Tom Hardy prepares for his toughest role yet as the hard-drinking killer who helped found the SAS in Peaky Blinders creator's new drama
- Brawny British actor expected to play Lieutenant-Colonel Blair 'Paddy' Mayne
- Mayne was a maverick founding member of elite SAS regiment at start of WWII
- The show will be based on historian Ben Macintyre's book SAS: Rogue Heroes
- The programme will see Hardy reunite with Peaky Blinders writer Steven Knight
Tom Hardy is preparing for his toughest role yet as the hard-drinking killer who helped found the SAS in the creator of Peaky Blinders' new drama.
The brawny British actor is expected to be cast as Lieutenant-Colonel Blair 'Paddy' Mayne, a founding member of the elite regiment in 1941.
The television programme, based on historian Ben Macintyre's book SAS: Rogue Heroes, will see Hardy, 41, reunite with Peaky Blinders writer Steven Knight - who worked with him when he played gangster Alfie Solomons.
Peaky Blinders star Tom Hardy (pictured) is expected to play Lieutenant-Colonel Blair 'Paddy' Mayne, a founding member of the elite regiment in 1941 in a new television adaptation
Ruthless: The 'redoubtable' Paddy Mayne pictured with a canine friend. was a 'brilliant soldier but a troubled soul with a very short fuse'
It will rediscover the forming of the SAS and their actions in the Second World War but also delve into the psychology of the hardy killers.
Knight, 60, told the Times: 'This will be a secret history telling the story of exceptional soldiers who decided battles and won wars only to then disappear back into the shadows.'
'We will shine a light on remarkable true events informed by the people who shaped them.'
Who dares: SAS founder David Stirling (right) and his band of mavericks training in the desert in the early days of the SAS. The new programme will be based on Ben Macintyre's book SAS: Rogue Heroes
Martin Haines, joint managing director for producers Kudos, added to Vanity: 'The sheer scale of the adventures brilliantly told by Ben, and the extraordinary and varied characters involved, make this an incredibly exciting project.
'With Steven on board we have the opportunity to redefine the genre completely.'
In 2015, Hardy was seen with Mayne's biography on his car dashboard and has often expressed an interest in the army.
Mayne's life was not as glamorous as Hardy's, with Macintyre's feelings towards the serviceman mixed.
Special Air Service soldiers pose with an armoured vehicle in the Western Desert. In 2015 Hardy was seen with Mayne's biography on his car dashboard and has often expressed an interest in the army
He said Mayne was a 'brilliant soldier but a troubled soul with a very short fuse', adding he was 'truculent, troubled, and dangerously unpredictable, particularly when drunk, which was often'.
The Northern Irish-born soldier was '17 stone of highly volatile human explosive,' he said.
In writing his book, Macintyre had access to a confidential, 500-page 'war diary' compiled by the SAS's archivists.
It contained first-hand reports from those who took part in numerous clandestine operations, from the regiment's formation in 1941 until 1945.
The tone was set by the 25-year-old David Stirling, an aristocratic Scots Guards officer renowned for heavy drinking and disobeying orders.
Reckless but mannered: David Stirling raved action and the company of soldiers, but his boisterous exterior belied a lonely man prone to periodic depressions and inner turmoil. He described one of Mayne's decisions as an 'over-callous execution in cold blood'
But the young solider managed to blag a meeting with a general and said Britain needed to deploy soldiers behind German lines in the war.
Some influential soldiers such as General Bernard Montgomery dismissed 'the boy Stirling as 'mad, quite, quite mad', but Stirling took Winston Churchill's son Randolph on a mission to Benghazi who later told his father of the fun he had.
Prime Minister Churchill sanction just under 100 men to form the Special Air Service regiment - with their first mission being to the Libyan desert in November 1941.
The sabotage missions they embarked on in the Second World War involved trekking up to 300 miles across the Sahara, where they would pounce on German and Italian air bases, blow apart parked planes and kill any who tried to stop them.
Winston Churchill talks to his son, Captain Randolph Churchill, at a North African airfield under the wing of an aircraft following the end of the Desert War in February 1943. Stirling took Winston Churchill's son Randolph on a mission to Benghazi who later told his father of the fun he had
How did Winston Churchill save the SAS after its first mission to the Libyan desert ended in failure?
Operation Squatter, was an unmitigated disaster. A huge storm, which Stirling had been warned about, blew him and his team many miles off target.
Men were dragged along the desert floor to their deaths by their parachutes, which failed in the high winds. Only 21 of the 55 men survived - with two men critically injured left to die.
Former Prime Minister Winston Churchill is photographed outside 10 Downing Street
The objective was to blow up a series of German airfields but it was never achieved and Whitehall wanted answers.
Officials thought spies should carry out the work of the force but the SAS prevailed with the backing of Churchill after his son, Randolph, was reported back to is father after being invited on a raid.
When Churchill met Stirling in August 1942 the SAS had developed advanced survival techniques used in hit-and-run raids, while the mystery and intrigue around them increased at home.
At a dinner party in Cairo where they met, Churchill was enthralled with Stirling and his accounts of his daring men.
Stirling took the opportunity to propose an expansion of the SAS in size and scope which would also bring all other special forces under his control.
Churchill gave him and his men his full backing with the proposals.
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Some in the unit could be described as ultimate survivors, but others were natural killers.
Mayne, who was Stirling's second in command, fit this category and was renown for doing more damage to enemy air power than any fighter pilot.
But he took great pleasure in slaughter, with one extract retelling how he gunned down around 30 enemy soldiers when they were in the middle of a party.
He 'kicked open the door and stood there with my Colt .45. We were a frightening sight, bearded and with unkempt hair.
'The Germans stared at us in complete silence until I said: 'Good evening', at which point a young German moved slowly backwards. I shot him, then turned and fired at another.'
A heavily-armed jeep patrol from 'L' Detachment SAS in North Africa', January 18, 1943. The sabotage missions they embarked on in the Second World War involved trekking up to 300 miles across the Sahara, where they would pounce on German and Italian air bases
David Stirling said he was 'was obliged to rebuke Paddy Mayne for over-callous execution in cold blood of the enemy' during their operation in the Libyan desert
The desperate plight of the British Army in the winter of 1941, with the German field marshal Rommel's tanks on the move from Libya into Egypt and a major defeat on the cards gave Stirling his chance to prove the SAS.
On December 5, 1941, the SAS took up residence in Jalo, a fly-blown, roastingly-hot oasis with a wooden fort deep in the vast Libyan desert.
While Stirling was with 14 SAS recruits trying to sabotage Sirte, the largest airfield, 350 miles away from their base, Paddy Mayne had driven with the rest of the team, a dozen men in all, to Tamet, a different airfield 28 miles away.
Dozens of planes were lined up. In single file the raiders slipped onto the airfield undetected and came across a large hut, from which a light shone and sounds of merriment could be heard. A party was going on.
The Northern Irish-born soldier (pictured) was '17 stone of highly volatile human explosive,' Macintyre said
Mayne and two of his men crept up to the door, guns drawn.
Mayne recalled kicking open the door and seeing about 30 men inside: 'I stood there with my Colt .45, the others at my side with a Tommy gun and another automatic. The Germans stared at us. We were a peculiar and frightening sight, bearded and with unkempt hair.
'For what seemed like an age we just stood there looking at each other in complete silence, until I said: 'Good evening.'
'At that, a young German arose and moved slowly backwards. I shot him, turned and fired at another some six feet away.
'Then the submachine-gunners opened up. The room was by now in pandemonium.'
Ordering four of his men to keep the Germans and Italians pinned down inside the mess hut, Mayne raced with the remaining six to attack the stationary planes.
They set about sabotaging the airfield with Lewes bombs and time fuses.
'What lovely work,' murmured one of the men. Mayne's assault on the officers' mess was daring but also reckless, as it alerted the enemy to the attack before the first bomb had been planted.
Killing highly-trained pilots was, arguably, an even more effective way of crippling enemy airpower than destroying the planes themselves, but it veered away from sabotage and close to assassination.
Faced with the chance to kill at close quarters, it seems Mayne had been unable to stop himself.
Stirling was shocked when the scale of the carnage was reported back to him. 'It was necessary to be ruthless,' he later wrote, 'but Paddy had overstepped the mark. I was obliged to rebuke him for over-callous execution in cold blood of the enemy.'
David Stirling (circled) with two members of the SAS together with personnel of 'G' Patrol of the Long Range Desert Group
Even Stirling branded it an 'over-callous execution in cold blood'.
The SAS continued to suffer huge losses of personnel - 34 dead, injured or missing in their first operation - but were a continued nuisance to the enemy.
Their numerous hits caused disruption, but have been described as just pinpricks in the context of the war.
Matters got worse when Stirling was captured on another botched mission and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner, ending up in the camp at Colditz.
David Stirling: The 6ft 6in gambler with no respect for rules or authority
In a short life, the aristocratic David Stirling had tried and failed at being an artist, architect, cowboy and mountaineer. World War II was his salvation.
His mother was the daughter of Lord Lovat, the chief of Clan Fraser, and his father a distinguished general, an MP and master of a 15,000-acre estate.
The parents drummed good manners into their six children, but otherwise largely left them to get on with their lives. They grew up stalking deer, hunting rabbits, fighting and competing.
By the age of 17, he was 6 ft 6 in tall, a gangly beanpole, wilful, reckless but also exceptionally polite and socially at ease.
He was sent down from Cambridge after misbehaving on a lavish scale and spending more time at Newmarket racecourse than on his studies.
Stirling went to Paris to become an artist. He wore a beret and lived a louche, Left Bank life, but displayed little talent for painting. The same went for architecture, his next choice of profession, as well as his ambition to be the first person to climb Mount Everest, even though he suffered from vertigo.
As he nonchalantly frittered away his dissolute life, unpaid bills mounted — from his bookmaker, his tailor, his bank manager and even from a cowboy outfitter in Arizona, seeking payment for a saddle.
When war broke out in 1939, he joined his father’s regiment, the Scots Guards, but was the most contradictory of soldiers: ambitious but unfocused, steeped in military traditions but allergic to discipline. He skipped parades and was always getting into trouble.
With the inbred confidence that comes from high birth, he regarded rules as nuisances and was blithely unconstrained by convention. He showed no deference whatever to rank.
SAS cap badge with the regiment's motto
It was when he gravitated to the Commandos, the special operations army unit dubbed ‘Churchill’s cut-throats’ for its undercover work, that his leadership qualities finally surfaced.
He had an adamant faith in his own decisions and did exactly what he wanted to do, whether or not others thought his aims were sensible or even possible.
The SAS came into being in part because its founder would not take no for an answer, either from those in authority or from those under his command.
On a personal level, Stirling was a romantic, with an innate talent for friendship but little desire for physical intimacy. He had many women friends but relaxed only among men.
A warrior monk, he craved action and the company of soldiers, but his boisterous exterior belied a lonely man prone to periodic depressions and inner turmoil. When the fighting was over, he embraced solitude.
For the rest of the war the troops worked to orders behind enemy lines in Italy, France and Germany.
They aided the Allied advance to victory by destroying communications, collecting intelligence, training Resistance fighters — and sustained horrible losses as the SS carried out Hitler's Commando Order to immediately execute any British saboteurs they caught.
The SAS was stood down at the end of the Second World War but policymakers soon realised there was still a need for their covert operations and it was reinstated.
Macintyre's 2016 book was made into a documentary series for BBC2 last year, but it has yet to be announced if the broadcaster will air the new show.
Soldiers preparing for action at a desert camp in Egypt in 1942. The SAS was stood down at the end of the Second World War but policymakers soon realised there was still a need for their covert operations and it was reinstated
