Colin Hogg: War drama worth a medal

Oona Chaplin (centre) is marvellous as the dark and brooding nurse Kitty Trevelyan.

These are the desert days of TV viewing. There's hardly anything new to watch and even the ads look worse than usual. I stopped looking altogether for a few days, but then someone called the nurse and I was put right.

Of course there's no avoiding nurses on TV these days. There are armies of them marching across our screens in their eye-catching colour-coded period-perfect uniforms. The latest lot arrived on Sunday calling itself The Crimson Field (TV One, 8.35pm), in the first of three epic episodes, ending last night.

Like the recent, Australia/New Zealand-made Anzac Girls, this series looks at World War I not in the heat of its terrible battles but through the experiences of some of the many women who went to the front a century ago to serve as nurses.

The Crimson Field, though, seriously lifts the dramatic game, being in another class to Anzac Girls, which was an awkward drama about New Zealand and Australian nurses at Gallipoli.

This new one's from the BBC (hats off in the back) and looks at the Great War from the point of view of British women who signed up for action as volunteer nurses, working alongside the hardened professional nurses and doctors.

For women from all classes, the war offered escape into a new world of equality, giving this mini-series the chance to introduce a touch of Downton Abbey, making drama from the social divides - posh girl making beds and tending to torn soldiers alongside working class girl.

There is the inevitable mean matron, though in The Crimson Field there's an even meaner senior sister, played with savage relish by New Zealander Kerry Fox, in grey hair and an English accent.

And there's a dark and moody one, played marvellously by Oona Chaplin, granddaughter of silent movie star Charlie and previously a star of Game of Thrones. She has a secret, as you'd expect. Or, as matron put it, "Am I to understand there's a child?"

Where Anzac Girls was made clunky by a script loyal to the letters, diaries and some of the language from 100 years ago, The Crimson Field sails on fine writing.

It's based on a book, The Roses of No Man's Land, by Lyn Macdonald, and its characters are nuanced and vividly acted by a terrific cast, men included.

Over seven hours or so, the series follows its band of variously-motivated volunteers - "I love camping," the goofy, jolly hockey sticks one declares when she spots the tent the girls will share narrow beds in.

New Zealander Kerry Fox plays the cruel senior sister in The Crimson Field.

Dreams of a jolly helpful time disappear quickly. They're treated with contempt, especially by that cruel sister, Kerry Fox, and set out to prove themselves - or not - as the blown apart men start coming in from the battle lines.

The gruesomeness is graphic - guts spilling, arteries exploding, barrows full of amputated limbs wheeled by to the incinerator belching smoke.

The show was also pretty tough on the tear ducts, not to mention the emotional demeanour, with its heartbreaking and grievously upsetting moments.

But it's terrific television, glowing with great acting and the sort of production values only a big budget can bring to the picture.

Though we might have had our fill of nurses at war now, thanks very much.