Army drama lacks true trash power

Honestly, what's the point of putting Zoe Lucker in a series called Bombshell (TV One, last night, 8.30) and making her a brunette? Even more ridiculous, the sexiest outfit we saw her in last night was regimental dress. Otherwise she was in fatigues, which I suppose might be somebody's idea of a fantasy.

But the really silly thing about Bombshell is that Lucker's character, Jenna, is, in the scheme of things, the nice girl. That is if you can be a nice girl who is a hard-nosed captain in the British Army having an affair with her major, an amputee called Nick. Or, possibly, Sir, in the bedroom. Major Nick had his leg off after he saved Jenna from a bomb blast on a peacekeeping mission.

Nick's wife, the ambitious Valerie, daughter of a general, was very sympathetic: "He's a bloody cripple."

After a row, Major Nick said to Valerie, "I'm going to go to my room".

"Well, that's about as far as you'll ever climb, isn't it, with a stump for a leg?" said the charming Valerie.

Right, so Valerie is a social-climbing bitch who has driven Nick into the arms of Jenna. Nick asked for a divorce. Valerie's response was to get drunk, turn up at a mess dinner and throw a drink and abuse at Jenna. "Would he be such a hero to you if he'd had another bit of himself blown off?"

None of this was very exciting. It's hard to make the Army exciting. There's hardly any makeup and those uniforms are so unsexy - at least on the sheilas.

You'd expect the people who made Footballers' Wives to come up with raunchier dialogue than anything we've heard so far. And a better vehicle for Lucker, who was the best (read bitchiest) thing on FW. Still, there was the girl-on-boy punch-up which was an attempt to, well, what? Titillate? Who knows?

You have to wonder why they bothered with a pilot which seemed to go on for as long as the war in Iraq. The point of a pilot is to introduce the characters and storylines.

The characters are hardly complex enough to demand such treatment. This was the equivalent of the sort of torment the Army blokes like to use on the recruits. "Stick your head down the toilet and flush it."

The recruits - the two main characters in this lot are a former prostitute and a petty thief who hasn't given up his trade just because he's joined the Army - make up the subplot.

This involves the sort of ritual humiliation mentioned above, and the inevitable sexism. "Are you fighting fit?" barks Bomb the bombardier (it is obligatory for all soldiers above a certain rank to bark in Army dramas).

A female recruit is told, "You're not fit to frigging piss straight, are you? If you wanted a girl's job you should have joined the catering corp."

So far, so disappointing. We need Lucker to grow her FW nails back and have a cat-fight with Valerie. If we're going to watch this nonsense we want it to be really trashy telly, and so far there's not a hermaphrodite baby in sight.