Call the Midwife creator Heidi Thomas says she initially thought "No" when she was approached with Jennifer Worth's memoirs, on which the series is based.
Thomas was looking for a new project following her success with the Judi Dench drama Cranford, which she'd adapted from Elizabeth Gaskell's work.
However, she told the Inspiring Doctors podcast that she was initially turned off by the book's cover and thus the series might never have happened.
"Post-Cranford, I was really looking for another literary adaptation to do because I love Victorian literature and I was approached with Jennifer Worth's memoirs, and I took one look at the cover which had scruffy urchins on it and said, 'No, I'm looking for Victorian literature'."
But luckily Heidi didn't fall into the trap of simply judging a book by its cover and read on...
"I read 17 pages of that memoir and I realized that what I really wanted to do was another medical drama [Cranford had medical elements]. There was a brilliant, visceral description of a woman giving birth in unmedicated circumstances in about 1957 to her fourth baby, so no complications were expected, and none occurred.
"But I just loved what the book had to say about the role of the medical caregiver and how the big physical events of our lives, be they medical — even crisis-related, such as the need for surgery or a big accident — or something natural and potentially perfectly straightforward, such as childbirth, really shape our lives and our sense of ourselves. And I think between Cranford and Call the Midwife, I found my niche, if you will, or possibly my life's calling, as a writer of medical drama."
Heidi Thomas went on to discuss how she approached turning Jennifer Worth's memoirs into a series that had dramatic merit whilst still honoring the spirit of the original books.
"For me, the challenge was to honour the spirit and the passion and if you like, the purity of Jennifer's memories, but turning them into something that had dramatic rigor, and also a degree of scientific rigor that I've worked on and hopefully continue to burnish to the present day", she explained.
The series is due to return this festive season for the Call the Midwife Christmas Special 2023. If you need to catch up on any episodes so far, you can stream Call the Midwife on BBC iPlayer and on Netflix in the US.
