At this time of year much is made of the need for sunny escapism, hence Death in Paradise or The Split: Barcelona. And then there is Steven Knight’s fantastically stylish, volatile and rock’n’roll SAS Rogue Heroes, transporting us to the sun-parched Sicily and Italy of 1943.
It’s just that, with this escapism, the men merrily beat the living daylights out of each other snarling, “You mad f***er,” while getting a tan. Then they go and blow the enemy to hell. They make the Dirty Dozen look like wimps and they are the SAS.
Scratch that, they are the SRS (Special Raiding Squadron), because the meddling top brass at GHQ apparently want to disband the insane SAS regiment.
That’s pretty much what’s going on at the start of series two, which kicked off to the rat-a-tat of a military drum: it is 1943, two years on from series one’s depiction of north African desert escapades, and the renegade SRS maniacs entering the snout of Sicily will go on to take “the whole hog right up to the tail”, before clearing the enemy coastal defences of Italy. It is a near-suicidal mission — “utter f***ing madness” as Paddy Mayne calmly explains to his men — but it will clear the path for the Allied advance on Europe.
So yes, they are heroes — and yet it remains an oddly provocative series, going beyond mere boy’s own exploits. I’m not just talking about the use of the Fall on the soundtrack, either. Take the first five minutes, when we were reintroduced to the Irish firebrand Mayne (Jack O’Connell), furious for not being allowed to attend his father’s funeral, and beating up military police in a swish Cairo bar, apparently quite happy to kill with his bare hands.
It prods you to ponder where heroism ends and borderline psychopathy begins. In Libya in 1941, Mayne once killed about 30 of the enemy sitting and playing cards in cold blood. What is one’s moral code during war?
Mayne was, of course, an incredibly courageous soldier, but the requirements of wartime heroism were here put under even darker scrutiny later in episode one, when the SRS boys were ordered to leave British soldiers, whose boat had sunk, to die in the water during the night-time incursion into Sicily.
During the briefing beforehand Mayne had ordered his men, “You will leave them to drown” — a shocking moment. “These are the last moments where you won’t have images of drowning men in your heads. Make the most of them.”
As the William Blake-quoting, newly promoted Mayne, O’Connell has a powder-keg charisma — a low-growling wolf about to erupt into a rage — which is vital to explain why violent men would put their lives on the line in carrying out his orders. Several of his new recruits are compelling in a brutal kind of way, with Mark Rowley a hilariously unhinged Jock McDiarmid, and Theo Barklem-Biggs’s Reg Seekings getting a particularly disturbing storyline later on.
But it’s the contrast between Mayne and his new superior, Gwilym Lee’s suave Bill Stirling (brother of the SAS “midwife” David, now languishing in a prison with a beard), that distinguishes the early episodes. With his patrician bearing, Lee looks perfect in the role of Stirling, who spelt out his character as “I’m more patient, less rash, more thoughtful, less impulsive”.
Mayne and his men innately fail to respect this posho lieutenant colonel, and who defers to whom here can seem like mice in a lab experiment.
In two-hander scenes, Mayne and Stirling’s dance of distrust are well-scripted. Mayne can’t abide his new superior, who — with some justification — doesn’t have faith in Mayne to “draw the line between enemy and friend and all those in between” during their missions. Mayne broods on this, eventually thundering, “I know where to draw the line!”
Even with its self-reflective interludes (and Dominic West’s supremo Dudley Clarke now feels somewhat superfluous), SAS Rogue Heroes is at times something rare — an unashamed celebration of tough masculinity. And at such moments, as when the lunatics arrive in the port of Suez to Madness’s Night Boat to Cairo, its energy is impossible to resist.
★★★★☆
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