SAS secrets revealed in new TV series detailing origins of military force

Rogue Heroes, a series about the origins of British Army’s Special Air Service, is not a show for ageing war buffs nursing romantic legends and gory myths.

A scene from Rogue Heroes

After a period of some medical indisposition, I’ve just caught up with the BBC’s Rogue Heroes, an unconventional war series that is provocative, confounding and vastly entertaining.

War is hell, it tells us but somehow some men love it and manage to find it an absorbing and profound human experience. As one of the central characters says in the series: “In war we are allowed to be the beasts we are.” Another echoes the sentiment, “Certain men are identified by war itself as its natural executors. They take matters into their own hands.”

The series is from former comedy writer Steven Knight, who, while he became better known for his movies Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises, created in the BBC’s Peaky Blinders, one of TV’s great crime series. The moodily corrosive tale of a volatile, family-led criminal gang of the same name set in Birmingham just after WW1 was a huge hit.

It was loosely grounded on uninviting fact but rendered in a style reminiscent of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In America and was gorgeously theatrical, arty, and claustrophobic, joining other recent ambitious dramas from the increasingly innovative UK producer such as The Shadowline, The Hour, Parade’s End and The Fall.

And his new series is just as edgy, stylish, and action-packed. It’s a story about how a band of misbegotten brothers came together in the soft sand and jagged rocks of the North African desert to form the British Army’s Special Air Service, known colloquially as the SAS. (“They are dead men just awaiting confirmation”, an onlooker says in the series of the men who will take “Who Dare Wins” as their motto, their insignia a winged dagger.)

It takes place during the darkest days of the Second World War in 1941, the motley force carrying out surprise attacks, sabotage missions and hit-and-run raids behind the Afrika Korps’ lines. In their rugged Jeeps, often carrying four mounted machine guns they attacked air bases spreading confusion and disquiet.

The series is based on historian and journalist Ben Macintyre’s nonfiction book of the same title, which is an authorised account of what the SAS did during the war made possible by the military organisation opening its archive for the first time. The book was highly successful even as it surprised many readers. “This is a book for readers of second world war history who like the Boy’s Own version of the conflict,” said a review in The Guardian. “The cast of characters could have stepped straight from a comic strip story.” The New York Times said it “reads like a mashup of ‘The Dirty Dozen’ and ‘The Great Escape’, with a sprinkling of ‘Ocean’s 11’ thrown in for good measure.”

Knight says that when approached by production company Kudos to adapt Macintyre’s version of the SAS’s origins, he thought it “a fairly routine origin for a book like this” but “an astonishing account of mad, wild and unexpected events” was revealed as he turned the pages.

“To create a drama from this amazing story I had to sculpt a world where things are a little bit heightened, much like how war and the absurdity of it heightens every emotion,” he says. “Bringing characters to life to inhabit this world, especially ones that are not archetypical heroes, was made so much easier by leaning on the facts and the truths. A more conventional approach would have been to simply focus on success upon success, but these are real men with real flaws who made mistakes along their paths to victories.” (The show is drolly prefaced by a warning: “Based on a true story, the events depicted which seem most unbelievable … are mostly true.”)

They are played by an extraordinary cast of actors. Connor Swindells of Sex Education is young Scottish aristocrat David Stirling, rarely without a tie even in battle. He perceived that enemy forces along the Mediterranean coast would be vulnerable to raids from the vast, seemingly impassable desert to the south. And he recruited other oddballs and desperados to take advantage of this vulnerability.

Game of Thrones’s Alfie Allen is Jock Lewes, the trainer and the voice of sanity in the emerging force. While Jack O’Connell from Skins is the violent, volatile Irishman Paddy Mayne, complex and enigmatic, recruited from a prison cell, where he was awaiting court martial for striking his commanding officer. And Dominic West is Dudley Clarke, British spy and a master of military deception.

As Knight says, “I think that all of the people who are the heroes in this, if there had not been a war, they would have ended up in jail and ended up in trouble because they weren’t equipped for normal society.”

To bring this wonderfully preposterous story to life, Kudos, responsible for an eclectic range of shows including Grantchester, Tin Star and Deadwater Fell, reunited director Tom Shankland with producer Stephen Smallwood. The pair previously worked together on fellow BBC drama The Serpent. That was the story of how the conman and murderer Charles Sobhraj was eventually caught and imprisoned. Apparently, it was a difficult shoot but paled in comparison to the problems faced with Rogue Heroes.

The production’s arrival in North Africa was met with soaring temperatures and daily sandstorms that appeared on the first day of shooting and tormented the production throughout. Smallwood told Drama Quarterly that no producer would shoot in 50°C under the most extreme circumstances, with actors in thick woollen uniforms and overcoats.

“But in the end, we had to do it,” he says. “The people we were telling stories about managed to do it while being shot at. We were doing it while eating bacon sandwiches.” But he, his directors and a bunch of committed actors never flinched in carrying out Knight’s rollicking origin story of the SAS.

“When you’re approaching a true story, particularly a Second World War story, you could approach it with a very reverential hat on and try to lean into the gravitas, the tragedy and the sadness,” Shankland says. “I felt that was not the approach, because I didn’t feel the real people. I wanted to find a style that leant into their swagger, their ‘Who Dares Wins’ mantra and their craziness. The overall style had to express something of their maverick, crazy individuality.”

In fact, at times Shankland parodies the war movies of the fifties, transcending the pieties of the genre: the way in which Hollywood reduced men to stereotypes and used combat as a pretence for mindless spectacle stoking the audience’s bloodlust and sense of patriotism. To Hollywood, all wars were more similar than they were different. As Francois Truffaut once said, “Every film about war ends up being pro-war.”

The opening sequence is brilliant, visually impressive but also mischievously establishing a contemporary edge to the style and tone. This is not a show for ageing war buffs nursing romantic legends and gory myths over port.

A long line of British military trucks is slowly moving through the empty windswept Egyptian desert, accompanied by a traditional sounding score reminiscent of dozens of British war movies. When it runs out of fuel there’s a confrontation between the insubordinate Stirling, full of hatred for his insipid command, resulting in the young officer screaming in rage. His angst is suddenly reinforced by the hammering guitars and drums of AC/DC’s If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It).

The first episode establishes the three leading characters, each a different type but convincingly realised, “mad f..kers” who become known as “The Three Musketeers”.

It’s the spring of 1941, the British Army perilously close to losing the war in the desert against the Axis powers. General Erwin Rommel and the recently formed Afrika Korps have pushed the British out of most of Libya. The Allies are just holding onto the vital forward supply base at ­Tobruk.

There is widespread discontent among battle-weary soldiers with the way they are commanded. As Stirling says, “In the words of Winston Churchill the whole English-speaking world is passing through a dark and deadly valley – in the words of the common soldier we are f..ked.”

Always desperate to escape the tedium of regimental restraint, he is convinced that small teams of highly trained men could achieve better results than larger groups using stealth and duplicity. Given the go-ahead in an unlikely meeting with the brass, he’s soon joined by Lewes but first they must prove they can pull off the notion of a parachute drop in the middle of a desert wasteland.

It’s superbly directed by Shankland, a immersive orchestration of sensations, though never losing sight of the characters that are at its centre, with occasional unexpected moments of humour.

But the series is accompanied by an unintended sense of irony. The show comes amid calls for greater transparency and accountability over Australia and Britain’s special forces. Both have been the focus of embarrassing scrutiny as cases of the alleged shootings of prisoners and civilians have emerged. Given the origins of the SAS this might not have been totally unexpected.

Rogue Heroes, streaming on SBS On Demand.