This late-empire drama is a heavy-handed parade
The scriptwriter Peter Moffat harvests his memories to make drama. North Square, Criminal Justice and Silk drew on his time as a barrister. The Village was inspired by the rural trials of his forebears. Now The Last Post (BBC One) riffs on his experiences as a child of the Empire.
The setting is Aden (now Yemen), where the military police keep the peace in desert fatigues. As ever with these things, we were shown around via the eyes of newcomers. Captain Joe Martin (Jeremy Neumark Jones) and his new bride Honor (Jessie Buckley, who was so good in War and Peace) arrived to find Alison Laithwaite, the alcoholic wife of an officer, sprawled all over their bed.
Alison (Jessica Raine, rather overdoing it) is Aden’s resident sardonic miseryguts. She does other transgressive things like have an affair and hang her bra up on a very public washing line. Her husband (the ubiquitous Stephen Campbell Moore), meanwhile, isn’t one of the boys: he harbours an unfashionable desire to understand the Arabic-speaking locals. “I think torture is the best recruiting sergeant for terrorists,” he said, as if teleporting himself to Abu Ghraib in 2003.
But do we actually need a drama about our record in the colonies? In order to appeal to a broad demographic, The Last Post has to interrogate British history while peopling the screen with likeable characters and offering insights into contemporary geopolitics. These goals felt drastically incompatible and the outcome was a parade of heavy-handed ironies and odd implausibilities.
Take the young son of the major (Ben Miles), presumably Moffat’s sort of alter ego: the small boy had a penchant for using the F-gerund which went oddly unpunished. Weirdly, none of the women got up to greet Honor when she arrived. Then at the end of the episode the exhausted survivor of an attack staggered into camp. “You’re late,” said Captain Martin. “Very late.” There’s British understatement, and there’s wildly improbable dialogue.
As a production, The Last Post feels undernourished. It’s not the BBC’S fault that it can’t match the spend of Netflix or HBO. But while the South African locations do their bit, to look at (and listen to) it’s all a bit Eldorado does terrorism.
So far the Philip K Dick series Electric Dreams has looked and sounded like traditional science fiction, with tales of space travel and telepathy set in dystopias. The latest,
(Channel 4), stayed much closer to home.
The setting was Woking station, of all the earthbound places, where plodding Ed Jacobson (Timothy Spall) sold tickets and whistled trains on their way. Then a glamorous young woman called Linda (Tuppence Middleton) asked for a ticket to a non-existent destination called Macon Heights, before magically disappearing. “Some sort of light thing?” wondered Ed.
This was Spall at his most charmingly dull. That snaggly grin of his seems to have doubled in size now that his face is half its previous width. His wife Mary (Rebecca Manley) called the smile fake, but it was more Pollyannaish, betokening clueless hope in the face of all the world’s ills.
Their particular difficulties took the form of Sam (Anthony Boyle), a teenage son with anger issues whose problems were only going to get worse. When curiosity got the better of Ed and he hopped aboard the train bound for Macon Heights, he found a faceless new town where all ills evaporated, including his. On returning home his son had ceased to exist. “Maybe this is the world as it should be,” suggested Linda, like a warped genie in a bottle.
This was a heartfelt examination of that awful chestnut: how much would a parent give for an easier life? Potternerds will note that the script was by Jack Thorne, the Stakhanovite writer of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, in which Boyle played Scorpius Malfoy. The subject is an itch that Thorne keeps scratching: he came at the problem of keeping families together in last year’s Bafta-winning single drama Don’t Take My Baby, about two disabled parents’ battles with social services.
This was sci-fi at its most responsible, a wild fantasy about grim reality. It came to the same conclusion as Sally Phillips’s documentary about the ethics of screening for Down’s syndrome, broadcast a year ago: that a future in which parents duck away from difficulty is morally impoverished.
The Last Post ★★
Electric Dreams: The Commuter ★★★★