All hot under the collar
SOME actors seem born to play a certain type, others continually surprise us. Take the cast of THE LAST POST (Sunday, BBC1). Sunday evenings are traditional Call The Midwife territory. This one’s got people in starched uniforms, values that went out with the miniskirt, it can even boast the original Midwife girl, Jessica Raine, but she’s no ministering angel.
Smouldering away on a military police base in early Sixties Aden (today’s still-troubled Yemen), there’s a whiff of Liz Taylor about Alison Laithwaite, hot tin roofs, cat claws and all. As we joined the story, the men were saying goodbye to their much-loved Captain, Nick Page (Joseph Kennedy), who was returning to Blighty. Mrs Laithwaite was preparing to say goodbye to him, too, in a different fashion.
Sozzled on gin, forever in her dressing gown or hanging up her smalls in public, she promises to cause so much bother on the base, you wonder why the insurgents are bothering to lift a finger.
Stephen Campbell Moore couldn’t be a more different casting choice for the role of Lieutenant Ed Laithwaite, Alison’s husband. Few actors do troubled posh quite so well, his Lieutenant Edward veering like a stubborn camel from principled clashes with top brass to outright sadism.
Veteran viewers might remember Merrick, the sinister, damaged intelligence officer played by Tim Pigott-Smith in Jewel In The Crown and maybe this series is the forgotten sequel.
The Raj has gone and this strategically important patch of desert is Britain’s last post. Locals are waging a guerrilla war against the occupiers. The occupiers, with wives and children and Christmas trees, believe they’re there to help.
The only one who doesn’t is Ed, who knows how little they are wanted, knows an attack is imminent and can’t find anyone to listen. With his bubbling violence and his disintegrating marriage, he at least presented a spectacle worth watching.
Other bits were less surprising. It was obvious what was going to happen to dear old Nick the minute we learned it was his last day.
It was similarly predictable that when Captain Joe Martin and his new bride Honor stepped off the plane, he’d be a dreary stick-in-themud and she’d be a free-spirited gel heading for a disappointment.
Like the Empire in its last days, this show doesn’t know its purpose in the world. Sunday night crowdpleaser or edgy desert drama?
You have to wonder how much really governments want to help. RUSSIA WITH SIMON REEVE (Sunday, BBC2) took us to the Siberian enclave of Tuva, famous for its nomads and their remarkable throat-singing (which sounds like a didgeridoo in the bath).
It is also, sadly, famous for alcoholism. Everywhere Simon looked, people staggered or toppled, every shot included bashed-in faces and missing teeth.
The Russian government’s response had been to raise the price of vodka, a daft move when everyone was distilling their own.
Throat singers, like the formerly famous one Simon encountered, now perform their routines on street corners to buy grog.
Yet elsewhere in the southern mountains of Dagestan, he found ethnic groups keeping their unique skills alive. One village supplied tightrope walkers to all the great circuses. What was the difference? I guess you just can’t walk tightropes when you’re tight.