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Jessica Raine’s role as a drunk, sex-crazed army wife is – to put it mildly – something of a shock to viewers who remember her as squeaky clean nurse Jenny Lee from “Call the Midwife.”

In “The Last Post,” she plays Alison Laithwaite who feels confined and frustrated by her life in 1965 Aden, the prosperous eye of Yemen. Ostensibly established to defend the Gulf oil-fields, the post ’56 Suez base in Aden was not the place to be in the swingin’ 60’s. Devoting most of its energies to protecting itself from unrest in the colony and tribal dissidence in the Protectorate – conditions inspired partly by the very existence of the base – army personnel and their wives lived life on the edge. By the end of 1967 it was all over. The British forces had suffered some 60 killed and 700 wounded in the hardest anti-terrorist campaigning possible, and another piece of the Empire was gone.