How can you tell a new Sunday night action-drama has arrived from the pen of Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight?
It’s got a bunch of capable, action-packed blokes in grittily boy’s own situations, and most importantly their feats of action and daring come with a thoroughly period-inappropriate soundtrack.
Tobruk with an AC/DC soundtrack
That’s why SAS Rogue Heroes (BBC One) opens on Connor Swindells’ real-life protagonist David Stirling railing against his superiors’ failed plan to relieve the 1941 siege of Tobruk in what’s now Libya, while AC/DC’s If You Want Blood (You’ve Got It) blares away in the background.
It makes for a more exciting opening than any scene featuring Miles Jupp’s well-cast and blustering Major Knox coughing up to his staff’s inability to calculate petrol mileage in miles rather than kilometres deserves to be (“Frenchmen” is his excuse), but that’s the real meat of Knight’s scripts.
He tells gruff, masculine stories, but within that, his dialogue is perfectly sharp and observant, his characters compromised by their own frailties, even as – just like Cillian Murphy’s Tommy Shelby in Peaky Blinders – they manipulate the menace of their situation to their own needs.
A lord and a rebel
Stirling came from a family of Lords (he was born at his family’s Keir House, near Bridge of Allan), but he was also a wartime rebel who didn’t take kindly to authority and wanted to get things done his own way.
After some trial and error, he brought the special operations squad which later become known as the SAS together during the North African campaign of World War II, which is what this series is all about.
It’s based on author and historian Ben Macintyre’s 2017 book on the subject, giving it a sense of historical compliance at least, but the delivery is pure Knight.
By words alone
In one key early scene of the first episode, he takes out two guys hassling him in a Cairo bar with extended verbal violence alone.
“I am a particular kind of soldier… in war, we are allowed to be the beasts that we are… necks are a gift, God’s ultimate mistake.” The men get out of there fast.
While Stirling purrs away, cradling a budgie in his hand, besieged Jock Lewes (Alfie Allen) and other future comrades are shown brutally carrying out a night raid in the desert, while his Northern Irish colleague Paddy Mayne brutally batters a trio of Military Police who attack him in his cell.
It’s all pure Liam Neeson in Taken macho posturing – but it feels doubtless truthful to who these men were nonetheless.
There’s a sense of conflict to Stirling, who’s drunk and in search of redemption, and a hint of the undoubtedly brave but historically conflicted character he was.
Later on, the focused deputy head of France’s spying operation in Cairo Eve Mansour (Sofia Boutella) appears, reminding us that women also existed in the world.
The rest of the series could frankly go either way, but it was a gripping start and Knight’s earned a bit of trust.
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