I Am The Controversial Bed From Call The Midwife

I am the controversial bed from Call The Midwife.

I serve multiple purposes. Initially, I offer a frisson of scandal: yes, two opposite-sex siblings share this little pre-fab house, and yes, there is just one of me, so...yep. You got it in one. Sure, Peggy (Elizabeth Rider) and Frank (Sean Baker) are too old now for there to remain any fear of misbegotten children coming into this union (despite the main thrust of the series in which our story appears), but still, brothers and sisters sleeping together is taboo, so everything about our storyline is pretty risqué for a prestigious British show that's set in the '50s and airs in the "family hour" on PBS.

But then, as the episode progresses, I shame you for your prurient reaction. I become the impetus for a discussion about Victorian workhouses and how their brutality affected families. If Frank and Peggy entered the workhouse as children and were separated through their formative years, then are they brother and sister anymore, really? Doesn't theirs become an inspiring example of devotion rather than a grubby tale of incest?

And anyway, did they even commit incest? Sure, after Frank dies, Peggy says that the two of them were more than a brother and sister, more than a husband and wife, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they Did It, and the show is very coy about exactly what went on in me over the siblings' happy years together. "Maybe they just liked to be close," you're left thinking by the end. "It could have just been innocent snuggling, like Marianne and Elinor Dashwood in Sense And Sensibility."

Of course, I know exactly what they got up to, but I'm not saying. If the show wants to have it both ways by raising the question of aberrant sexual behaviour and then scolding the show's own characters (and, by extension, the audience) for being curious about it, then who am I to help you make a ruling either way?

That said, the "God Is Love" sampler above me is a bit on-the-nose, right? Geez, Peggy.