Rotten title, eh? SAS Rogue Heroes. (BBC1, Sunday). Sounds like something Ross Kemp would be fronting, wearing a tight-armed camouflage T-shirt while digging so deep into his vocal cords to find an Ant Middleton-angry tone ,his tonsils are touching his trainers.

But it isn’t. Thankfully. It’s a drama based on Ben McIntyre’s account of SAS history and screenplayed by Steven Knight of Peaky Blinders fame, a man who can blend a killer line with lots of, well, killing. A decent combination of talent?

Set in Cairo in 1941, where the Brits are proving to be entirely useless in securing the Suez Canal, this “mostly true” story tells of three men, three dafties in fact, with a death wish and an utter defiance of authority.

What we learn is that when the crazy gang (played by Connor Swindells, Jack O’Connell and Alfie Allen) come to realise that the officer class are in fact dunces, they decide to save Suez themselves.

And so, they come up with a scheme to attack the Germans from the desert, by parachuting onto the sand. (Apparently, in real life the SAS practised this by jumping from a moving truck at 30mph.)

Did their parachutes open, figuratively speaking, and give us the great drama the Beeb had been teasing us with for weeks? Well, the opener revealed real potential; there was some lovely writing (albeit with a slight comic-book sensibility) designed to heighten the impression that this wild bunch were superheroes in khaki and create a Catch 22-meets-Kelly’s Heroes sensibility.

And who can fail to love a poetry-reading soldier who can batter a murderous military policeman with a book of prose and the martial arts skill level of a Shaolin monk?

Who can fail to be attracted to his friend, who can talk his way beautifully out of a serious scrap with two drunk Aussies by describing in detail his skills in puncturing windpipes and pushing thumbs into eye sockets? Yes, there was a worry there may be too much testosterone on display here, no valid, powerful female presence. But Steven Knight wasn’t blind to this omission, which is perhaps why he drafted in the red-lipsticked, cleavage-thrusting French Algerian spy (Sofia Boutella). You just know she’s going to be deadly.

But that’s not to say this war drama was entirely explosive. All too often this opening episode was dragged down a little by the heavy sand of character exposition.

Yet, that’s no reason at all not to follow the further adventures of this fun boy threesome as they set out to do damage to the Nazis, and more likely themselves.

Damage was certainly the central theme of Made in the Eighties, The Decade That Shaped Our World, (Channel 4, 10pm, Monday) in recalling the psychological pain inflicted on the population early on in the decade.

We tend to look back on the 1980s as a time of New Romantics and the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, of shoulder pads and shoulder charges on trades union power. And that was tough in itself. But this opening episode reminded us of the real horror of the escalating Cold War, that Britain was as close to nuclear war as Reagan was to Thatcher. Russian missiles were primed at the UK. Government TV addresses were filmed, warning the population that should someone in the family be killed, “move the body to another room”.

Indeed, the geopolitical backdrop was so scary that Holly Johnson wrote Two Tribes and Kate Bush stopped writing songs about Bronte heroines and came up with lyrics such as: “We’re all going to die.”

Meantime, the theme of military muscle-flexing was being carried out in films such as Top Gun, a 90-minute ad for American military hardware.

This was a scary time. Men with missiles were threatening the planet, but what Channel Four reminded us was that the Greenham Common women were prepared to become human shields.

What gave this powerful documentary added resonance however was the realisation that our world today isn’t so very different.

There’s not so much that’s different about Louis Theroux Interviews (BBC 2, Sunday) these days. Same schtick. Same mild fawning over his subjects in the hope that cosiness loosens otherwise tight lips.

The problem was that his latest telly squeeze, Judi Dench, has never been tight-lipped about anything. (See recent views on her

suggesting The Crown is a couple of jewels short on the truth.) In fact, Dame Judi didn’t hold back in telling Theroux to “f*** off”, when he pointed out her “national treasure” status. What did he coax

out of the treasure?

That she hasn’t

watched most of the films she has made

because she’d

find then irritating, and that was honest.

But then you feel that Dame Judi Dench would have told the same stuff to the woman behind the till at

Waitrose.