Breathless, ITV, review - Telegraph The requirements for a role in Breathless (ITV), last night's glossy new drama set in a Sixties hospital, seemed to be as follows. One: be impeccably well-groomed, even if you're playing a corpse. Two: have an ability to stare meaningfully at all other characters, even during surgery (the impossibly smooth Jack Davenport, this means you in particular). And three: all female cast members must either be pregnant, be thinking about getting pregnant, or recently have been pregnant. It is set in a gynaecology ward, after all. The action opened in an operating theatre, where rookie upstart Richard Truscott (Oliver Chris) was struggling with a complicated procedure. In stepped Otto Powell (Davenport), who saved the day, then whisked the headstrong Nurse Wilson (Catherine Steadman) off to a backstreet abortion, where a well to-do patient had "been a silly muffin" and needed their help. Meanwhile, Truscott was having second thoughts about his engagement to Christina Hendricks lookalike Jean Meecher (Zoe Boyle), anaesthetist Charlie Enderbury (Shaun Dingwall) was applying for a promotion and Otto's wife Elizabeth (Natasha Little) was trapped in a loveless marriage. Despite promising a "cauldron of lies, deception and guilty secrets," not much actually happened - apart from a rather dull storyline featuring a waiflike patient trying to get out of an unwanted marriage. Powell and Wilson's burgeoning relationship sizzled - then fizzled; Enderbury's wife Lily (a bumbling, likeable Joanna Page) drank too much and got rowdy; and a mysterious policeman stalked Powell. Lack of plot aside, it was very pleasant to watch. Writer and director Paul Unwin (whose 27-year stint on Casualty proves his medical credentials) gave us a drama perfectly pitched between Mad Men and Call the Midwife, from the characters" permanently rouged lips to the opulent décor, old London street scenes and mournful saxophone solos. The dialogue was witty, historically accurate (peppered with talk of V2 bombers and Lyons Tea Shops) and hinted at just enough repressed emotion that something explosive (probably that pistol in Powell's desk drawer) is sure to go off in the next instalment. The period, too, was well-chosen: set in 1961, the action unfolds on the brink of the swinging Sixties. Abortion was still illegal and contraception was only just becoming available to married women - which made for a funny scene with a smirking Powell giving bedroom advice to two blushing newlyweds. Here's hoping that, in weeks to come, the story lives up to the scandalous, tumultuous, revolutionary era in which it's set. Forceps at the ready.