Call the Midwife is a British period dramatelevision series based on the best-selling memoirs of former nurse Jennifer Worth, who died shortly before the first episode was broadcast. It is set in the late 1950s and early to mid-1960s and for the first three series centred primarily on Jenny Lee, who, in the first episode, begins a new job as a midwife at a nursing convent in the deprived Poplar district of east London. The programme's ensemble cast has also included Jenny Agutter, Pam Ferris, Judy Parfitt and Laura Main as nuns living at the convent, and Miranda Hart, Helen George, Bryony Hannah, Charlotte Ritchie and Emerald Fennell as other midwives. Vanessa Redgrave delivers framing voiceovers in the role of "mature Jenny", and continues to do so even after the younger version of the character was written out of the series. The idea of adapting Worth's books for television was initially dismissed by the BBC, but revived after Danny Cohen took over the post of Controller of BBC One. A full series was commissioned in 2011 and writer Heidi Thomas adapted Worth's books for the screen. The first episode was broadcast on 15 January 2012 and the initial series of six episodes drew positive reviews and large viewing figures, said by the BBC to be the highest audiences achieved by a new drama series on BBC One since the corporation's current method of measuring audiences began in 2001. Following the second episode, the BBC announced that a second series, expanded from six to eight episodes, had been commissioned. In September 2012 the programme won the BestNew Drama award and Hart was named Best Actress at the TV Choice Awards. The second series began on 20 January 2013, and during the run BBC Controller for Drama Ben Stephenson announced that he had commissioned a third series to be broadcast in 2014, despite the fact that all the original source material had been exhausted by the end of the second series. The series has also achieved success outside the UK. In the United States, the first series' transmission on PBS in the autumn of 2012 drew an average audience of three million viewers. This figure was 50% higher than the network's overall primetime average audience for the 2011-12 television season. In March 2019, the BBC announced it had commissioned two further series and Christmas specials, through to an eleventh series in 2022, moving the plot from the mid into the late 1960s.
