![]() He saves the boy’s life with some wire-cutters only for the defused ingrate to pick up a dropped assault rifle and gun down three of Porter’s comrades.ĭisgraced and discharged for this lapse of judgement, Porter is left by his wife (played by Nicola Stephenson, Anna Friel’s erstwhile lesbian squeeze in Brookside), shunned by his teenage daughter, and soon growing his hair down below his collar. That’s a lot of talent to invest in what is essentially a not very bright pot-boiler, in which Armitage plays John Porter (perhaps Ryan nodding obliquely to Look Back in Anger, but then perhaps not), an SAS man who, during an operation on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq to rescue a kidnapped British businessman, takes pity on a teenage boy who has been strapped to a suicide bomb. Made by Andy Harries’ Left Bank Pictures, purveyors of Wallander, Prime Suspect and much else, and starring Richard Armitage from Spooks, Andrew Lincoln and Jodhi May, the first two episodes were written by Jed Mercurio ( Cardiac Arrest, Bodies), the former doctor turned great white hope of British TV drama. If so, then Sky1’s new six-part adaptation, Chris Ryan’s Strike Back, has been considerably toned down for family audiences - although the effect of bullets on flesh is as graphic as any shoot-‘em-up computer game. I assume his writing shares the same visceral qualities – not to mention an authentic-feeling barrack-room racism that dubs Arabs as “ragheads”. Literary critics aren’t that savage, surely.Īdmittedly I have never read any of Ryan’s books, although I did, out of curiosity at its cultural impact, consume Bravo Two Zero, McNab’s much-disputed factual account of an ill-fated SAS reconnaissance patrol during the first Gulf War, of which Ryan was also a part. ![]() Both men retain their pseudonymous existence, more for the self-publicising drama of it than for security reasons - although Ryan rather ludicrously asserts that his life would be at risk if his real identity was revealed.
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