SAS Rogue Heroes

Meet the cast and creatives behind Steven Knight's drama about the chaos, comedy and tragedy of war.

I’m doing it in a way that looks to channel their spirit and make it feel as fun and as timeless and rebellious and as cool as I think they were. To me it’s exactly the same, and I think if you lose that or forget it then you can suddenly be in a world of pain, stress, conflict and it seems pointless because usually you’re with all of these super cool people who want to do this super cool thing. I’m in such awe and admiration of what they were able to accomplish that I think everyone should give it a go and watch the show, read the book and watch the documentaries because these men are courageous and fascinating. I felt that it was everything I thought it might be, suddenly all the images that came into my head were much more entertaining, zany and about the kind of craziness of the situation in what these guys did and how they did it. Dudley Clarke said that his job was jokes and tricks, so he just operated out of a basement and made up lies to spin the Germans. I think that is a quality that enables Jock to go out there and be this machine of war. Working with him has been one of the highlights of the job, just to see him step up to the mark and take it all in his stride. And then they had this sort of yearning to go and be in a battle field, in a life or death situation. And then we had to find David Stirling and I count myself quite fortunate that I was included in part of that process and was able to read with one or two actors for the role. I think within war you have real extreme versions of that and I get the impression that that’s what gets him going, focusing on the psychology of the sort of person it would take. It was so hard to film out there in the Sahara in those conditions, but it brought a real truth to it that you couldn’t have cheated in any other circumstance. 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.

You'll know him as the reformed bully in Sex Education, but now Connor Swindells has swapped the classroom for the scorching heat of the desert in his new ...

Just push the fuck-it button and have a go.” In the pandemic, Swindells developed a mild obsession with the chef and adventurer “Let yourself have fun and let yourself fail,” he says, as Moose pulls him home. And just doing it all with a wink and a smile.” “But I read the scripts and they were awesome, so I very much wanted it to happen, which was even more frustrating.” Actually, I do enjoy that pressure of: ‘How are we going to get through this situation where I am seconds away from vomiting?’ And I really do have dysentery when I’m talking about it in the show.” And it’s important to remember that you came from just digging holes in the earth.” He had done a production of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at school and enjoyed it, but didn’t think much more about it. “It’s like he was built in a lab for comedy. Phoebe died of bowel cancer when he was seven and Swindells – who is the youngest of four brothers – moved with his father to live with his grandparents. Is Gerwig is a fan of the show then? The plan had been to sit in a café with Swindells and talk about his fast-escalating career, including roles in the new TV drama from Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight and the live-action Barbie movie.

SAS have become the three most famous letters in militaria. They immediately bring to mind daring raids behind enemy lines, and to people of a certain age, the ...

SAS Rogue Heroes takes on the same aesthetic but swaps out the growling thump of Royal Blood and The Kills for the heavier thrashing of Skunk Anansie. It's all in the name of style and will suit some viewers more than others. Knight recently said at an event to launch the series that to make the show appear more realistic he had to tone down real-life events "so many times". The characterisation of Stirling is also broadly in keeping with his spirit as a man born for boldness. Take for example, the scene where Stirling clears out a bar by throwing a dummy grenade onto a snooker table – it's tame compared to the real version. We're swiftly introduced to Lieutenant David Stirling, a young soldier, a maverick and a rogue who has issues with authority.

New BBC One drama SAS Rogue Heroes is based on real British history, but how much of what it details is true and what did the team use for inspiration?

[subscribe now](http://radiotimes.com/magazine-subscription?utm_term=evergreen-article) and get the next 12 issues for only £1. However, the team behind SAS Rogue Heroes has stressed that they have tried, where possible, to stick to the reality of what happened. They changed the course of the battle." "Individuals can take control of a few moments and that changes everything. "We sought the advice of the SAS Regimental Association, who were super supportive throughout the process. The book has since been retitled SAS Rogue Heroes to align with the series. I think there’s a sort of smoothness about fiction about war, but everything I've learned from people who have experienced it is it's just chaos. And so I’ve chosen that when that character dies, they die and it's a shock. The series is based on real British history, but how much of what it details is true? [RadioTimes.com](https://RadioTimes.com) and other press, executive producer Karen Wilson said: "We have taken that very seriously. Eve, like a lot of them, used methods that were born within her instinct and her intelligence." And it's just amazing.

Jack O'Connell, Alfie Allen and Connor Swindells all play real-life soldiers in the BBC Two show.

The war hero died in a car accident in 1955. [Terms of use,](https://www.independent.co.uk/service/user-policies-a6184151.html) [Cookie policy](https://www.independent.co.uk/service/cookie-policy-a6184186.html) and [Privacy notice.](https://www.independent.co.uk/service/privacy-policy-a6184181.html) to be violent”. [Privacy policy](https://policies.google.com/privacy?hl=en) and [Terms of service](https://policies.google.com/terms?hl=en) apply. [The Telegraph](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/sas-rogue-heroes-star-jack-oconnell-society-wants-lock-lads/) that Mayne, as “a man who went to war”, was “required... [The Times](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/sas-rogue-heroes-star-jack-oconnell-society-wants-lock-lads/) that the new TV adaptation of his book has a “rocking modern soundtrack, gripping action and some superb individual performances”. [Sign up](https://amzn.to/3wUCpW9) [shared that he had to tone down the script](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/26/sas-rogue-heroes-real-life-stories-bbc-toned-new-series/) to make the true tories of the war heroes seem more plausible, with the series carrying a disclaimer that the events in the show “seem most unbelievable” but “are mostly true”. [Steven Knight](https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/steven-knight), and based on bestselling author Ben Macintyre’s book, SAS Rogue Heroes stars Jack O’Connell, [Alfie Allen](/topic/alfie-allen) and [Connor Swindells](/topic/connor-swindells) as the fearless real-life soldiers who formed the Special Forces unit.

Alfie Allen stars as Jock Lewes in new BBC series SAS Rogue Heroes which begins on Sunday night.

The synopsis for the first episodes reads: “Spring 1941. that was not nice.” Stirling gets permission to recruit the toughest, boldest and brightest soldiers for a small undercover unit that will create mayhem behind enemy lines. “I think that is a quality that enables Jock to go out there and be this machine of war.” “And then they had this sort of yearning to go and be in a battle field, in a life or death situation,” he recalled. He said of the conditions the cast filmed in: “I have shot in very cold conditions before so this was the polar opposite to that.

SAS: Rogue Heroes is a World War Two BBC drama that roars out of the blocks like a fully-formed beast. Read our review.

So, even if war dramas aren’t your normal kit bag, give it a go. [Is SAS: Rogue Heroes based on a true story and how accurate is it?](https://metro.co.uk/2022/10/29/sas-rogue-heroes-is-it-based-on-a-true-story-17662425/?ico=more_text_links) The performances are top drawer. And it does. [creation of the SAS](https://metro.co.uk/2022/10/28/sas-rogue-heroes-star-tomm-glyn-carney-meets-102-year-old-war-hero-17659477/) enlists punk legends The Clash, The Damned and more to join AC/DC in evoking the madcap maverick spirit of the enterprise. [SAS Rogue Heroes ](https://metro.co.uk/2022/10/29/sas-rogue-heroes-is-it-based-on-a-true-story-17662425/)that’s hard to resist.

From the maker of Peaky Blinders, SAS Rogue Heroes is the show we think everyone will be talking about.

He added: "Such an amazing, unbelievable, incredible story, we all think we know who [the SAS] are, but when I started to research the Ben Macintyre book... "To make it seem realistic I turned it into a dummy hand grenade. Speaking at the British Film Institute, Steven explained: "It's never been written down, it came as a consequence [of meeting] Mike Sadler who is the last surviving member of the original SAS.

Sex Education's Connor Swindells, Jack O'Connell, Alfie Allen and Sofia Boutella star in Steven Knight's new drama SAS Rogue Heroes.

He added: "SAS Rogue Heroes tells the true story of war... Viewers can tune into the first episode from 9pm on the channel. "He fights for permission to recruit the toughest, boldest and brightest soldiers for a small undercover unit that will create mayhem behind enemy lines. Convinced that traditional commando units don't work, he creates a radical plan that flies in the face of all accepted rules of modern warfare. Steven Knight's new drama SAS Rogue Heroes is here. Other key cast members include Jack O'Connell, Game of Thrones star Alfie Allen, Sofia Boutella, and The Crown's Dominic West.

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).

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.

A review of BBC1's SAS Rogue Heroes, by Steven Knight, the writer behind Peaky Blinders.

It’s a cracking idea for a story but one sprinkled with so many far-fetched events it needs to get the period detail spot on. And while it’s not quite fair to say that SAS Rogue Heroes follows the same formula as the smash-hit saga of Tommy Shelby and co, the two shows are certainly blood brothers. Where Knight has drawn the line in the sand between fact and fiction is hard to pin down but, in a firecracker of an opening episode, it feels like we’ve been parachuted directly into both the unforgiving Sahara desert and the smoky backstreets of Cairo as the seed of the idea plants itself in posh boy David Stirling’s irreverent brain. And if they are, well, to borrow from AC/DC’s signature theme… That’s a lot of bases covered. A World War II adventure that motors along to the power chords of AC/DC?

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

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.

From grenades to a disastrous parachute jump, this is the true story behind Steven Knight's follow-up to Peaky Blinders, SAS: Rogue Heroes.

Despite the protests of an airman on the ground, they take to the skies, shot and scored with the bombast typical of a Knight drama. With Stirling and Lewes determined to prove that the concept of the SAS could have actual utility, they take to the skies for a parachute run — both largely unequipped and inexperienced. [Alfie Allen](https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/peaky-blinders-spin-off-series)'s prim and proper Jock Lewes — the man who would come to be the principle trainer behind the boys of the SAS — meets with Swindells' Stirling at a down-market club full of squadies. “I've just got back from a deep desert patrol, and I,” Stirling says, priming a grenade, “am mad as fuck.” He lobs it, and it nestles next to the reds. According to Knight, the fearsome regiment itself has given the series “the nod of approval". Indeed, you might take this to be the driving notion behind the (mostly) true-to-life action of this SAS origin tale, beginning in May 1941 somewhere in the Egyptian desert.