SAS: Rogue Heroes is still about as subtle as an earthquake

When SAS: Rogue Heroes first arrived on our screens in 2022, it roared like a malevolent comet. Adapted by Steven Knight (Peaky Blinders) from a book by Ben MacIntyre, it claimed to tell the origin story of the formation of the SAS during the Second World War – a maverick, and highly under-the-radar, crew who’d undertake only the most suicidal of missions in pursuit of victory over Hitler – while also gleefully tipping into fiction to better flesh out characters and make it all maximum fun. It featured a top drawer cast, too: Connor Swindells (Sex Education), Jack O’Connell (Skins), Dominic West (The Crown).  

For the viewer at home, observing its chaotic glee was a little like watching a fight between Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie over who was the most alpha. And now it’s back for more. Where the first series focused on establishing the SAS’s credentials, the second builds on the outfit’s improbable early success. Maybe they really will be able to help turn the war effort in our favour?

With Lt-Col David Stirling (Swindells) languishing as a prisoner of war, it was time for Paddy Mayne (O’Connell) to step up and become the leader he never wanted to be.

We found him, angry as ever – Mayne is always angry – in Morocco, smashing chairs and tables in a fit of apoplectic pique, before lamping the policemen that had come to calm him. When a British sergeant major type then visited him in jail to inform of his unlikely promotion, Mayne’s reaction was to drop his keks and take a literal shit in front of him, he the sort of character to show deference to no one.

To Italy next, where Mayne was tasked with breaking in the newcomers after so many of that initial team had been killed in action. Only those with psychopathic tendencies applied for the SAS, the tacit suggestion that, had they not, they’d be languishing in high security facilities back home.

And so the motliest of crews were corralled, bringing with them their regional British accents, their moustaches and pipes – and, in one case, a dog – to have all the remaining humanity drained out of them and replaced only with murderous intent.

During one mission, we watched as Mayne walked confidently into enemy fire, his protective helmet swaggeringly removed. He did this not because he was an early forerunner of The Terminator, but simply because Mayne is the lead character, and the script requires his survival. Pinches of salt are necessary, enough for chips.

Back at home in London, specifically the Ritz hotel, Lt-Col Dudley Clarke (West) passed much of his war sipping cocktails. Not all Brits were lunatics during the Second World War, you know. Some of the cleverer ones were engaged in that duplicitous game of “intelligence”. Here, he was assisted by one of the show’s few women, Eve Mansour (Sofia Boutella), an Algerian working with the French government. She wears pretty dresses, and likes the rain.

But these scenes were mostly palate cleansers before returning to the SAS, who were by now busy shooting Italians in the face before the Italians could shoot them, all of it so stylised that the accompanying sound effects sounded suspiciously like “biff! bang! pow!”.

SAS: Rogue Heroes is, frankly, subtle in the way an earthquake is subtle, but then that’s rather the point. War is loud, and war is hell. It is also, from the perspective of this series opener, an absolute hoot. It looks like it’s going to be a bumpy ride, chaps. Strap in.

‘SAS: Rogue Heroes’ continues tomorrow at 9pm on BBC One