Episode 1

In this first episode, Ben starts at the very beginning of the formation of the SAS - at the height of the war, in the heat of the North African desert in 1941. A bored, eccentric young British army officer starts to form his own plans to take on the German and Italian forces with an elaborate scheme that would prove to be imaginative, radical and entirely against the rules.

This officer was David Archibald Stirling, an aristocratic dreamer who once held lofty ambitions to be an artist or a famous mountaineer but now, with the war in the desert reaching its most desperate stage, Stirling has a vision for a new kind of war: attacking the enemy where they least expect it - from behind their own lines.

With exclusive access to the SAS's 1987 filmed interviews with Stirling and the other original SAS members, Ben reveals how Stirling succeeded in convincing the many in British High Command who opposed this radical new way of warfare, how he began training a small elite fighting force, and how his new covert tactics helped the Allies to victory in the desert.