>
CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews the weekend’s TV: It takes a spy master in a lady’s dress to spice up SAS exploits
SAS Rogue Heroes
Rating: ****
Black Sand
Rating: **
Pearls skewed and eyeshadow smeared over half his face, Dominic West staggers out of bed in a velvet dress and takes an invigorating sip of whiskey.
You’d be forgiven for thinking this was yet another slanderous invention of The Crown, in which West plays the future King Charles III as an obsessively vain and treacherous conspirator. This time, however, the Old Etonian actor takes liberties with a very different real-life figure, Cairo spymaster Dudley Clarke, in SAS Rogue Heroes (BBC1).
Dominic West plays Cairo spy master Dudley Clarke in SAS Rogue Heroes on BBC One
Whether the sergeant was actually a transvestite is disputed. Early in the war, Dudley was arrested in women’s clothes, which he claimed to be wearing for an undercover operation — though a photo of him wearing high heels and elbow-length gloves suggests it wasn’t a convincing disguise.
I suspect writer Steven Knight was inspired by Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet and the character of Lieutenant Commander Scobie, a British spy in Egypt with a penchant for hanging out around the harbor in women’s clothing.
Wherever the idea came from, West’s intervention gives the story a much-needed twist. Without him, SAS Rogue Heroes – despite the frequent explosions of violence and the poetic flights of extended dialogue – threatens to get a bit monotonous.
All the other characters only want one thing: to kill Nazis. This was summed up in a segment where aristocratic maverick David Stirling (Connor Swindells) picked up recruits. To earn a place in his special unit, all a soldier had to do was to express an unquenchable distaste for Germans.
Pictured together from left to right: Jock Lewes (played by Alfie Allen), David Stirling (played by Connor Swindells), and Paddy Mayne (played by Jack O’Connell)
Stirling’s main allies, fighter Paddy Mayne (Jack O’Connell) and uptight Jock Lewes (Alfie Allen), are united in the same ambition. So are the blimp generals and sultry French spy Eve (Sofia Boutella). They may have different ideas about the best way to win the war, but none of them have anything else on their mind. There are no subplots, no distractions.
Stirling’s only plan is to blow up Luftwaffe planes on the ground like grouse before they have a chance to fly, and by the time he’d explained this for the eighth time, it was getting tiresome.
West, as the wildly theatrical and selfish eccentric Dudley, enlivened the proceedings. Stirling is so determined that we know he will carry out his plan, even if it kills everyone.
But Dudley is capable of sabotaging everything and everyone, including herself. That’s much more interesting.
The proceedings desperately needed some livening up in Black Sands (Alibi), an Icelandic detective series that moves as fast as a melting glacier. Aldis Amah Hamilton, who also writes the series, plays detective Anita Elinardottir, who returns just in time to the coastal town where she grew up to lead an investigation into the death of a German tourist.
Aldis Amah Hamilton, who is also a co-writer on the show, plays detective Anita Elinardottir in Black Sands
Even by Scandi-noir standards, the first episode was quiet, until the last moments. Our heroine had been shopping at the local supermarket and flirting with the cashier for about ten minutes when a woman stumbled into the store, furious and covered in blood.
Worse, she didn’t speak Icelandic! Could you imagine?
Fans of crime thrillers in the Arctic may overlook an uneven pace, but the behavior of the police in Black Sands makes for a much more inconvenient problem. While keeping watch over the dead woman, two young officers joked about whether they found her attractive.
In the wake of sickening news reports of police sharing photos of female murder victims, such callousness is hard to forgive.