Too much backstory makes for heavy going in the BBC’s SAS Rogue Heroes, finds Griselda Heppel

 

Funny old thing, fiction. You’d think a story set in wartime featuring a bunch of young, fearless, spirited soldiers getting together to risk their lives blowing the blazes out of the enemy could not fail to grip right from the start. Especially when turned into a TV series set in embattled Cairo in 1940, bristling with intrigue, with a huge cast of extras and plenty of brawls and scenes of soldiers haring through the desert in jeeps and parachuting out of planes into sandstorms.

 

So why am I finding SAS Rogue Heroes (BBC iPlayer) such heavy going? 

I should clarify: the story itself isn’t fiction. All the main characters, bar one (who I’ll come to in a moment) are real: brave mavericks, intolerant of authority and frustrated by the Allies’ failure to stem the German advance through North Africa, who came together to form their own unit operating behind enemy lines. Venturing deep into the desert, they attacked enemy aircraft bases, blowing up huge numbers of planes on the ground, thereby inflicting heavy losses on Rommel.

Thus the Special Air Service was born. A more exciting, real life story you could not wish for. 

And that’s perhaps where the problem lies. I haven’t read the book on which the series is based, but author Ben Macintyre cannot write a dull account of anything. Translating the story to the screen however seems to involve lengthy back stories involving insubordination, clever japes, reckless schemes and violent attacks on superior officers, all to establish character, obviously, but at the expense of any narrative drive. A lot seems to happen in the first hour-long episode but in fact nothing does, and amidst all the turmoil I found myself yawning and looking at my watch, with the weirdest sense of being back in the 1960s with a copy of Boys’ Own or The Eagle. Worse, a decision has been made that there must be a main female character in this very masculine set up, so the totally fictitious figure of a French Algerian spy is introduced. Clever and alluring, she is allowed initially to match SAS leader David Stirling in strength of character, before quickly being reduced to anxiously waiting for news of him in the background. Realistically it’s difficult to give her much else to do but why include her in the first place, when she didn’t even exist? 

By Episode Three things at last start to happen and the filming is terrific. Fast, exhilarating scenes of racing across the desert and planting explosives on German planes under cover of darkness had me glued to the screen. Only to become unglued by a series of cringingly sentimental scenes in which a wounded Jock Lewis hallucinates that his girlfriend is there. These should be deeply moving but done so surprisingly badly that they are anything but. And of course they wouldn’t be in Macintyre’s book. 

This is the danger of fictionalising history to make it work better on television. It doesn’t. You just end up with something that is neither purely true nor purely fiction, but falls flat in between. Those real, courageous founders of the SAS deserve better. 

OUT NOW 

The Fall of a Sparrow by Griselda Heppel

BRONZE WINNER in the Wishing Shelf Awards 2021 

By the author of Ante's Inferno  

WINNER of the People's Book Prize

www.griseldaheppel.com 

https://griseldaheppel.wordpress.com.