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.
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