"I don't want nutters from Downton Abbey helping with my birth!"
IN THIS ONE... The Doctor Who/Call the Midwife crossover.
REVIEW: Well! You really need to have seen at least one episode of Call the Midwife to find this enjoyable. You still get the jokes because they put big red noses on them - it's all the characters blatantly breaking the fourth wall and talking about their show's clichés, or else their 1950s attitudes clashing with the very contemporary couple giving birth in a modern hospital - but aside from getting a certain joy from seeing Jessica Raine (Hide, Verity Lambert in An Adventure in Time and Space, and playing opposite Capaldi in The Devil's Hour), Miranda Hart (Hyperdrive) and Jenny Agutter (Logan's Run, An American Werewolf in London, I don't need to be telling you this), I just couldn't connect to something I've never watched. It also parodies the Channel 4 documentary series One Born Every Minute, so it all must be pretty dissimilar to the original drama.
It's certainly not very similar to Doctor Who, I'll tell you that. Eventually, the harried couple calls for a doctor and Matt Smith shows up, though it's entirely clear his parts weren't shot on the same day and he never interacted with the rest of the cast. Shows up in the last minute, rattles off a bunch of Doctor Who key words, makes a rude gesture at one of the nuns, and drops the punchline, which I absolutely do not get because I'm not up on British pop from the 2010s. Even looking it up, I still think it's lame.
THEORIES: Canonicity is between weak and zero here. At first, I thought, well if Doctor Who can co-exist with Eastenders, why not Call the Midwife? But everyone is doing such BROAD comedy that it can't possibly have happened, unless the Doctor perhaps got lost in the Land of Fiction, caused some kind of domino effect that made these characters self-aware (they do ask him to return them to their era at the end), but the dialog doesn't bear any of this out. I've included the sketch here, but I'm bending my own rules.
REWATCHABILITY: Low - Maybe this was funny to Call the Midwife fans, but it's a big maybe. It's certainly not funny to Doctor Who fans.
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