Where do babies come from? Not babies in general – I mean the newborns featured on Call the Midwife.
Two or three births happen in every episode and the actors playing the parents and the midwives are shown cuddling newborns. The babies are real, live infants*, not dolls wrapped in swaddling blankets.
The babies shown appear to be only a few days old. Where does the casting director find them? I know that there are talent and modeling agencies that carry slightly older babies and toddlers on their books but the infants on CtW are tiny. It seems impossible that even the most ambitious stage mothers would manage to get headshots taken and their offspring registered with an agency before the child is a week old.
Does the casting director send leaflets out to obstetricians and birthing centers saying things like: “Casting call for infant, either sex, of Pakistani ethnicity, twins welcome. Must have been born between 1st and 10th March of this year. Please contact … etc.” How are these tiny performers located and hired?
*The only time I recall an effigy of an infant being used instead of a real baby was in an episode about the thalidomide tragedy, when an animatronic puppet of a deformed infant was used.
I’ve had the same thoughts watching that series. They’re definitely real newborns, and you hardly ever seen newborns on TV shows; they substitute babies who are several months old most of the time. These cute little munchkins are practically young enough to still have umbilical cords attached.
Have they had an episode about the Thalidomide-related birth defects? If so, the US broadcasts must be behind because the only mention I remember was one in which the doctor’s wife was concerned about a pregnant woman with insomnia, and either the doctor or his wife recommended this great new sleeping pill for pregnant women, called of course Thalidomide.
Dewy and Miss Mapp,
You’re both in the States, right? I don’t know which CtM episodes are currently playing on PBS and the US feed of Netflix because I watch the show on BBC I-Player. The episode about the birth of the profoundly deformed thalidomide baby (played by the animatronic puppet) was first shown on BBC on 7 Feb of this year. It’s Series 5 Episode 4. It’s a difficult episode to watch because Sister Julienne has a very painful choice to make, but the writers handle the subject with sensitivity.
You know, thalidomide is almost topical again. You could say that zika is the new thalidomide.
Miss Mapp, do you have Netflix? Or a friend who has it? Because I’m pretty sure that the US feed of Netflix includes CtM, though I don’t know how many seasons it offers.
Cream cheese and strawberry jam are usually mixed together and smeared on babies to make a fake vernix/blood coating. The strawberry bits make good clots. And it’s perfectly safe to use on newborns, while makeup is either forbidden or just Not Done (depending on local laws.)
I had a micropreemie, and really wanted to get her into acting. She was three months old before she even looked like a newborn. Unfortunately, I was never able to find a legit agency, only the scammers who wanted a bunch of money to “represent” her. Most baby actors are babies of actors, or scriptwriters, or costumers, or production assistants, or other people already in the industry.
It wasn’t approved for sale back then*, but it was widely released for testing. 17 “thalidomide babies” were born in the US.
*It’s since been approved in the US for Multiple Myeloma and Erythema Nodosum Leprosum (which I have to look up the spelling of every time). It carries HUGE black box warnings against use during pregnancy, of course. And you have to go through a special certification course to prescribe or dispense it: http://www.thalomidrems.com/
Yes–that’s where I saw the earlier series. If they’ve got 5 already, they haven’t told me.
I remember seeing a documentary on the BBC ages ago (during my 2000 or 2002 trip to the UK, I think) about other medical uses of thalidomide and how it was actually beneficial for people with certain conditions–but of course they couldn’t possibly give it to someone who was or might become pregnant.
They definitely use some robot/fake babies. I haven’t seen the show, but I read an article not long ago that talked about the episode with the thalidomide baby. Someone (one of the actors?) mentioned that, while the other fake babies were tossed into buckets or carried around by their heads when they weren’t being used, everyone cuddled the thalidomide baby.
I’ve finally seen the Thalidomide baby episode and a couple of others from Series 5. It made me cry, but I did wonder if that could be a robot-baby the whole time. The one at the birth obviously was, but if that was a fake baby for the scenes with the little one wrapped in a blanket or a few of the other shots where the limbs were only glimpsed, then it was a very good fake baby face.
And they should have told the parents much earlier.
Also, maybe it’s just my television, but the umbilical cords on this and the other babies I’ve seen born in the latest episodes look more aqua-green than blue.