Secret Agent Selection: WW2

The students face SOE’s demanding selection process. Known as the Student Assessment Board, this intense four-day course puts the students through a series of physical and mental tests, all with the aim of finding out who has the raw talent required to progress to full training. The programme charts the beginning of SOE, which started with a handful of agents, in an organisation determined to find a way back into Nazi-controlled Europe.

Training begins as the students are schooled in guns, explosives and silent killing techniques. Skills which came together and helped SOE to pull off one of the most audacious assassinations of World War Two. The students need to show a calm head and a killer instinct when handling real weapons, but not everyone makes the grade.

The students are dropped in the middle of the remote Scottish Highlands, where they learn survival skills required for life in the field. Training in the same mountains as 1940s agents, they are schooled in the same techniques which prepared a group of agents tasked with putting a stop to Hitler's atomic ambitions in Norway. In a freezing Scottish lake and on a sheer rock face, some of the students are forced to find previously-untapped reserves of mental and physical strength.