Before we get to the meat and potatoes of this week’s piece, you might be wondering – what’s the difference between a Punk Military Historian and a real one? The answer is, of course, research. Tony Beevor and Max Hastings, for example, spend yonks in dusty libraries, reading old diplomatic communiques and after-action-reports. On the other hand, my knowledge of D-Day was gleaned from eating crème brulee in Caen, followed by a cider-fuelled stagger around Villers Bocage. I’m also prepared to wager Mr. Beevor doesn’t do his research wearing a Woobie smoking jacket.

This is the cross I bear for my art, and this week involved Netflix, a three-litre box of Lidl’s finest Pinotage and some Pringles. Why? Because I wanted to write about the finest British soldiers ever to grace television and the silver screen.

Along with the coolness of uniforms, Popular Culture is another punk historian obsession, mainly to pretend we’ve got something meaningful to say about how society views the profession of arms. In reality, it’s because war films are fun, and you don’t have to visit some cobwebby archive in Minsk to see one.

When I floated this idea on Twitter earlier this week, I received a terrific response. However a fair few suggestions concerned Americans. This is unsurprising as (a) for a country younger than my local pub, America has lots of war heroes, and (b), it makes all the movies. No, this is the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the British army – the gimlet-eyed warriors on my list all hail from Blighty, exemplars of our national martial spirit. Apologies to the many superb examples who didn’t make the cut (yes, I know Sarn’t Wilson from ‘Dad’s Army’ should be running Junior Brecon and Windsor Davies was wasted on that concert party), but I had to be ruthless, analytical… and shamelessly self-indulgent.

Are you sitting comfortably? Go on, have a Pringle and get ready to send me an angry tweet because I missed your favourite. Here they come, in no particular order…

You thought I’d choose Michael Caine or Stanley Baker, didn’t you? Nope. For me, ‘Zulu’ is all about the other ranks, especially Nigel Green as real-life Colour Sergeant Frank Bourne of the 24^th Regiment of Foot, most senior NCO at Rourke’s Drift in 1879.

There are several reasons why Green’s depiction of Bourne makes the cut – not least his stoicism when faced with thousands of marauding Zulus (if there’s one thing we expect from British NCOs, it’s unflappability in the face of disaster). Bourne also gets some great lines – “a prayer’s as good as a bayonet on a day like this”, he says stonily, thousands of enemy spearmen swarming across the savanna. Bourne’s bayonet-fu is also top-notch, and as for those mutton-chops? Epic. He’s so nails, he can even survive an incoming battery of Welsh close-harmony singing.

Most importantly, Green plays Bourne as an archetype, but not a cliché, a wise and gentle bully, only raising his voice when necessary and seldom revealing his ‘book-learning’ (during the film Bourne quotes the Bible fluently and frequently). The men respect him utterly, which is as it should be, his relationship with officers textbook – I do hope they show ‘Zulu’ at Sandhurst.

History factoid – the real-life Bourne was only 24 when he found himself at Rourke’s Drift, ending his military career in Dublin as a recalled officer during the First World War. And he’s buried in Beckenham in South London, not a million miles from Shooter’s Hill, from where our next actor hails…

The Wild Geese is a perennial Sunday-afternoon favourite, a dollop of Boy’s Own silliness involving Africa, mercenaries and Richard Burton’s bulletproof liver (I love it so much I even wrote a novel influenced by TWG, here’s an utterly shameless plug). It revels in Commando-comic level violence – sentries are killed with poisoned crossbow bolts and cyanide gas, the mercs get napalmed and rows of bad guys are mown down with an ancient Vickers gun.

Roger Moore plays Shawn Fynn, remittance man and ex-Guards officer (he’s meant to be Irish Guards, but that looks like a Coldstreamer’s beret badge to me) now slumming around London as an underworld fixer. One minute he’s force-feeding heroin to a mafioso bigwig, the next he’s off to rescue a Nelson Mandela-style character from an African prison (with dastardly East German military advisors running the show).

Fynn’s a classic Flashman-style lovable rogue – posh but affable, seedy yet dashing, a perfect fit for Moore’s breezy acting style (apparently he was going to play Richard Harris’s part, but they went on the piss together and decided to swap). The cigar-smoking, Uzi-toting, Dakota-flying Guardsman is my favourite fictional mercenary, displaying the insouciance and élan we expect from British army officers of a certain stripe.

The Wild Geese is also notable for its cast of ex-squaddie mercenaries, off to fight wearing their old cap badges. The film is a spotter’s delight – there are fusiliers, 17^th / 21^st Lancers, Guardsmen, Green Howards, SAS, Paras and more. Admit it, you’re already checking to see if it’s on Freeview, aren’t you?

I know, it’s not a picture from ‘The Professionals’, as I’m already wearing cream-coloured flares and a Milk Tray Man roll-neck. At this point, our younger readers might look up from their smashed avocado on sour-dough, thinking “wasn’t he a copper in The Professionals?” Well, yes and no. In the TV series, CI5 was a joint military and police unit. Lewis Collins, playing William Bodie, was from the SAS. His colleague, Ray Doyle, was a Detective Sergeant from the Met Police. Bodie was the fast-driving, karate-chopping weapons expert, Doyle the bloke who fought crime with an oversized lumberjack shirt and a bubble perm. And the cars! The Mk. II Capri and Escort RS2000, in particular, make men of a certain age misty-eyed, but for ex-coppers the Rover SD1 is the real star (although I’ve also got a soft spot for the Dolomite Sprint).

Collins was, in my humble opinion, a wholly underrated action-star. Affably charming, cruelly handsome, Collins was a Thatcher-era Jason Statham. It didn’t hurt that he’d been a TA paratrooper, comfortable playing martial roles in a way other actors weren’t. And (despite its silliness) his only big movie, ‘Who Dares Wins’ was more fun than a sack of kittens. We shan’t, however, dwell too much on ‘Commando Leopard’.

I’m not the only 80’s kid who came home from Scouts on a Friday night to watch Bodie and Doyle chase Euro-terrorists across the rooftops of a country house, dishing out lashings of 9mm justice. Then, before the gun-smoke cleared, they’d be going on the piss in Camden with a couple of air hostesses in tow. There might be better ways of earning a living, my friends, but I doubt it.

If Tommy Shelby had a LinkedIn page, it would probably say ‘leads successful team of enterprising ex-servicemen, creating business opportunities via transferable military skills in challenging socio-economic circumstances’.

Yes, it’s ‘Peaky Blinders’, a bunch of Birmingham gangsters led by WW1 veteran Tommy and his psychotic, coke-addled brother, Arthur. Tommy, played with icy menace by Cillian Murphy, has a chest-load of medals (including DCM and the MM), reoccurring shell-shock… and a plan. He’s also nails, winning his spurs tunnelling beneath German trench networks on the Western Front, fighting with pistols and daggers deep underground.

Apart from being one of the best things on telly, ever (I’m an unashamed fan-boy), ‘Peaky Blinders’ also has a truckload to say about mental health, military resettlement, war, class and the enduring bond between people who’ve faced immense danger together. And Peaky Blinders’ poses a recurring dilemma, as relevant now as it was then – what do you with men, soused in violence and death, when the war’s over?

The gang falls back on military discipline when the going gets tough, the old boys of the Small Heath Rifles still referring to Tommy as ‘Sergeant Major’ and forming-up in threes when he gives orders. And as a leader, Tommy’s ruthless, but also paternalistic and charismatic. Yeah, he reminds me of more than a couple of sarn’t-majors I’ve met over the years – not necessarily the nicest guy in the room, but you’re glad he’s on your side.

Then there’s the style – many scenes in Peaky Blinders are near-fetishistic, the camera lingering on haircuts, clothing and weapons, the ever-immaculate Tommy strutting like a slo-mo, killer-peacock. Shelby’s a CSM to the bone, the Sergeants’ Mess Mafia made flesh. If you haven’t seen it yet, you really should.

Who hasn’t read any Bernard Cornwell books? You at the back? Right, bugger off and buy one immediately (doesn’t matter which, they’re all good). Now we’ve got that sorted, the TV series ‘Sharpe’ is where Sean Bean made Cornwell’s Napoleonic-era rifleman his own. In the novels, our hero is a dark-haired Londoner who joins the 33^rd Regiment of Foot but on telly he’s a chippy Northern blonde. After saving the Duke of Wellington’s life, veteran soldier Sharpe wins a battlefield commission. A crack shot, he assembles a group of ‘chosen’ riflemen, a sort of 19^th Century special forces / recce unit. Most episodes involve behind-the-lines derring-do, sword-fights, musketry, high-command politicking and, occasionally, folk singing.

Sharpe, naturally, is also a prolific shagger, working his way through a bevy of aristocratic crumpet. With his floppy hair, Sheffield brogue and manly stubble, Bean’s channelling ‘Lady Chatterley’s lover’, albeit with a Brown Bess musket rather than a shovel. Most drama relies on conflict between characters, and in Sharpe that’s all about Class. Bean is splendidly venomous with his fellow Ruperts, fighting with ‘em as much as he does with the French. Of course, the jumped-up aristos are all jealous of Sharpe’s all-round brilliance, swash-bucklingness (it’s a word now) and ability to woo Liz Hurley (the Peninsula army seemed to have skipped the memo whereby LE officers are a quasi-Masonic cabal of hard-bitten bastards, capable of ensuring the demise of any who cross them).

Sean Bean now dwells in a strange hinterland between genuine superstar and cult genre-actor (the joke being his character dies in virtually everything), but Sharpe was the ur-Bean writ large – a social hand-grenade more comfortable in the field than the mess, with a hooligan-like propensity for violence and the unswerving loyalty of his men. The sheer longevity of the franchise is a testament to how good it was, with even notoriously picky Napoleonic War buffs grudgingly admiring the attention to detail. Go on, pop open the Pringles and watch the one with Liz Hurley. Again.

‘Blackadder Goes Forth’ has many memorable characters – I almost gave this slot to Rik Mayall’s Lord Flashheart for shamelessly stealing every scene he’s in. But Baldrick – smelly, hopeless Baldrick… patron saint of conscripts, the hapless innocents tossed into war’s charnel house. This is why Baldrick is important, not just because he’s funny, but because we sometimes forget the vast majority of men (and it was predominantly men) who fought the two World Wars weren’t necessarily there by choice.

Despite his questionable personal hygiene and apparent lack of military skills whatsoever, Baldrick’s actually a Top Bloke. Every platoon needs one, and I suspect more than one platoon actually has one. Baldrick’s also the superlative batman – consider his unquestioning loyalty to Captain Blackadder, his ingenuity in creating delicious trench food (mainly rat-based) and of course his morale-boosting poetry (Boom, Boom, Boom, about German artillery, immediately springs to mind). And at the end, when Blackadder finally goes over the top, Baldrick’s at his shoulder (who’s chopping onions in here?).

The character’s enduring popularity with the British army has seen many a regimental mascot named Baldrick, not to mention a divisional flash. And so Blackadder, in no small part to Tony Robinson’s portrayal of Pte. Baldrick, is forever etched into the twisted, irreverent annals of British military humour.