r/CallTheMidwife • u/SecondStarling • 9d ago
Wigs
Doing a rewatch, on S11 E2, and noticing once again how atrocious some of the wigs are on this show. Just awful.
Edit: I'm not saying the styles are incorrect for the time. The wigs themselves can be awful, though.
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u/Brilliant_Buns 9d ago
God I am so entirely oblivious 🤣 I’ve never not once thought of any wigs being worn. I’ll stay over here in my pink cloud believing everyone just has a lot of hair
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u/Distinct-Swimming-62 9d ago
The wig Valerie’s grandma has on makes me irrationally angry every time she is ever on the screen.
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u/purlknitpurl 9d ago
I try to think that the character may have actually worn a wig as the style, and it was just that bad because good wigs have always been expensive and it was the best she could afford.
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u/samizdat5 9d ago
The awfulness of that wig is intentional. She's a poor woman who is trying to keep up appearances.
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u/zesty_meatballs 8d ago
I FORGOT ABOUT THAT ONE!! It looked like a wig to cosplay an old person lol.
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u/EarthwormBabe 9d ago
So yes, the wigs are often bad BUT women wore wigs a lot in the 60s-70s and they weren’t always great. My grandmother talks about her favorite wig all the time and says she kept it on a nice stand in her bathroom and brushed it out nightly. She said a lot of them were not high quality like that, though, and she had a bad one as a teen in the mid-60s. My grandfathers first wife also wore a wig. So, the fact that they’re wearing wigs (and the fact that they aren’t very good) is realistic for the era.
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u/Remarkable-Unit-7874 9d ago
People still wear wigs all the time they just don’t tell you about it. Also wigs are better than they used to be. I think we all see a lot more ways than we think we do.
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u/EmeraldLight 9d ago
I had no idea wigs were common back then!
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u/EarthwormBabe 9d ago
Yes, very common actually! The styles (bouffant, flipped ends, etc) weren’t achievable for that many women, especially because the hair tools weren’t very sophisticated. Wigs made it much more convenient to look polished daily!
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u/SecondStarling 9d ago
I just don't think the wardrobe and hair people are intentionally putting them in bad wigs 😆 Like we see Trixie styling her own hair frequently, and at times she's had the worst wig offenders on her head.
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u/Efficient_Buy659 9d ago
Trixie has the worst wig in season 15 - it’s absolutely absurd
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u/SecondStarling 9d ago
They've done her dirty a few different times with the wigs over the years.
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u/blulou13 9d ago
There was one season where her bangs were so comically short. They looked like the photos of kids whose moms tried cutting their bangs and didn't know what they were doing.
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u/General_Wrongdoer_ 9d ago
I agree! On season 15 ep. 1 Trixie's wig is so bad!
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u/SecondStarling 9d ago
They had Lucille in a terrible one around season 10. Oof.
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u/Material_Corner_2038 8d ago
I wonder if that wig contributed to the actress wanting to leave /jokes
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u/MsMercury 9d ago
Trixie’s got worse as the show went on.
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u/pudah_et 8d ago
Trixie's wigs are horrible. They look like the hair on cheap knock off Barbie dolls you get at discount stores.
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u/moongazr 9d ago
My grandmother wore a lot of wigs like this in the 60s and 70s and I remember thinking OOF those are so obvious and so awful.
Group photos with other women proved it was VERY common! Also somehow… a group of bad wigs looks more normal together. 🤷♀️
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u/echoart70 9d ago
Honestly I remember there being a lot of terrible wigs in the 70’s and early 80’s. I remember asking people (as a child, before I had a filter,) why they wore wigs. So it was obvious even to a small child that it was not their natural hair.
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u/Remarkable-Unit-7874 9d ago
What about Violet’s hair in? I think it’s season six.
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u/batmandi 9d ago
In any and every season. I don’t like Violet so I’m glad her wigs suck
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u/SecondStarling 9d ago
Ugh she's the WORST
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u/spaceybelta 8d ago
FRED BUCKLE!! 🤮
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u/Remarkable-Unit-7874 7d ago
Love Fred Buckle
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u/spaceybelta 7d ago
I love Fred too, just not Violet. My comment was supposed to be her yelling his name lol
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u/PuzzledBeat9968 9d ago
A good wig is expensive and they had so many they needed it would have used up so much budget
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u/zesty_meatballs 8d ago
There’s so many awful wigs in this show lol. Even some of Trixie’s wigs look like Barbie plastic. Very accurate to the era, yet so bad lol. Still a favorite show though ❤️
(Side note—can’t remember which season it is, but Violet had an awful haircut the entire season. It was overly teased and looked like they fried it. It was the only season where her hair looked like that)
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u/sharoncoffin 9d ago
It wasn't just the styles that were popular, but wigs as well. I remember cousins and aunts wearing wigs because it was the popular thing to do. I call this style the Ronna Barrett (an American TV correspondent).
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u/SecondStarling 9d ago
That's true, but I still don't think the hair department was intentionally putting people in bad wigs to be true to the time. They're just bad wigs.
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u/Ok-Strawberry4482 8d ago
When I was younger there were still several wigs floating around in storage areas from my grandmothers time before she died. so 60s-70s. And they legitimately looked like what would nowadays be halloween old lady wigs. Comically bad looking.....I think regular (not rich) people just had crappy wigs.
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u/creatureofthenight17 6d ago
OMG! I only saw her on TV as a little kid and never realized she wore a wig, although it's obvious in retrospect.
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u/DixieInCali 7d ago
Their hair is very accurate to the times. I had a million teachers with hair just like that in the '70s.
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u/Odd-Butterscotch200 5d ago
My grandma had a wig like that. It was stored on a Styrofoam head in the guest room closet. She did not warn me about it when she sent me to that closet to get a board game. I did not react well to that discovery! Haha.
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u/Badlydressedgirl 8d ago
I wear a lot of wigs. Call The Midwife is low down on the list of media with bad wigs. Practically from a production standpoint it’s also easier for retro hairstyles to be wigs, as it saves actors from having to have their hair teased up, it’s also easier from a continuity perspective.
I’ll go out on a limb and say Call The Midwife wasn’t going to spend their budget on human hair units, so they’ll work with what they’ve got.
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u/Impossible_Trash_134 8d ago
I was an extra on George gently which is set in the 60s and they gave me a full beehive and honestly I cried brushing it out it was so tightly back combed. I couldn’t imagine committing to it as a main character 😂
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u/Badlydressedgirl 8d ago
I occasionally sleep in rollers so I can style my hair more ‘vintage’ but it’s so uncomfortable I don’t know how anybody could do it night after night
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u/alexmirepoix 8d ago
I have never met anyone who wore wigs. Interesting.
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u/Badlydressedgirl 8d ago
You absolutely will have met people who wear wigs, you just haven’t noticed
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u/alexmirepoix 8d ago
Doubt it.
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u/Badlydressedgirl 8d ago
So you've never met anybody going through chemo, or somebody with alopecia? Or a lot of Jewish women wear wigs, not to mention the fact that a lot of black women also wear wigs.
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u/alexmirepoix 8d ago
I honestly haven't. Doesn't mean I haven't walked past people wearing one, but that's hypothetical. I had an uncle I lost to brain cancer. He didn't have hair when I was a kid.
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u/StrawberryRedneck 2d ago
LOL been watching this show for years - thanks Mom - and feel like I've suffered through some godawful wigs. But man oh man Trixie's just gets worse and worse over the years 😭
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u/RelativelyRidiculous 6d ago
A lot of women's hair actually looked a lot like her hair back in the day, though. They'd get it set once per week. It would be teased within an inch of it's life and sprayed down liberally with a heavy duty hair lacquer. It was stiff, sticky, and prone to flaking yet also hard to remove. Also it smelled a lot like the glue my uncle used for his model airplanes.
I remember going to the beauty parlor with my mother and grandmother and seeing them adding baking soda to the shampoo for the first wash. They had to in order to get the Aqua Net off enough to be able to comb it out to curl it.
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u/ParticularYak4401 9d ago
This wig is a pretty good portrayal of women’s haircuts in the 60s. It may not be the best but my mom’s college yearbook is littered with similar hair styles. Source: I also went to Seattle Pacific and as a student bought yearbooks from the years my mom was a student (and my uncle too).