This is NOT how frazzled Army wives look, Jessica

IN OUR transgender, metrosexual era, it gets harder and harder to remember what men and women used to be like. For me, the new BBC Sunday night soap opera The Last Post is almost unwatchable. In 1960s Aden, did the Royal Military Police really look like male models dressed up as parking wardens? Did their harassed, frazzled wives really look as if they had spent all afternoon at the Aden branch of Vidal Sassoon, as Jessica Raine does?

If you want a real, poignant true-life drama about male and female courage, stoicism, patriotism and grief, turn instead to the amazing series on the Vietnam War, screened absurdly late on Monday nights on BBC4. It is, among other things, astonishingly fair.

More than once, while watching this rare example of real, serious television, I have found myself weeping. If we would only learn from this terrible episode, how much happier we would be.

Yet today’s governments behave as if they had never heard of it.

Once the BBC would have screened this in prime time. Now it lacks the character or courage.