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Call the Midwife: Season 1 (DVD)
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Additional DVD options | Edition | Discs | Price | New from | Used from |
Watch Instantly with | Per Episode | Buy Season |
Purchase options and add-ons
Genre | Drama |
Format | Subtitled, Color, Multiple Formats, Full Screen, NTSC |
Contributor | Miranda Hart, Roger Goldby, Jamie Payne, Jessica Raine, Helen George, Ben Caplan, Pam Ferris, Stephen McGann, Laura Main, Bryony Hannah, Philippa Lowthorpe, Jenny Agutter, Vanessa Redgrave See more |
Language | English |
Number Of Discs | 2 |
Frequently bought together
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Product Description
Product Description
Call the Midwife: Season One (BBC/DVD) A moving, intimate, funny and, above all, true-to-life look at the colorful stories of midwifery and families in East London in the Fifties, based on the best-selling memoirs of the late Jennifer Worth. When Jenny Lee first arrives in Poplar, she knows nothing about hardship, poverty or indeed, life itself. Attached to an order of nursing nuns at Nonnatus House, Jenny is part of a team of midwives who visit expectant mothers, providing the poorest women with the best possible care. Here, the streets teem with children and with just one eight-bed maternity ward to serve the whole district; most deliveries take place at home. Following Jenny as she travels through the streets to meet her patients - like Conchita, who is on her 25th pregnancy and Mary, a prostitute and pregnant at just 15 - Call the Midwife offers a fascinating insight into a community on the brink of huge social change.
Amazon.com
In drawing from the memoirs of Jennifer Worth, the BBC's Call the Midwife instantly distinguished itself from most other medical dramas, largely because it's a more character-driven piece. Jessica Raine, who evokes the openhearted Judy Garland of The Wizard of Oz, plays Jenny Lee, a middle-class 22-year-old who takes a job at an Anglican convent in 1957, where the young nurses work alongside experienced nuns: calm Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter), stern Sister Evangelina (Pam Ferris), and spacey, cake-addicted Sister Monica Joan (Judy Parfitt, who costarred with Ferris in Little Doritt).
Jenny is hardy judgmental, but the depth of poverty permeating London's East End provides a wake-up call (suffice to say, gynecological care has come a long way since the 1950s). To be effective, though, she must learn to put her preconceptions aside about teenage prostitutes, unwed mothers, squalid living conditions, and inappropriate relationships. Her upper-class colleague, Camilla "Chummy" Cholomondley-Browne (Miranda Hart, quite affecting), seems like she'd be even deeper out of her depth, but looks can be deceiving--even if Chummy finds it harder to handle the bikes the nurses use to cycle between appointments. Written by Cranford's Heidi Thomas and narrated by Vanessa Redgrave, the show has proven to be as much of a favorite among PBS viewers as ITV's Downton Abbey, to which it's garnered a few comparisons, possibly due to the period setting, even if there's a greater emphasis on women's issues. If anything, the postwar milieu brings the films of Terence Davies and Mike Leigh to mind, particularly Leigh's Vera Drake, in which Imelda Staunton provided off-the-books care to desperate mothers. Though Worth was involved with the spectacularly successful first season, she passed away two weeks before filming began. --Kathleen C. Fennessy
Product details
- Is Discontinued By Manufacturer : No
- MPAA rating : NR (Not Rated)
- Product Dimensions : 0.6 x 5.4 x 7.6 inches; 3.2 ounces
- Item model number : 26411218
- Director : Roger Goldby, Philippa Lowthorpe, Jamie Payne
- Media Format : Subtitled, Color, Multiple Formats, Full Screen, NTSC
- Run time : 5 hours and 55 minutes
- Release date : November 6, 2012
- Actors : Jessica Raine, Stephen McGann, Miranda Hart, Jenny Agutter, Pam Ferris
- Subtitles: : English
- Studio : BBC Home Entertainment
- ASIN : B0093I913W
- Number of discs : 2
- Best Sellers Rank: #25,306 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
- #4,153 in Drama DVDs
- Customer Reviews:
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The plots deal with many real life issues, terrible living conditions, the forgotten poor and elderly, babies taken from their mothers for adoption without consent or care for the mother or the child, but most affecting of all is the Workhouse. An institution I thought was finished in Dicken's time but that in fact covers almost six hundred years of history. In the most affecting story, the cleaner for the nunnery and her brother were taken to the workhouse when the brother was seven and the sister was barely a toddler. There they were separated. The brother grew up and was released but refused to stop looking for his sister and once he found her, working until he could pay for her release. The two lived together for the rest of their lives, but Frank, is now diagnosed with cancer. How can these two possibly live without each other? Their happiness in each other and in simple pleasures along with the way the workhouse broke them of the ability to have a normal life will affect anyone with a heart.
Call the Midwife doesn't lecture, but I had to look up the history of the Workhouse and found that some form of Workhouse as punishment for the poor was extant in England from 1388 as a response to the depredations of the Black Death until 1948. Yes, you read that right, the Workhouse in England is still within living memory. That should sober us here in America when we are considering doing away with programs that help the poor and where our attitude has become punitive. Surely we can find a way to do better with many things in life, but punishing the disadvantaged can't be right for anyone. A look at the results shows that.
Perhaps because they are drawn from life, the characters are all amazingly well drawn. The young midwives each have a distinct personality, perhaps most memorably, the overly large, clumsy aristocrat who has fled her family's disappointment in her physical failings, called Chummy. Nor is this a saccharine call to be a good person. The people in these stories are good in the way that people actually are good in that they struggle with their faults, their prejudices and the stresses of the day to try and be kind to one another. When they manage this, as when we do, it is a triumph and that is why this is inspiring. The nuns aren't cut out religious, they are real women who have given their lives to their beliefs and who do better some days than others.
I cannot say enough about this wonderful series. I really did find it a soul stirring inspiration.
One of those understated shows which has so much character and care - you will be a better person for watching this.
Top reviews from other countries
Und doch hat mich bei der Durchsicht der Angebotsseiten von Amazon etwas dazu gebracht, mir diese BBC-Serie näher anzuschauen und sie schließlich auch zu bestellen.
Nun, am heutigen Sonntag, kurz vor Mitternacht - meine Frau schläft schon - haben wir bereits die erste Staffel komplett gesehen, und ich bin gerade dabei, diese Rezension zu verfassen. Die anfängliche Skepsis bei meiner Frau und meine Befürchtung, es könnte sich eventuell um einen Fehlkauf handeln, sind großer Begeisterung gewichen, denn
- endlich einmal keines der üblichen Klischees,
- keine unglaubwürdigen Protagonisten,
- kein Gut-Böse-Schema,
- keine vorurteilsbehafteten Handlungsstränge,
- kein High-Society-Gedöns,
...
sondern stimmige Umgebung in glaubhafter geschichtlicher Einordnung mit mitreißenden, bewegenden Geschichten mit vielleicht manchmal etwas zu weichgespülten Handelnden, die trotzdem sehr menschlich und liebenswert sind.
Und es gibt zum Glück kein oft unvermeidliches, tragisches Ende und keinen der fast schon Mode gewordenen Cliffhanger.
Natürlich fallen mir da und dort Dinge auf, die mich etwas stören, etwa wenn es eisig kalt sein soll, aber bei niemandem kondensiert der Atem.
Dennoch, Call the Midwife - Ruf des Lebens ist herzerwärmend anders, aufrichtig und im positiven Sinne zutiefst menschlich, ohne ins Banale abzugleiten.
Para los que queráis profundizar un poco más, la serie está basada en los libros autobiográficos que escribió Jennifer Worth (Jenny Lee era su nombre de soltera). Son cuatro títulos: Call the Midwife, Shadows of the Workhouse, Farewell to the East End y In the Midst of Life. Todos sin publicar en castellano, una pena.