It’s back to a chilly winter for the Call the Midwife ladies, after last year’s trip to sunny South Africa.
And not just any winter, either. The winter of 1962 was one of the coldest on record in the U.K., so cold in fact it was dubbed the Big Freeze, with blizzards forming 20-ft high snow drifts in some places, and lakes and rivers freezing over as temperatures plummeted.
Enter the redoubtable nurses and nuns of Nonnatus House, who are unlikely to let a few snowflakes get in the way of doing their rounds.
We had a first look at the special when it premiered during the Children in Need charity drive televised in the U.K. on Friday (November 17), as the midwives celebrate Christmas with stockings, a crackling fire, and plenty of snow:
The special will pick up after Tom (Jack Ashton) and Barbara’s (Charlotte Ritchie) wedding in season six, and swing us into 1963 and the series’ seventh season, the first of a three-season deal that will keep the show on air until at least 2020.
And with the changing seasons, there will also be some new faces in Poplar, East London. Black Mirror‘s Leonie Elliott will play Nurse Lucille Anderson, a newly trained midwife and the show’s first regular black character.
According to Digital Spy, creator Heidi Thomas, who has just written a new adaptation of Little Women, had this to say about the new role:
“[My research] has made me very aware of the contributions made by West Indian and Caribbean nurses to the NHS [National Health Service] in the early 1960s,” she explained. “She’s going to bring stories with her, and a different cultural point of view, and that’s very exciting.”
It is indeed. And then there’s Sister Monica Joan (Judy Parfitt), Nurse Crane (Linda Bassett), and Trixie (Helen George) to catch up with, not to mention her love interest, the dentist Christopher (Jack Hawkins).
The Call the Midwife Holiday Special will air on PBS in late 2017, followed by season seven in spring 2018.
Are you in the holiday mood yet?