It is 1944, and Kiwi-born Nancy Wake is planning operations with the maquisards - rural guerrilla bands of French Resistance fighters.
As the Allies close in, the woman known as the White Mouse - the Gestapo's most wanted person - is working for the liberation of France.
She walks down the hallway of a rustic French cottage and out into the bright sunshine of ... Mitchell's Cottage, just up the road from Butcher's Dam, near Alexandra.
Then Wake is on her epic 500km bicycle ride to replace codes her wireless operator had been forced to destroy in a German raid, and we see her passing ... Butcher's Dam!
Then she's riding over that historic one-way bridge near (I think) Ophir!
Yes, it's a New Zealand production, a docudrama of the Nancy Wake story, featuring some of the best French scenery Central Otago has to offer.
TV One premieres Sunday Theatre: The Ford New Zealand Season - Nancy Wake: The White Mouse, Sunday at 8.30pm.
Wake is played by Rachael Blampied, who was also at one time the scheming and manipulative Dr Bree Hamilton on Shortland Street.
In The White Mouse, she is the foul-mouthed, hard-drinking and gorgeous Wake, who in 2006 was awarded the Royal New Zealand Returned and Services' Association's highest honour, the RSA Badge in Gold.
That added (after about 60 years) to the many other awards she received, from France's highest honour, the Legion d'Honneur, to three Croix de Guerre and a French Resistance Medal, Britain's George Medal and the US Medal of Freedom.
The White Mouse was funded by the New Zealand on Air platinum fund, and directed by Mike Smith (Underbelly, Almighty Johnsons, and the upcoming Brokenwood Mysteries).
But reflecting Wake's limited New Zealand roots (she left for Australia as a 2-year-old), most of the talking heads are Australian.
That includes her biographer, Sydney Morning Herald sports journalist and former Wallaby Peter FitzSimons.
Blampied does a reasonable job, though somehow it is hard not to keep seeing Bree Hamilton through the wartime fashion.
The regular cuts from the drama to the talking heads is slightly annoying, but The White Mouse is entertaining and informative enough to keep you involved.
And the story is nothing if not compelling.
Wake worked for the Resistance until the network was betrayed, and she was forced to flee Marseille. Her French husband was captured, tortured and executed by the Gestapo.
After reaching Britain, Wake joined the Special Operations executive, before being parachuted back into France.
Despite her just two years as a Kiwi, it would probably be unpatriotic not to watch.
- Chalres Loughrey
