SAS Rogue Heroes, review: Steven Knight has a riot with this bombastic wartime saga

The SAS is so steeped in legend that we civilians will huff up almost any tall tale about it. This is to the advantage of Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight, who in SAS Rogue Heroes (BBC One, all episodes on iPlayer) has taken command of Ben Macintyre’s bestseller about the regiment’s North African genesis. The story gives him a licence to swill: to mix facts – the stuff of black and white newsreels – with colourised fictions.

“The events depicted which seem most unbelievable…,” a cheeky disclaimer advises, “are mostly true.” As the early episodes gleefully show, the regiment’s origin story is rooted in make-believe. 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).

There was no such militia, though news of its existence was disseminated to the gullible Axis. It’s very much in the spirit of Knight’s witty adaptation that Clarke is personally affronted when his splendid ruse is colonised by a real trio of vagabond soldiers.

Quite how maladjusted these superheroic dogs of war really are is established early on. Lt David Stirling (an insouciant Connor Swindells) is a scion of the Highland gentry fired by an Oedipal desire to outstrip his old man. Poetry-reading Ulster psycho Paddy Mayne (played with gruelling intensity by Jack O’Connell) arrives on screen mad, bad and dangerous and pretty much stays that way. 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.

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. Knight brings with him from gangland Birmingham a rambunctious taste for boys’ own machismo and cruel comic-strip violence, underscored by lashings of heavy metal, punk and, er, George Formby. There are even subtle infusions of Homer. Erasing any hint of sepia softness, our chaps say “f--k” an awful lot, glug much grog and slaughter as easily as they breathe. In Which We Serve this is not.

The whole teeming canvas – Cairo’s watering holes, the desert redoubt in the dunes – looks a picture. At times the ragged band of hunks with their goggle-eyed shades and customised fatigues come across as the Steampunk Air Service. The design department also knows how to brew up a tremendous desert storm.

To give us all a breather from the performative maleness of the story, Lewes glimpses a girlfriend in flashbacks, while Stirling has a dalliance with sultry Algerian spook Eve Mansour (Sofia Boutella). As a chic femme fatale she is almost a parody, and therefore fits right in. Also, when we first meet Brigadier Clarke he’s wearing lipstick and a frock.

Via Eve comes a collaboration with the Free French, bringing tension and subtitles. By the final episode the SAS, no longer a shadow entity and lauded by Churchill (a twinkling Jason Watkins), are fighting on so many fronts, and mainly in the dead of night, that the climax doesn’t have quite the narrative clout it might. But along the way it’s a handsome hoot.