(upbeat music) - What does it mean to be going into the 1970s?

Well, the shirts are getting a bit more jazzy.

(laughs) The collars are getting longer, the flares are getting wider, and social history is changing.

- Well your coffee, Dr. Turner.

I'm afraid it's from the percolator.

(upbeat music continues) - Mm.

(cup clanking) - Yeah, we're in the '70s now.

And you do see it in the shop windows, and you see it with the people walking past in the streets, and the cars that are going past.

It's changing.

Things are becoming more modern.

- You know what you could use in here?

- Vending machines.

- My own business.

Pop a coin in, out comes tea, coffee, hot chocolate, with milk, without sugar, whatever you like, push of a button.

- The '70s doesn't seem so far away, but of course it is.

It's moved forward as a series in exactly the same pace as we've moved forward.

So you're still going back the same amount of years, but those same amount of years were 1957 once.

They're 1970 now.

- The '70s were really when it went mental.

So fashion was crazy.

Big flares getting in, caught up in your chain of your bike and falling off.

And what's brilliant about this show is the art department that capture all of that.

You see it going past in the background.

You go, oh my God, yeah, I remember that.

Look at that, you know.

- I know for my character, Miss.

Higgins, there's a general feeling of not quite so buttoned up, more relaxed feel.

She still has her hat on, of course.

But I think, you know, it's a more relaxed look, and also a more relaxed behavior.

And I think even with Dr. Turner, I'm conscious there is just more of an open relationship with them in terms of how they converse.

- If you're looking for the pasty you left on the side, it has been removed to the refrigerator.

- Our costume and art departments are so amazing that now we're in the 1970s, you can definitely see, it's very subtle, but there's a shift in, we're starting to see a widening of the bottoms of trousers.

And I think there's a difference in attitude that will come through as well, as the '70s come.

- I spoke to Stella, the the head of makeup, and I said, "Can I like grow out my sideburns a bit?"

She said, "Oh yeah, go on, let's thicken them up."

So, it's taken a while.

It's like most of the season (laughs) to get my sideburns a little bit thick, I don't know.

- Hoping that we can get more and more bangs going on.

That'd be, that'd be great.

- Lacquer, if he takes on that first wheel, it's going to be windy.

- Automatically, to me, there's something that feels very different about the '60s and the '70s.

And for the Poplar community it's seeing more wealth, seeing more growth.

In the '70s there seemed like there was a lot of things to deal with.

People expected more.

You had the strikes, you had the difficulties.

There were lots of problems in the '70s, which were to do with a kind of uncomfortable change, I think, that was happening to society.

- A new world, a new age.

That the housing has come on so much now.

A lot of what we do films in high-rise blocks now, and it's new builds of places, new kinds of council housing.

But that only creates different problems.

And some of the oldest evils are still there.

Infectious disease doesn't care how modern your flat is.

It will still get you the same way if you're not careful.

- And we're moving away from home births to more medicalized births as well.

So the role of the midwife within the community is shifting.

- The '70s was getting very modern.

Modern was a big buzzword.

The NHS, it was as powerful as it would ever be.

It was this enormous monolith that would take everything.

So back to the series, Nonnatus House is becoming an ever smaller and more sort of strange corner part of a very large piece of big health.

And there's this sense of the nurses, and the nuns, and the doctors still working the same way.

They're still important, they're still needed.

But it's becoming just a little bit more difficult to maintain.

- There have been surveys of this and studies of that ever since the National Health kicked off.

But this is going to be teaching us things for 80 years.

(gentle music)