Call The Midwife most-watched drama in over a decade

BBC show's season finale drew more than 9m viewers.

By Andrew McIntyre Published 21 February 2012

The season finale of Call The Midwife, pushed back half an hour to 8:30pm, pulled in a record 9.2m viewers Sunday night, making its first season the most-watched new drama series on BBC One in over a decade, the broadcaster said Monday.

With two 9m rating evenings in February -- 9m tuned in 5 February -- the show ended its first season with an average of 8.7m viewers per episode, a record under the current measurement system, dating to 2001.

Call The Midwife was well above 1930's drama Upstairs Downstairs in ratings Sunday, with the latter drawing 6.5m viewers.

BBC One controller Danny Cohen said, in a statement:

Heidi Thomas and Neal Street have brought a new kind of grit and risk to period drama. It's been wonderful to see viewers respond so warmly -- and in such large numbers -- to this world of babies, nuns, and extraordinary women.

In Sunday's season finale, midwife Camilla Cholomondely-Browne, known on the show as Chummy and played by Miranda Hart, married despite disapproval from her mother.

The 1950's drama based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth will return to BBC One's Sunday night line-up for a second season.

Read Rachel Cooke's New Statesman review of Call The Midwife here

Special Offer: Get 12 issues of New Statesman magazine for just £12

View the discussion thread.

1 comment

Wed, 2012-06-13 15:12 — Andrew Chapman (not verified)

This is quite a good article. Many new questions emerge to the surface, all you need do is to read further information about the issues. Only then one can form a final view on a particular subject. Otherwise everything is seen only in the dimension of how to cum more black and white. The natural logic of pr agentura evaluating things before catering they were properly cognitively processed is a horrible mistake, made by those less intelligent. People should not throw away their common ubytovanie na slovensku sense easily. Anything and everything deserves appropriate time for making judgements.