Call the Midwife, Christmas special, review Unlike the distinctively unseasonal Downton Abbey, this year's Call the Midwife Christmas special embraced the festive spirit with the ardour of a long-lost lover. "At Christmas we like to see things in their proper place," intoned Vanessa Redgrave in the show's opening homily. We like the right faces around the table, the right carols to be sung, the promise that this is how it is and will always be. Because that's what Christmas is - the one still point in a world forever turning. For those nodding in agreement through a haze of post-plum pudding torpor, what followed was a warm enfolding tide running in to cover any number of dramatic bases. There was nativity, death and marriage. There was humour, medical emergencies and strong nods to Christianity and social history. There was jeopardy, terror, redemption and love. Lots of the latter but no sex, of course, for as we know that wasn't invented until the Sixties. There was even an entertaining cameo by Sandi Toksvig as a grumpy ward nurse. The jeopardy came in the form of a ticking wartime German bomb unearthed during building works in Poplar on Christmas Eve, requiring residents to evacuate their homes and seek shelter for the night in the safety of a local hall. There the nuns and midwives of Nonnatus House, led by Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter) and Jenny Lee (Jessica Raine), awaited them with blankets, biscuits and bucketfuls of saintly concern, stepping up as ever in their community's time of need. Almost as many subplots and storylines milled about as people. The principal ones involved an outbreak of polio, a traumatised war veteran's emotional rebirth, and the efforts of former Sister Bernadette (Laura Main) to break through a wall of guilt over her impending wedding - to scrummy Dr Turner (Stephen McGann) - and reconcile herself with her former sisters in the convent. Inevitably the melange of nuns, nativity, sick children and happy-ever-after wedding days drifted towards mawkishness at times. But series creator Heidi Thomas kept her script mostly on the right side of the line to deliver a stirring, soft-centred story that celebrated the power of love, laughter and the gentler side of human nature in a suitably cynicism-free parcel of festive fare. In terms of soppy Yuletide bang for your buck, this was drama that delivered.