In the five years since Our Girl was first broadcast its original frame – naïve girl runs off to join the Army, like Private Benjamin but without the jokes – has been more or less completely dismantled. They’ve changed the lead character (Lacey Turner’s Molly Dawes was replaced by Michelle Keegan’s Georgie Lane in series two); they’ve changed the setting (from the fag end of the war in Afghanistan to humanitarian missions in Kenya and then Nepal) and they’ve tried on pretty much every format for size, from a one-off pilot to two five-episode series to three blocks of four episodes for this third series.
Our Girl being a military drama has given writer Tony Grounds the opportunity to kill off...