SAS: Rogue Heroes (BBC One) might sound like a documentary on some dusty history channel lurking around the last pages of the TV guide, but Steven Knight’s first time back on the BBC since the end of Peaky Blinders is a big and brash adventure drama about the formation of the SAS in 1941. It is witty, pacy, confident, and, as you might expect, occasionally very violent.
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. It is, we are promised, “based on a true story” (as told in Ben MacIntyre’s book of the same name), but it is only “mostly true”. In interviews, Knight has said that he had to tone some elements of it down, so that it wouldn’t stretch viewers’ belief.
