As the series returns for its 15th run on BBC1, some viewers were left wondering what is really going on with her love life
Helen Geroge has addressed concern about her ‘missing’ husband.
In Call the Midwife, viewers have not seen one glimpse of Trixie’s husband Matthew Aylward since March 2024, when the character moved to New York to try and solve his financial woes.
Since then Helen George’s character has jetted between London and the US to see her long-distance husband and her young stepson Jonty. Now some fans are questioning how it will all pan out, with Helen George having been in the BBC1 series since the very start, in 2012, and actor Olly Rix having left more than two years ago.
And there’s no prospect of him returning. As many viewers know, he is now firmly ensconced within Holby General as Casualty’s Dr Flynn Byron. The writer of Call the Midwife, Heidi Thomas, has already cleverly signalled to viewers that they should not expect to see any sign of Matthew during this 15th series.
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“Matthew has to stay in New York until autumn,” Trixie told her nurse pals around the table at Nonnatus House, as she announced she was also free for midwifery dories. “Jonty’s starting pre-prep in Easter, I needed to get him home and settled.”
So that explains why Trixie is happily living in Poplar, where she is delivering babies, getting stuck in to the Women’s Lib movement and also battling for the future of Nonnatus alongside Sister Julienne (Jenny Agutter), white Matthew stays firmly on the other side of the Atlantic.
Asked if it felt weird for her play a character with an absent husband, Helen said she was fine with it. “Look, marriages function in lots of ways and we can all think they’re strange from the outside but they function well from within.”
She says that, in her head, Trixie quite likes the arrangement – even though the couple weren’t even in the same place for Christmas. “I think it gives us space that she can come back to Nonnatus and do what she wants because she’s got this double life of being Lady Aylward but also coming back to the heart of her life and doing the thing that she loves the most, which is midwifery.
“She’s able to put on a fancy hat and go to lovely events with Matthew but then also to be cleaning up sick and baby poo.”
But there are some who feel that Matthew’s absence is growing ever harder to explain for the BBC drama, and must – at some point – reach a conclusion in which the couple live together again or split.
In the storyline, from series 13, Matthew had accumulated company debt of more than £250,000, which saw him stripped of his seat on the board and his salary stopped. For a while they managed on Trixie’s nurses wages alone, but then an old schoolfriend offered Matthew an opportunity in New York, to try and build a business out there.
At the time, Helen said that because it was the 1970s, he felt a huge need to be the main breadwinner and it drove a wedge between them. “Because of the time he feels the pressure and the need to take the responsibility for fiscal responsibility on without including her. And she’s such a collective, community-driven person that she wants to be involved. She wants to be involved in the decisions and has a very modern outlook on this idea of a relationship. He’s very much into the notion of the man solves the problem, I will sort this, and that’s hard.” After that they settled on the current arrangement of her travelling back and forth.
Helen’s own love life has been similarly complicated. She was married to fellow actor Oliver Boot in 2011 but they divorced in 2015. She then had a long-term relationship – and two daughters – with her Call the Midwife co-star Jack Ashton (Reverend Tom Hereward) from 2016 until they separated in 2023.
Now she is a year into a relationship with businessman Dan Innes. Speaking last month she said it was going well, telling a magazine: “It’s a very happy relationship. It’s lovely to be with someone outside the industry. I’m not defined by my job, and I’m really interested in meeting the people he works with.”
Source: Mirror
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