We’ve featured British comics that appeared on the BBC’s poor-people-having-babies-in-mid-1900s-London drama Call the Midwife a couple of times (here and here), but with the show still going, I’m still watching just in case more comics turn up. And guess what? The latest episode (the second of series 13) features four comics lurking in the background under the guise of “set-dressing.” Series 13 is chiefly set in 1969, so I don’t expect it to be too hard to pin down the individual issues…
The first three comics appear on the shelves in the Buckles’ newsagents, and for a change they’re not all DC Thomson titles…
Tiger was a sports-themed comic from Amalgamated Press / Fleetway / IPC that ran for an impressive 1554 issues from 11 Sep 1954 to 30 Mar 1985, absorbing The Champion (1922), Comet (1952), Hurricane, Jag, Scorcher, and Speed before it was consumed by the 1980s version of Eagle — see the Eagle Timeline for more details than you can shake a stick at, or would want to.
We don’t get a decent look at the whole cover of the issue of Tiger & Jag in this episode of Jack London’s Call of the Midwife, so the image above has been masterfully reconstructed from two separate glimpses. It was easy enough to identify because there’s not a huge number of British comics covers that feature people getting kicked in the head by a horse.
So that’s Tiger and Jag cover-dated 17 May 1969 (issue 760, although the comic rarely featured issue-numbers on the cover). This puts the episode right in the middle of summer 1969, only a couple of months away from the first moon-landings (which I expect will be referenced in an up-coming B-plot, and I’m gonna make a bet here and now that Sister Monica Joan will go a bit loopy because of it, and we’ll see a few “Man Walks on Moon” newspaper headlines and a bunch of young boys in short trousers and tank-tops running around pretending to be astronauts, with a strong likelihood that there’ll be a street party for the kids and nervy Sheila Turner fretting about making appropriate costumes for her countless children).
The next two comics are also from IPC/Fleetway and are of the nursery-age variety, and thus generally less well documented on-line…
Teddy Bear ran from 21 Sep 1963 to 15 Sep 1973 for 520 issues before it was absorbed into Jack and Jill, while Bobo Bunny ran from 22 Mar 1969 to 27 Jan 1973 for 201 issues, absorbing Esmeralda along the way, before falling to the sword of Hey Diddle Diddle.
Teddy Bear, cover-dated 22 Mar 1969… So something’s amiss here, because that comic is like eight weeks older than the issue of Tiger and Jag that appears above. So either the Buckles are very lax about renewing the stock (“Shouldn’t we get some new issues of Teddy Bear comic in, Fred?” “But we’ve not sold that lot yet, Vi!”), or Fred has access to a time-machine and is nabbing comics from the future, in which case perhaps he’d be so kind as to donate some of their old stock to me, thanks.
So is this episode Who You Gonna Call? The Midwife! supposed to be set in March or May 1969? Let’s check out that issue of Bobo Bunny: maybe we can find some answers there!
Well, as it happens that’s issue #2 of Bobo Bunny, dated 29 Mar 1969, only a week after the issue of Teddy Bear. Given that a season of the show generally spans a year, episode 2 is gonna be set pretty early in the year, so I’m assuming that it’s more likely to be March than May, in which case the copy of Tiger and Jag is an anomaly, and that suggests that my time-machine theory isn’t so far-fetched after all.
But there’s still one more comic to go in this episode… And, again, it’s an IPC title: a copy of Lion that appears prominently on a streetside news-stand:
Lion ran from 23 Feb 1952 to 18 May 1974, for 1156 issues, absorbing Sun, the original Eagle, Champion, and Thunder, before it was consumed by Valiant.
But… what’s this? The news-stand selling person is even laxer than those fickle Buckles at replenishing the stock, because the issues of Lion they’re trying to flog…
… are cover-dated 4 May 1968. That’s, like, a year out of date!
In fact, that date is the very day that the classic Doctor Who serial The Wheel in Space broadcast its second episode… One of the infamous missing episodes, as well you might know! Doctor Who and Call the Midwife are intricately connected: Midwife‘s initial lead character was played by Jessica Raine who went on to play Doctor Who‘s original producer Verity Lambert in An Adventure in Space and Time, Sister Monica Joan made a big thing about watching the brand-new show back in series 7 which was set in 1963, and Doctor Turner is played by Stephen McGann, actual real-life brother of the eighth Doctor Paul McGann.*
So I think it’s only fair that when Fred Buckle has finished mucking around in his time-machine and pilfering comics from the future that he comes here to 2024 and takes me back to that date so I can record the episode and it’ll no longer be missing. You’re welcome, Doctor Who fans!
* Yes, Pádraig: I do know that your beloved Charlotte Ritchie appeared in both Doctor Who and Call the Midwife, but if I were to list every connection I’d be here all day!
Rusty Staples 