Cape Town provides backdrop for new British TV drama

It’s 1965 in the Yemeni port of Aden‚ and as the swinging sixties deliver sexual liberation‚ feminism and The Beatles‚ a British army unit is fighting off an insurgency.

This is the backdrop to the latest international TV series to be filmed in Cape Town‚ which is set to receive premieres worldwide from Sunday.

Margery Bone‚ the executive producer of The Last Post‚ said the six-part drama needed coastal‚ mountain and desert settings‚ as well as colonial architecture.

“Cape Town doubled perfectly for all these elements so it was an easy decision to base ourselves there‚” she said. “Finding a disused British naval base that overlooked Simon’s Town bay enabled us to give our drama the kind of scale it is normally difficult to achieve on a television shoot.”

Writer Peter Moffat said the series was based on his father’s life as an officer in the Royal Military Police and his mother’s struggle between being what the army required her to be and being the person she wanted to be.

“Young married couples in the heart of the sixties living in extremely close proximity in a very alien and dangerous environment has always struck me as ripe territory for drama‚” he said.

“Men full of vim‚ vigour and a desire to be heroes in a situation where that isn’t always possible‚ alongside young women who are starting to feel the emancipation of the sixties and a sense of new freedoms but who are living in a constrained setting where their role is supposed to be merely supportive.

“Throw in rock ’n roll and tumultuous love stories alongside the unexplored territory of this period in our history and you have a pretty heady mix.”

The Last Post’s six hour-long episodes were filmed between last October and March‚ and will screen on BBC1 in the UK. They will also be available to Amazon subscribers.

The series features British actors including Jessica Raine (Call The Midwife)‚ Jessie Buckley (War and Peace)‚ Ben Miles (The Crown) and Stephen Campbell Moore (The History Boys)

More than 50 years after the events depicted in the series‚ Yemen’s capital has been temporarily relocated to Aden after rebels took control of Sana’a in February 2015.