SAS Rogue Heroes

This show about the formation of the SAS – from the brains behind the Shelbys, Steven Knight – is big, brash, witty and packed with energy.

It is a bracing way to spend a Sunday evening, and, to borrow the parlance of one of its leads, a lot of fun, old boy. O’Connell is Lt Robert Blair “Paddy” Mayne, who writes poetry and is, in the words of one of the sets of military police who try to imprison him, “a mental case”. And a lack of volunteers who are “mad as fuck”, as Stirling claims he is. For all of the bells and whistles, the bombs and the battles, it was this aspect that had me most gripped. Unless there is a drastic shift in tactics, it is looking like the allies are “fucked”. The show leans on a number of contemporary TV drama touchstones, from its use of anachronistic music, blasting out metal and rock over action scenes, to the familiar cheeky disclaimer about its veracity.

A new BBC World War Two drama from the creator of Peaky Blinders has reignited a real-life campaign for justice.

[carried a poetry book](https://twitter.com/blair_mayne/status/1582729955653607426) called Other Men’s Flowers into battle – and SAS: Rogue Heroes does show this side of him, as we see Mayne reciting poetry in prison during the first episode. [leading several successful missions](https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/paddy-mayne), some of which we’ll see in the course of SAS: Rogue Heroes. Even SAS founder David Stirling (played by Connor Swindells in the drama) is said to have thought Mayne overstepped the mark at times, in particular when he reportedly gunned down up to 30 unarmed soldiers in the Libyan desert in 1941. This EDM went as far as quoting King George IV, who inquired why the award ‘so strangely eluded him’, and confirmed David Stirling believed there was ‘considerable prejudice’ towards Mayne. This is certainly how he’s introduced in SAS: Rogue Heroes, breaking out of prison in Cairo by dispensing with not one but three soldiers with a wince-inducing ferocity. His recommendation was supported by witness statements, including from Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, celebrating his ‘brilliant military leadership and cool calculating courage’.

The Peaky Blinders creator adapts Ben Macintyre's bestseller into a boys' own hoot which playfully buys into the regiment's mythic status.

The whole teeming canvas – Cairo’s watering holes, the desert redoubt in the dunes – looks a picture. OK, so no one’s much bothered with character arcs – there’s a war on, after all – but as a romantic hymn to raw courage the whole bang-shoot is a riot. Toss in cool-blooded “Jock” Lewes (Alfie Allen), who doesn’t flinch as bombs rain on Tobruk, and the great game – to wreak havoc among Axis supply lines – is afoot. The story gives him a licence to swill: to mix facts – the stuff of black and white newsreels – with colourised fictions. There was no such militia, though news of its existence was disseminated to the gullible Axis. A troop of marauding desert rats making mischief in the Sahara was first conceived in Cairo by strategic deception ace Dudley Clarke (played with caddish aplomb by Dominic West).

BBC are back with a new drama, SAS Rogue Heroes, which tells the story of a group of men in the war and all the chaos, tragedy and also funny times th.

- Stuart Campbell as Bill Fraser - Jacob McCarthy as Johnny Cooper - Jacob Ifan as Pat Riley - Corin Silva as Jim Almonds - Tom Glynn-Carney as Mike Sadler - Theo Barklem-Biggs as Reg Seekings

This is something of a prestige drama – albeit one imbued with a streak of deep tackiness that befits its title.

To know whether it really works, you’ll have to ask the audience. “You are the SAS,” Dudley Clarke, the British intelligence supremo in Cairo (played by Your tolerance for SAS Rogue Heroes will depend on many things, from your sympathies towards the British army to your willingness to endure a rather Roger Cormanesque aesthetic palate. Therein lies the rub. If you recognise the spirit emblematised by these SAS renegades, the show will be infinitely more bearable. As the first title screen of the series notes, this story is “mostly true”. And rather fittingly: not much of that ink has survived the decades. “In war, we are allowed to be the beasts that we are,” Stirling opines; and SAS Rogue Heroes is a vision of war, if not unleashed, then untamed. [Connor Swindells](/topic/connor-swindells)), a toff burdened with horrific levels of self-confidence (or, in the words of his commanding officer, a “drunken, insubordinate malcontent”), Jock Lewes (Game of Thrones’s Alfie Allen), a “mad martinet”, and Paddy Mayne (Starred Up’s Jack O’Connell), an Irishman with a reckless propensity for chaos. From the former, SAS Rogue Heroes takes an anachronistically punky soundtrack and a riotously playful aesthetic. [SAS Rogue Heroes](/topic/sas-rogue-heroes), based on the book by prolific popular historian Ben Macintyre – is saddled with a name so naff that it conjures images either of video game stealth missions or Ant Middleton dangling celebrities off cliffs by their toenails. From the latter it inherits a sense of low-stakes jeopardy.

VIEWERS of new BBC One drama SAS Rogue Heroes were left switching off the TV as they tuned into the show this evening.The new drama made it's debut on.

I'll give it 5 more minutes." 🙄" Another fumed: "Turned #SASRogueHeroes off after 15 minutes. Another added: "This is a really good drama!" One disappointed viewer wrote: "The music is throwing me at the moment." Another echoed their thoughts on the 'boring' series, writing: "FFS get to the point!

CHRISTOPHER STEVENS: SAS Rogue Heroes (BBC1) is Steven Knight's adaptation of historian Ben Macintyre's account of the exploits of the first Special Air ...

Instead, Swindells’ portrayal was almost a parody of a hero from a boys’ comic book. The verbose affectations dragged occasionally. Further south in the Egyptian desert, Janina Ramirez was on the trail of Tutankhamun’s Secrets: Raiders Of The Lost Past (BBC2) In real life, the grenade wasn’t a dummy. Further south in the Egyptian desert, Janina Ramirez was on the trail of Tutankhamun’s Secrets: Raiders Of The Lost Past (BBC2). In one scene, the regiment’s founder David Stirling (Connor Swindells) (pictured) commandeers a room in an officer’s club by throwing a dummy grenade onto the snooker table

Never judge a book by its cover, they say, and perhaps the same is true for TV.

For people raised on a diet of Call of Duty and sub-Tarantino knock-offs, SAS Rogue Heroes will feel like a breath of fresh air. For others, it will feel like an indulgent and messy rewriting of recent(ish) history, where each sequence has a 50:50 chance of hitting a bum note. From the former, SAS Rogue Heroes takes an anachronistically punky soundtrack and a riotously playful aesthetic. As the first title screen of the series notes, this story is “mostly true”. “Sounds like a branch of the f****** Post Office,” comes Paddy’s earthy verdict. Together, they will found the SAS, via a series of alcohol-fuelled shenanigans.

Viewers who tuned in to watch the BBC's new drama, SAS: Rogue Heroes, couldn't help but complain about one thing…

This is gonna be great," while another agreed, adding: "Great programme, loving the AC/DC and Black Sabbath songs in the soundtrack #SASRogueHeroes." A third fan commented: "Watched the first episode of #SASRogueHeroes. Repeat." Turn sound up. Turn sound down. One person wrote: "This could have been really good if the #BBC could have got the sound right, can't hear the dialogue, action scenes deafening.