SAS: Rogue Heroes – the Authorized Wartime History

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It’s 1941, Egypt, and this is the story of three men: David Stirling ( Sex Education’s 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. Making sure everyone was drinking enough water, eating enough food and it was a lovely environment to be in. What they put up with was unthinkably more distressing and traumatic than anything that us TV people were having to put up with.

They fight to keep Paddy’s legacy alive, and are keen to point out that the ‘muscle for hire’ image many people remember him for doesn’t tell the full story. He then destroyed the aircraft with Lewes bombs and even tore the control panel out of one plane with his bare hands. When Tom Shankland, who I worked with on Les Miserables a few years ago, rang me up and said “I’m doing this, do you want to be involved? 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.

Gwilym Lee (The Great, Bohemian Rhapsody) joins SAS Rogue Heroes for series two to play Bill Stirling, David Stirling’s brother and founder of the 2SAS regiment, while Con O’Neill (Happy Valley, Our Flag Means Death) will play General Montgomery.

Britain’s Special Air Service—or SAS—was the brainchild of David Stirling, a young, gadabout aristocrat whose aimlessness in early life belied a remarkable strategic mind. Dudley the man, when he wasn’t hatching plots and lies to tell the Germans, would sometimes wear delicious long gloves and dress up as a woman, and there are photographs of him doing that. I used to be a cadet myself - I was in the 126 Air Training Corps City of Derby squadron from when I was 11 to 15. Apart from the two to three day period where I was suffering from heat stroke and food poisoning at the same time… that was not nice.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.

Bloodlands season 2 ending explained: What happened in the finale of the James Nesbitt police drama? But the SAS did bring to life the plucky, maverick, individualist hero of the comic strip, a very British way of making war.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. Jack O'Connell plays Paddy Mayne in SAS: Rogue Heroes , but Tom Hardy was originally reported to be taking the role, which was incorrect. It was a fantastic moment in my life - being somewhere that big and feeling so small in the middle of it was really quite special.