalidomide, which saw many children born with malformed limbs in the late ’50s.
But it’s not just the viewers who will be hit hard by the realisation of the drug, as the cast also had trouble getting their heads around it when a prosthetic model of a limbless thalidomide baby arrived on set for the latest plot-line.
Heidi said: "All our prosthetic babies turn up in boxes and we tend to drag them around during filming, but this baby was never dragged. She was called baby Susan – we don’t usually name the babies – and when she came out of the box, the whole room was silent. They handed her to me and I just looked down at this little thing in the crook of my arm – and it did choke me, it really did."
Call the Midwife could go on for 50 years
