Gripping war drama 'Dark Hearts' will have viewers on the edge of their seats

We all know that the internet has made the world a much smaller place. But before we spent hours endlessly scrolling our feeds, it was the TV that brought foreign shores a little closer.

American culture has permeated almost every facet of our entertainment industry, but other nations have carved out their own places in our hearts.

Few have done it quite as stylishly as France.

It’s easy from the lofty heights of Blighty’s shores to poke gentle fun at our near-neighbours, especially if all you know of their cultural output is some dodgy Seventies crooners and maybe evergreen rocker Johnny Hallyday.

But, lest we forget, this is the nation that gave us the effervescent Leslie Caron and Maurice Chevalier in Gigi, the wicked trickster Yves Montand in Jean de Florette, as well as Gerard Depardieu proving he was much more than a prosthetic nose in Cyrano de Bergerac (even if he didn’t quite pull off the same feat in Green Card).

Not to mention the luminous Catherine Deneuve in anything she cares to star in, the magnetic Isabelle Huppert and the magnificent Eva Green, to name but three female French icons.

Bearing all that in mind, it’s perhaps less surprising to know that Brits are actually quite fond of French drama.

The rise of the streaming services has enabled the flow of quality programming to go from a trickle to a flood, and recent years have seen us treated to French sci-fi drama Missions, following the first manned journey to Mars.

There was the frothy but hugely enjoyable Versailles, which managed to track several years at the court of King Louis XIV without the saucy monarch ageing a day.

And, of course, there was Spiral. Over the course of eight series it followed criminal investigations in the French capital from the different points of view of everyone involved. Forget Emily in Paris, this gave us the gritty, beating heart of the City of Light served on a plate.

It brings us neatly to the latest cross-border exchange, this six-part drama, created and written by Dang Thai Duong and Corinne Garfin, that looks set to have everyone on the edge of their seats.

It follows a French special forces unit on the brink of the 2016 Battle of Mosul, in Iraq. With a terror threat hanging over their heads, the unit must track down the daughter and grandchildren of a prominent ISIS leader.

If they can safely extricate his relatives from the city, the leader promises he will give them much-needed insider information.

Eagle-eyed film fans will spot the series is directed by Ziad Doueiri, whose 2017 feature The Insult earned his native Lebanon its first Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Sue Deeks, head of BBC Programme Acquisition (Fiction), is clearly thrilled at having snapped up the French drama.

“Not only is Dark Hearts a gripping mix of action drama and espionage thriller,” she said, “it also gives a fascinating insight into the lives of a close knit elite military unit who know that every mission could be their last.”

Marie Dompnier, Thierry Godard, Moussa Maaskri and Nicolas Duvauchelle head the top-drawer cast.