First Contact: an Alien Encounter mixed interviews with scientists, ‘repurposed footage’, spooky music, endless vistas of stars and ill-lit dramatised scenes to imagine what might happen if extra-terrestrials show up. Either way, judging from the first episode, we should have a lot of slightly alarming fun seeing how far they get.īut, as it transpired, the BBC wasn’t finished with eccentric fact-based television for the week. Yet in a programme that’s pretty bonkers itself, you wouldn’t want to rule it out completely. There were also a selection of chorus girls in their underwear, and a duly chic French agent, complete with cigarette and heavy lipstick.Īt this stage, the men’s goal – to gather a few like-minded colleagues and ‘win the war’ – might seem a little ambitious.

Not that she was the only woman we saw on Sunday. To sound them out, he set up a meeting in a Cairo club where, adding to the old-school feel, the discussions took place in the presence of a belly dancer. No wonder that when Lewes had the bright idea of forming a new parachute regiment to attack the enemy’s supply lines (a plan his superiors apparently didn’t notice), the commendably ‘mad’ Stirling and Mayne were high on his list of target recruits. In an army jail, where he’d been imprisoned for beating up a military policeman, Paddy Mayne (Jack O’Connell) took a break from quoting A.E. Outside Tobruk, Jock Lewes (Alfie Allen) conducted a highly practical seminar for his men on how to kill 50 Germans. Luckily, Stirling wasn’t the only frustrated British semi-psychopath in north Africa. Inside the clash between Boris and Charles This was a 2022 BBC drama that took an unashamedly gung-ho approach to macho heroism ‘Eyes,’ he pointed out, ‘are for thumbs to push into the brain.’ (Not surprisingly, the Aussies immediately finished their drinks and left.) Once there, he downed several whiskies and shared with a pair of Australian soldiers his theory of how the fighting should be conducted – i.e. This latest cock-up was the last straw for David Stirling (Connor Swindells), who, aghast at being denied the chance to slaughter some Germans, headed straight to a Cairo bar. The opening scene featured a 1941 convoy off to save Tobruk running out of petrol mid-desert.

We were, mind you, reminded of how hopeless the British Army was in the early years of the conflict. So much so, in fact, that you couldn’t help wondering whether any writer less hot than Steven Knight (creator of Peaky Blinders) would have been allowed to get away with it. The unexpected result was a 2022 BBC drama that took an unashamedly gung-ho approach to macho heroism – and that, give or take a spot of swearing and heavy-metal music, didn’t feel very different in tone from those classic British second world war films of the 1950s.

And from there the same sense of somewhat incredulous, head-shaking admiration for its subjects remained.

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