“These men changed the course of the war through sheer determination and creativity”
Peaky Blinders creator STEVEN KNIGHT (left) tells us about his new drama centred on the founding of the SAS in the Second World War
Your new series, SAS Rogue Heroes, explores the formation of the Special Air Service. How did the show come about? I was given Ben MacIntyre’s book SAS: Rogue Heroes – an amazing story, but one I didn’t know particularly well. One of the reasons I wanted to make the series was that my dad fought in the Eighth Army in north Africa during the Second World War. When I was a kid, he didn’t tell me anything. He used to say: “We just were in the sun playing cowboys,” and I always wondered what really went on. The SAS creation story is set in that time, which really drew me to it.
How did you research the series?
One of the most important parts of the research was meeting [desert navigator] Mike Sadler, the only surviving member of the original SAS. From speaking to him, I got the personality of those people, because he was so understated. His memories are still quite vivid. He would say things like: “We approached the Italian and German lines, and they opened fire with machine guns, mortars and hand grenades – it wasn’t ideal.”
This turn of phrase captured what they were like: so matter-of-fact.
What should we make of SAS founder David Stirling (1915–90)? He’s become a slightly problematic figure. (In the 1970s, he created an organisation called Great Britain
75 that planned to step in and govern the country in the event of an “undemocratic event”.)
I didn’t want to go into who he became. We’re all human; things happen and we change. I think history should look at what he had done before – and we should also be aware that Stirling, Jock Lewes, Paddy Mayne and the others changed the course of the war through sheer determination and creativity. Heroes can be flawed, but they did what they did.
Operating behind enemy lines, the early SAS pioneered a kind of commandoplus warfare. How radical was this? They took the direct line between “this is where we are” and “this is what we want to achieve, so let’s just go and do it”. Stirling was in his mid-20s, and I think the sense of invulnerability you get when you’re young helped. These were really young people having an idea and executing it in the most horrendous circumstances, when the stakes could not have been higher: is fascism going to take over the world or not? You have to bear in mind that, but for their madness and bravery, it could have gone the other way.
SAS Rogue Heroes begins Sunday 30 October on BBC One and iPlayer