From the team who brought you 'Neighbours'.... Remember last year's 'The Crimson Field', about a group of nurses in France and Belgium in WWI? This is the Aussie version, with the game young ladies in the Dardanelles, patching up the Commonwealth casualties. Or not, as the case may be, since they constantly tell each other their daily death score and how long they've been awake. It must be a bit like the current NHS.
What the English version veered towards, the Antipodean drama barrels straight into. We're presented with the no-nonsense Matron, her more amenable Deputy, the Flighty One, the Religious One (a hick Kiwi, by the by), the Outspoken Tomboy and the One with a Secret. Except it isn't kept secret very long and the whole situation has been neatly resolved by the end of the episode. (Nurse Elsie is secretly married to a soldier, which is strictly against the rules, but he happens to be the son of a recent Aussie Prime Minister, so that's OK).
Apparently this is all loosely based on real correspondence and memoirs of nurses in the field, but we can only assume a large dose of 21st Century soap was added . There's a bit of fake blood histrionics, but they have a lot of time to visit the Pyramids in the risque company of fighting men, and wear brazenly modern pyjamas and silk kimonos.
If the men's experiences are dramatized in films like 'Gallipoli', and the women's in television like this, it seems Australian women have as unfair and unequal a deal as they did a century ago.
2014, as the centenary of the outbreak of WWI, was obviously going to mean our screens were full of men in khaki and puttees, with women dressed as nurses amid a backdrop of mud, blood and stumpy trees. The documentaries have always been compelling, the dramas less so. This one has female leads - a sort of 'Call the Midwife' but without the babies or the NHS, and added bi-planes.
We follow a small group of new volunteers arriving at a field hospital in France, where we meet an escapee from 'Downton Abbey'. It's quite apt, since this could well be 'Downton Abbey - the Missing Years' depicting Matthew and the other Downton menfolk at the front. We feel qualified to say this, having read an account of a nurse's life at a field hospital in recent weeks. Presumably the writers have read many similar accounts, and have taken the unvarnished truth and varnished it up with a coat of 'Tenko' (all women together in a "perfectly ghastly" war), another coat of the aforementioned 'Downton' and for good measure a finishing wax of just about any WWI depiction to date ('Upstairs Downstairs', 'Aces High', 'When the Boat Comes In', 'Wings'....). This opener dealt with suspected cowardice, nascent understanding of shell shock, professional rivalries, class distinctions and the extreme youth of those involved - though the doctors' youth is unlikely to be an accurate portrayal: romantic potential in the absence of able-bodied soldiers perhaps? Each of the characters comes replete with a backstory, of-course, so the tensions are all about whether Nurse Kitty (Oona Chaplin) is a suffragette or some other freakish sort of female; whether ridiculously naive, perfume-wearing Flora is under-age; and whether Rosalie really is an old maid who only joined the war effort to escape a dull life. Oh and not forgetting whether Sister Livesey (Suranne Jones) is in fact a time-travelling flapper from the 1920s, with bobbed hair and a motorbike.
Confusingly, the original title for this was 'The Ark', which other than having a rather laboured relationship to a tale of a field hospital, presumably led viewers to think this was a televisual version of 'Noah', currently in cinemas. The episode ended with patients returning to war, rebel Kitty accepted into the fold and one patient dead in anything but a peaceful manner. Accounts of real nurses in the First World War tend to be understated, but have all the more impact for it. This is a drama, so we expect a certain amount of conflation, but would volunteer nurses really arrive at a field hospital in France without even knowing how to make a bed? We're not sure something so earnestly soapy does justice to their experiences.
