The Wipers Time BBC 2 9pm

This is a play on words and the way the working-class soldier pronounced Ypres during the First World War. BBC 2 seems our best bet for this kind of costume drama, with Channel 4 hitting the futuristic buttons with drama such as Blackout-pronounced black---out. I didn’t black – out I stuck with the new dystopian drama, Blackout, to the first ad break. Good man I can hear you say in that Standard English accent used for voice overs and British army officers. The war has ended and (Ben Chaplin) Captain Mark Roberts is applying for a job in Fleet Street. His interviewer notes that although he seems a nice enough chap, he’s no real experience of the newspaper trade (I’m paraphrasing here). Cue Captain Roberts handing him a copy of The Wipers Time and we step back into 1916 and the finding of a printing press in bombed out Ypres and it turns into Oh! Oh! Oh! What a Lovely War with song and dance and sketches. I say that as a compliment to writer Ian Hisplop. God knows what he’d have done if we had a Blackout and not a World War.