The show turned from the usual Sunday night period travails of the upper classes to chronicle a primarily working-class community living in overcrowded tenements, where children played in bombsites and washing was strung across the streets. However, the community was presented through the eyes of the middle-class midwives, with new arrival Jenny as our protagonist. This world was also served with lashings of sentimentality, the odd quirky nun and comedy pratfalls off bicycles (utilising the comedic skills of sitcom star Miranda Hart as the bumbling, frightfully posh Chummy). This is 1950s poverty spit-shined and filtered through a warm golden glow – even a Catholic home for unwed mothers is all white light and a kindly priest (until they wrench the baby from its hysterical teen prostitute mother). There is abrasiveness alongside the comforting nostalgia – brawls on the street, unwed mothers, rotting housing, deaths in childbirth. But the midwives are our focus, the births and mothers come and go. As Willa Paskin at Salon noted, this is a medical procedural; we deal with the dangerous birth of the week, the midwives move on. But this is also part of its pleasure – these are young women with careers, occasionally saving lives, not sitting around in drawing rooms waiting for someone to marry them.

But why didn’t Call the Midwife’s British success translate to PBS? Though it had solid critical praise, particularly for Hart, the lack of twitter buzz was marked after its decent 1.5 million premiere. I’d like to make a few suggestions, the first being politics. US critics seemed uncomfortable with its depiction of the NHS – Mo Ryan suggested it ‘strays into almost comical propaganda now and then’, whilst the New York Times felt ‘at times the series sounds like a public service ad, extolling the benefits of the system’. Interestingly, Bitch magazine used Midwife as a framework to talk through public health issues in the run up to the election (‘What Nuns Know about Reproductive Justice’ is perhaps my favourite headline about the series).

For all of Mdiwife’s tendency to marginalise the working-class point of view, this is a progressive history demonstrating the gains made by ‘socialised medicine’, to use the menacing US term. So is there a certain degree of distance, is not a collective history easily transferred for US audiences? (Perhaps its soft-focus post-war urban community also fits awkwardly with the nostalgic US national imaginary of the 1950s as a middle-class small town?). It is useful here to bring Downton Abbey back into the mix, and whisper that maybe America just prefers its British period drama conservative? For all its lip service to progressive stories, Downton maintains a strong conservative ideology and belief in the class system. It may well chronicle the (relatively cushy) lives of Downton’s staff, but for its writer Julian Fellowes (married to a duchess, recently made a Lord by the Conservative government, for whom he is a high profile donor) a good, sympathetic working-class person is one who is quiet, loyal and knows their place.

 In addition, the urban setting of Call the Midwife cannot compete with Downton’s display of British heritage in a series of dully-composed wide shots (when in doubt, cut to a shot of the house) made possible by co-funding from NBC Universal. I’d also suggest that Call the Midwife lacks the romantic melodrama of Downton – Jennie is a touch dull compared to Lady Mary’s repressed yearnings. Yes, melodrama, as underneath its surface veneer of ‘quality,’ Downton is popular, soapy entertainment from the UK’s biggest commercial broadcaster, where it sits next to X-Factor (though Fellowes could learn a lot about dialogue, serial storytelling and trusting your audience from the UK soap operas). At heart it is Gainsborough rather than Austen, with the Guardian episode blog awarding the ‘Golden eyebrow award’ for the week’s best aghast reaction shots. In Midwife the melodrama is focused around the births and deaths, rather than the interpersonal storytelling (though Chummy’s tentative romance is a delight). Whilst it offers a more skilled televisual storyteller in Heidi Thomas, Midwife lacks Downton’s heightened, messy, soap opera and sumptuous celebration of aristocracy. Poverty, sweat and tears kind of harsh the buzz, no matter how prettily it’s turned out.

Series 2 sees 91 high-definition cameras fixed throughout the Accident and Emergency ward at London’s Kings College Hospital each episode chronicles a single day in one of the UK’s biggest trauma center. Able to turn and zoom in any direction, these cameras are controlled by remote control from a mobile gallery parked outside. 168 production team members filmed for a month, accumulating 7600 hours of footage, to produce 14 episodes. It is a mammoth technological undertaking, illustrating how Channel 4 likes to do things big – it’s a public service broadcaster, but one funded through adverts, so it has to reel its audience in.

Each episode of 24hrs in A&E (which airs in the US on BBCAmerica) assembles a series of central stories and surrounding vignettes. We have victims of road traffic accidents, gang stabbings and massive strokes. But we also have the little old lady who fell out of bed, or the man who left in that splinter way too long. It’s often a masterpiece of storytelling, confronting us first with the injury and the team’s attempts to treat and diagnose before slowly building up the picture of the patient and what happened through retrospective interviews with friends, families and medical staff. It illustrates Channel 4’s public service remit in action, working as a flagship ‘state of the nation‘ documentary, and a chronicle of multicultural Britain through its patients and staff. Yet at the same time it demonstrates technological innovation through its filming processes.

In recent years Channel 4 has built a stable of these fixed-camera documentaries, chronicling daily life in model agencies, hotels, maternity wards and high schools (and even a houseshare of dwarves during panto season). The form debuted with The Family in 2008, where Paul Watson’s groundbreaking 1974 BBC documentary serial was updated for the Big Brother age. The observational camera crew were absented in favor of 40 fixed cameras fitted around the Hughes family home, with a live gallery in the house next door, filming for 100 days to build up a picture of ‘everyday’ family life. Creatives and executives were careful to highlight the program’s ‘normality’ in contrast to the pictures of dysfunction and conflict painted by previous Channel 4 hits Wife Swap and Supernanny. This was serious, 9pm, ‘event’ documentary. Its title suggested universality – ‘The’ family – a chronicle of the institution, featuring white, British-Asian and British-Nigerian families. Building on Channel 4’s remit to ‘appeal to the tastes and interests of a culturally diverse society’, the programme established the fixed-camera format as a distinctive (another remit buzzword) feature of a new era of Channel 4 observational documentary.

The Family’s success helped signal a way forward in the imminent post-Big Brother era, with Channel 4’s defining reality TV series slowly limping towards its cancellation in 2010 (since revived by channel Five). These fixed-camera documentaries utilized Big Brother’s surveillance technology to present a new spin on the classical ‘fly-on-the-wall’ style. By making its camerapersons invisible, the documentaries attempt to reduce the observational documentary paradox, with their around-the-clock filming and all-seeing cameras bringing connotations of directness, immediacy and transparency.

You can see the value for Channel 4: a standardised format, deployed across a range of subjects, producing a string of new programming, for a limited development spend. The accumulation of vast tranches of footage allowing relatively lengthy runs compared to a single-authored documentary series or one-offs. From One Born Every Minute to The Hotel to Educating Essex – they all unfold the same way. A fast-paced opening montage introduces the concept and location, foregrounding the technology and the breadth, yet intimacy it allows. Highlighting the combination of the spectacular and the mundane that will unfold. Then they settle down to tell 2 or 3 main stories through observational footage and contextualizing interviews from participants. You could set your watch by them. As with any success story, this boom tipped over into a glut of fixed-cam documentaries chronicling the emergency services at the beginning of the year, leading to grumblings from the press.

However, as I noted, these programmes have particular value for Channel 4’s public service remit, though they are distinct from the majority of the channel’s socially-focused factual programming. The channel has a tendency towards livening up complex political issues within a challenge format, which offer more than a hint of neoliberalism – the need to ‘provide access to material that is intended to inspire people to make changes in their lives’ is literally written into the channel’s remit. Series like Benefit Busters or Fairy Jobmother, with their tough love and use of NLP strategies on the long-term unemployed, seem to come straight out of a government press release. Whilst Secret Millionaire and its search for the ‘deserving poor’ and community volunteers to hand a cheque to (whilst going on weeping personal ‘journey’) is a virtual blue print for Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ – someone will surely step in to provide these public services we’re cutting.

In contrast – perhaps because the technology provides the high concept – the medical (and school-based) fixed-cam documentaries step back and let us view the daily work of the public services. Of course there’s the hand of a master storyteller behind this, shaping those thousands of hours of footage into linear stories and perfect moving moments. But whilst the programme depicts the cost of timewasters and drunks, the long waiting times, and the struggle to provide care, this is soft political advocacy. A heart-rending personal story (nearly always) wrapped up in a warm hug. All this technology allowing television its small-scale intimacies, and the NHS its moments of grace.

Misfits‘ industrial context is key to understanding some of the issues Anne addresses. It’s shown on E4, a free-to-air sister channel to terrestrial broadcaster Channel 4.  Targeted at a youth demographic, it primarily showcases US Teen TV alongside Friends reruns and reality formats. E4’s distinct brand identity feeds off Channel 4’s status as the younger, edgier terrestrial channel, with a reputation for quality UK drama and US imports.  Alongside ensemble teen drama Skins and teen boy sitcom The Inbetweeners (whose remake is currently at pilot stage with MTV), Misfits demonstrates a successful shift in recent years to E4 commissioning original British programming.  It’s a niche channel, but it makes a lot of noise. Ratings for The Inbetweeners third season beat out programming on terrestrial channels, Skins has won an audience award BAFTA (the UK Emmys) and last year Misfits won the BAFTA for drama series to gasps of surprise and delighted cheers.

E4’s brand identity is key to the tone that Anne notes in Misfits.  It’s a bit cheeky, a bit snarky, it prides itself in not taking things too seriously.  The ironic tone of E4’s continuity announcers and promotions – particularly of its US imports – presents its programming through a framework of peculiarly bombastic phrasing (“chuffing”, “ruddy hell”, “telly box”) and light mockery.  This allows US Teen TV’s glamorous melodramas to retain their escapist emotional pleasures, yet reframes them within the channel’s pose of ironic detachment in order to assimilate them into E4’s ‘insincere’ British youth TV flow.

It’s British shows operate by drawing from yet distinguishing themselves against US Teen TV.  Their combination of excess and the everyday, surrealism and reality, is drawn from British television’s legacy of social realism and anarchic comedy. This is set against the escapist pleasures, gloss, melodrama (and perhaps underlying conservative ideologies) of shows like 90210, Glee and One Tree Hill, the contrasts serve the UK shows’ poses of authenticity (Look how casually we do drugs! Watch us walk around in our dorky knickers!).  Whilst US Teen TV can happily air in daytime slots, E4’s British youth TV usually airs at 10pm (though later when transferred to Channel 4), enabling the language and depictions of sexuality that Anne notes.

I think that Misfits gets away with its content because it is nearly always framed as blackly comedic, through its play with representations and its witty dialogue, together with the suspension of disbelief that its genre elements bring.  It somehow manages to be sincere and snarky all at once, and we care oh so much about these characters.  Partly, this is creator and writer Howard Overman’s distinctive dialogue and tone, which he is finding difficult to transfer to the more generic arena of BBC quirky detective series with recent misfires Vexed and an adaptation of Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently.  Partly it is the excellent performances from virtual unknowns (though with major roles in Spring Awakenings and Channel 4’s Red Riding amongst them) and the chemistry of the group, who hate each other but secretly might care a tiny bit.

Nathan may be rude and lewd, perpetually self-aggrandising (to the others disgust), but Robert Sheehan is so effortlessly charismatic, you would follow him anywhere.  Kelly may be a ‘Chav’ – a role Lauren Socca has fine tuned in social realist dramas The Unloved and Five Daughters – but Socca makes the frustrations behind the tough mouth clear, and hilarious. Compounded by her power to hear others thoughts – and what they think of her, a person society brands and dismisses – Kelly is kind of caring, kind of smart but still an unrepentant gobby cow. Though compared to the boys’ powers (Invisibility! Rewinding time!) the girls have kind of a rough deal – don’t even get me started on the punishment of the sexualised young woman by giving her a power that basically amounts to fighting off rape when touched. 

Anne’s difficulty with placing both the location, the langauge and the context is interesting, as what is universal here becomes very culturally specific when consumed abroad.  This cultural discount is arguably what is driving US remakes, in preference to imports.  (I’m interested in the channel brand identity mash-up that will occur with MTV’s remaking of E4’s British Teen TV in service of their own push for ‘authenticity‘). Misfits is often tagged ‘ASBO superheroes’, and the orange jumpsuits of community service make a handy uniform for our reluctant gang, more likely to accidentally kill someone than save them.  ASBO (Anti-Social Behavioral Order), like Chav, is a very British bit of slang to derogatorily mark a character as part of the undesirable underclass.  The pleasure of Misfits is its presentation of our outcasts, the apathetic can’t be bothered generation, suddenly handed great power and responsibility and generally, just messing it up. How very British.