TONY ON TV: New War drama The Crimson Field takes the action right to the frontline

Men from whole streets, groups and communities volunteered in force to serve -- many of them never to return home amid the blood and carnage of battle -- in a way I can’t see being repeated by a different generation where ‘selfies’ and Twitter are more likely to be the in thing.

The dark comedy ‘Blackadder’ is to many what the Great War was all about, but a more honest picture about life and loss in the trenches is about to hit the screens in the epic drama ‘The Crimson Field’ starting this Sunday on BBC1.

This six-part drama -- one of the many programmes being shown in the BBC’s four-year commemoration marking the centenary of the hostilities -- takes the action right to the frontline as it follows the lives of a team of doctors, nurses and women volunteers who work together in a tented field hospital healing the bodies and souls of men wounded in the fighting.

‘Scott & Bailey’ star Suranne Jones as Sister Livesey heads the cast in the opening episode in which the hospital workers -- whose daily battle is to patch up the men and keep the war machine churning -- are seen by some to be more of threat than a lifeline.

If you want TV to take you on a time trip, then press C4 for ‘New Worlds’ (Tuesday), a major new historical drama going back to the 1680s Restoration period as a group of young idealists, on both sides of the Atlantic, pledge their life and passion for a fairer future.

Jamie Dornan (‘The Fall’ and ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’) and Freya Mavor (‘Skins’) head the cast of this four-parter, co-written and crated by Peter Flannery (‘Our Friends in the North’).

Press the ITV1 button and you’ll be taken to modern-day Shropshire in ‘Undeniable’ (Monday), a two-part thriller about a murder that spans a generation.

My new-found allotment friends, Onslow and Olga, were miffed to have missed Claire Goose when the UK tour of ‘The Perfect Murder’ stopped off at Derby Theatre last month, but her absence may have been explained by her leading role in this drama as 30-year-old Jane who recognises the man who killed her mother 23 years ago, and then sets out to bring him to justice.

Murder of a different sort is regularly being committed in ‘MasterChef’ by India Fisher whose mangled pronunciation of many foreign-sounding dishes jars just as much as contestants who taste the food and then drop the spoon back in the pot. But when “Sgt Gregg” regularly mixes up the correct use of “John and I” and “John and me” I can’t see anyone being brought to book.