The Last Post

BBC1, Sundays, 9pm

Full confession: sometimes I get sent press releases about TV shows and I immediately jump to all kinds of conclusions about them before I’ve seen a second. In the case of, say, the doof-fest that is Bromans on ITV2, actually watching it didn’t make much difference. But with BBC1’S new Sunday night period drama The Last Post, it turns out I was totally wrong. I do blame the frankly tedious-sounding premise, though, which is all about the lives of the Royal Military Police in a place called Aden (now known as Yemen) in the Middle East in the early ’60s. Thrilling! Luckily, the opening scene of episode one immediately put paid to any idea that this was going to be a cosy heritage story of brave Brits abroad, as we watched Jessica (Call The Midwife) Raine totter around her digs in an increasingly drunken stupor, generally being horrid to her husband Stephen Campbell Moore. He’s playing a troubled chap for the second week in a row on BBC1, after The Child In Time alongside the Cumberbatch. Then, there was the arrival of newlywed Captain Joe (Jeremy Neumark-jones) and his wife Honor (Jessie Buckley), who look like the perfect couple. But she barely seems to know him, and he clearly has big secrets. From these riveting early scenes on, the whole show reeks of authenticity, probably because it’s based on writer Peter Moffat’s childhood memories. His father was an officer in the Royal Military Police and his mother struggled with the idea of being an officer’s wife. The series is also beautifully filmed and directed, which just goes to show even dull-sounding Sunday evening period dramas can be peak TV, too.