If the television fare gets any better on Sunday nights, we’ll have to invest in a multi-screen sitting room to take it all in.

It was hard enough when RTÉ’s Raw was up against most of Sherlock Holmes over on the Beeb, but it got even worse over the last two weeks as our cross-channel friends pulled off the impossible – they turned Sebastian Barry’s brilliant Birdsong into spellbinding television as well.

And just to prove that anything can be captivating if it’s well made, the evening’s entertainment kicks off with Call the Midwife, a mini-series about – as the name suggests – midwives, set in the poverty-stricken London of the Fifties.

Now I had difficulty watching the midwife who helped deliver our children, so why I’d want to spend my Sundays watching a similar scenario set in the squalor of dirty London is anyone’s guess – but I do.

Miranda Hart shows that there’s more than one side to her talents, because she is utterly credible as Chummy Browne – otherwise the Honorable Camilla Fortescue-Chomeley-Browne – the enormous and completely clumsy toff who has a natural aptitude for helping these poor women in the direst of circumstances.

But Chummy isn’t the main character here because the plot of Call the Midwife centres on newly qualified midwife Jenny Lee (Jessica Raine) and the work of the nuns of Nonnatus House, a convent, coping with the medical problems in this deprived area of East London.

It’s a top class cast that also boasts Jenny Agutter, Pam Ferris and Stephen McGann – Vanessa Redgrave is the voice of Jenny Lee in later life – but Call the Midwife works because of the realism, the well-rounded characters and the quality writing.

If you missed Birdsong over the last two weeks, it’s too late to catch it now – unless you’ve got BBC Player, or you wait for the DVD or RTÉ to buy it ... whichever comes first.

For those who read the bestselling book, the marvel is that they managed to turn such a complex read into a television drama at all – but because they spared nothing on set or storyline, this will sweep the boards at whatever awards it comes up for.

Those who read the book know this is the story of Stephen Wraysford, switching throughout between two key times in his life – in the trenches of France during World War 1, reflecting back to his great love in that same region of the same country before the war.

For more, read this week's Connacht Sentinel.