Refreshingly macho: BBC1’s SAS Rogue Heroes reviewed

Sunday’s SAS Rogue Heroes – about the founding of perhaps Britain’s most famous regiment – began with a revealing variation on the usual caption in fact-based dramas about how everything in them really happened, except the things that didn’t. ‘The events depicted which seem most unbelievable,’ it read, ‘are mostly true.’

And from there the same sense of somewhat incredulous, head-shaking admiration for its subjects remained. The unexpected result was a 2022 BBC drama that took an unashamedly gung-ho approach to macho heroism – and that, give or take a spot of swearing and heavy-metal music, didn’t feel very different in tone from those classic British second world war films of the 1950s. So much so, in fact, that you couldn’t help wondering whether any writer less hot than Steven Knight (creator of Peaky Blinders) would have been allowed to get away with it.

We were, mind you, reminded of how hopeless the British Army was in the early years of the conflict. The opening scene featured a 1941 convoy off to save Tobruk running out of petrol mid-desert. This latest cock-up was the last straw for David Stirling (Connor Swindells), who, aghast at being denied the chance to slaughter some Germans, headed straight to a Cairo bar. Once there, he downed several whiskies and shared with a pair of Australian soldiers his theory of how the fighting should be conducted – i.e. very violently indeed. ‘Eyes,’ he pointed out, ‘are for thumbs to push into the brain.’ (Not surprisingly, the Aussies immediately finished their drinks and left.)

Luckily, Stirling wasn’t the only frustrated British semi-psychopath in north Africa. Outside Tobruk, Jock Lewes (Alfie Allen) conducted a highly practical seminar for his men on how to kill 50 Germans. In an army jail, where he’d been imprisoned for beating up a military policeman, Paddy Mayne (Jack O’Connell) took a break from quoting A.E. Housman to beat up several more.

No wonder that when Lewes had the bright idea of forming a new parachute regiment to attack the enemy’s supply lines (a plan his superiors apparently didn’t notice), the commendably ‘mad’ Stirling and Mayne were high on his list of target recruits. To sound them out, he set up a meeting in a Cairo club where, adding to the old-school feel, the discussions took place in the presence of a belly dancer. Not that she was the only woman we saw on Sunday. There were also a selection of chorus girls in their underwear, and a duly chic French agent, complete with cigarette and heavy lipstick.

At this stage, the men’s goal – to gather a few like-minded colleagues and ‘win the war’ – might seem a little ambitious. Yet in a programme that’s pretty bonkers itself, you wouldn’t want to rule it out completely. Either way, judging from the first episode, we should have a lot of slightly alarming fun seeing how far they get.

But, as it transpired, the BBC wasn’t finished with eccentric fact-based television for the week. First Contact: an Alien Encounter mixed interviews with scientists, ‘repurposed footage’, spooky music, endless vistas of stars and ill-lit dramatised scenes to imagine what might happen if extra-terrestrials show up. (Happily, this was not a programme ever intimated by ‘if’s, however colossal.)

What followed was occasionally intriguing, but ultimately a bit unsatisfying – the problem being that it always felt torn between the demands of scientific responsibility and exciting telly. Naturally, the scientists it chose were those who believe there’s advanced life in the universe somewhere – because, well, there just must be. Even the most bullish of them, though, couldn’t come close to giving us what we really wanted: the possibility of some sort of extra-terrestrial version of a Zoom call.

Instead, the scenario the show came up with started with a signal coming through – although not one readily distinguishable from white noise. Fortunately, a few days later, an ‘Artefact’ 200km long was spotted traversing the sky at a fair old lick of three million km/h. All of which seemed promising for a while – until that pesky scientific responsibility kicked in again, leading to a series of anti-climactic conclusions that left us alone in the universe once more, at least for the past billion years or so.

Still, what did feel convincing was what might happen if all this stuff that won’t happen happened. First Contact, for example, did a fine job of imagining the response on Twitter to apparently imminent alien arrival. Equally believable was the mix of extraordinary human cleverness and extraordinary human stupidity we’d be likely to display. On the one hand, in the quest to identify the Artefact’s origins, our space telescopes would work out the size, temperature and potential habitability of planets hundreds of light years away. On the other, back on Earth, we’d instantly empty the shops of all toilet paper.