Call the Midwife uses 60 to 70 newborn babies per season -and here's how they pick them
| Date | 18 June 2021 |
| Published date | 18 June 2021 |
| Publication title | MyLondon (England) |
All this and more was revealed in a Radio Times interview with show producer Ann Tricklebank.
Ann told the entertainment magazine the show would 'always include real babies' instead of using fake replacements, to make the show more authentic with a few rare exceptions, revealed later....
The abundance of real babies on set presents a unique set of challenges for the actors.
"They are real divas,” according to Charlotte Ritchie, aka Nurse Barbara on the show from season four until season seven.
She described how the babies 'cry all the time', adding: “They have 15-minute breaks every 15 minutes and everyone has to be hushed when they turn up! They get everything they want.”
So, how do the real babies on Call the Midwife actually get picked for the show
Well according to Ann, the production team are never short of new parents offering for their newborn to appear in the series.
She told Radio Times: "Lots of eager parents contact us and say, 'We are having a baby, would you like it on the show'"
For the first series, the team asked midwives at a maternity unit if they knew any women who would be happy to bring babies to the set.
But by series two, regulations had tightened -and since then the show has sourced most of their babies through a specialist talent agency.
"The reality is that we need our newborns at very specific times due to the filming schedule," explained Ann.
She added: "We use babies up to about eight weeks old, and sometimes we have special demands, for example with regard to ethnicity.
"Or perhaps if we're covering a premature birth, we will need a tiny baby."
Ann explained how they have had to find ways around shooting 'difficult births', even casting newborn twins, "who can give us twice as much time filming on camera."
She said they are unable to use the babies of people who write in, "because the baby has to tie into the shooting schedule, not the other way round."
Ann lamented the incredibly complicated process of filming a birth, describing how one baby being born on screen will take 'at least five hours' to shoot.
Seeing as the actor playing the mother often won't have had a baby herself, Ann said they frequently have to rehearse what the actual experience of childbirth is like with a midwifery adviser -and it varies depending on whether the birth is at home, at a hospital, or in the back of a car -yikes!
She...
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