On the eighth day of COVID isolation in the Jordanian desert, Phil Turner and his crew were still locked inside a filming bubble they'd been in since before SAS: Who Dares Wins Season 7 could begin. The British and American teams had never worked together before. The directing staff — Ant Middleton and Ollie Ollerton now gone, Remi Adeleke and Rudy Reyes newly arrived — were circling each other in the way that very competitive alpha men sometimes do. The testosterone was high. The friction was palpable.
Then the Tyson Fury vs Deontay Wilder world heavyweight title rematch was about to air live on pay-per-view at 5am Jordan time. Turner proposed setting up a laptop in the open air so the entire bubble could watch it together.
Twelve men — British special forces, American special forces, directors, producers, crew — crowded around a single screen to watch a 12-round heavyweight bout in the early hours of the morning in a desert. By the final bell, whatever had been tight between the UK and US sides had loosened. The bubble became a team. Who Dares Wins started shooting days later.
Turner has directed nine seasons of SAS: Who Dares Wins. He's also spent two decades making documentaries for the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky, Netflix, HBO and now Apple TV+ — where his current project is Make or Break, a World Surf League series from the production team behind Drive to Survive. In an interview with Zebra Home Cinema, he walked through the full arc from a Halifax childhood through an unplanned Australian detour, into documentary television, and across the harrowing corners of the job that the polished final product doesn't show you.
Halifax to Perth — How a 17-Year-Old Ended Up in a Chemical Factory
Turner grew up in Halifax, West Yorkshire. The camera interest started early — his grandfather had a Super 8, which his father inherited, which Turner eventually got his hands on. A family friend had one of the first portable camcorders in the 1980s — camera, separate tape bag, battery pack, the full production kit of the era. Turner was captivated.
He never knew you could do this as a job.
At 17, he bought a one-way ticket from the UK to Perth, Western Australia for £175 — the cheapest flight he could find to the furthest point from Halifax. He took his father's small Sony camcorder with him. His first job on the other side of the world was in a chemical factory in Kwinana, a town outside Perth that, in his words, isn't somewhere most people would ordinarily go.
"I think I just really needed to get out of Halifax. The furthest city I could get to from Halifax. I got a one-way ticket for £175. That was it."
The story of how that became a television career is improbable in the way many good stories are.
The Australian Film School Week That Changed Everything
On a bus in Perth, he met a girl. She was studying at the Australian Film Television and Radio School in Sydney. She recommended he take a short course in documentary production in Melbourne — a one-week intensive programme.
Turner took the course. That week hooked him.
"From that moment, I was like — I'd do it. I'd do anything to get into that industry."
He returned to the UK and enrolled at Bournemouth Film School. He studied producing — not directing, not cinematography — because the producing slots were easier to get, and the important thing was simply to be in.
"When you go to film school, everybody wants to be a director. Everybody wants to be a cinematographer. But to get the director place or the cinematographer place can be quite difficult. So it was easier to get a producer place. The key is always to say, I could do that. And then when you're in the role, figure out what you can actually do."
Out of film school, he was making tea for people at Blast Films in North London. Location work in Malta and — more exotically — Sheffield. The gradual building of a CV.
Becoming a Director — The Landmark Films Break
The pivot came via Nick O'Dwyer, who ran Landmark Films in Oxford. O'Dwyer hired Turner as a runner and production assistant — and Turner took the camera home every night, learning the big broadcast Sony DSR-570 in his own time by filming his newborn daughter Leah.
After a year of that, O'Dwyer offered Turner his first proper camera role: a year in Botton, North Yorkshire, filming what became the BBC's *The Strangest Village in Britain. The resulting documentary was successful enough to earn Turner a Broadcast Young Talent of the Year* nomination. That put him on the map.
Shortly afterwards, Richard McCaro at Love Productions interviewed Turner for a camera role. Halfway through the interview, McCaro stopped and asked: have you ever thought about directing?
Turner said yes immediately.
"This is what I do. This is exactly what I want to do."
McCaro gave him the opportunity. Turner stayed with Love Productions for years, directing across a catalogue of shows that defined British documentary television in the 2010s — *Famous, Rich and Homeless, Benefits Street, the first series of The Great British Bake Off*. By 35 he was one of the busiest directors in UK factual television.
Influences — Oliver Stone, Ken Loach, Shane Meadows
Turner's creative genealogy is working-class, socially-conscious British realism crossed with big American political cinema.
- ▪Oliver Stone — particularly Platoon, Wall Street, JFK, and Natural Born Killers. Turner cites Stone's willingness to move across styles and genres while carrying a political conscience into each project.
- ▪Ken Loach — the godfather of British kitchen-sink drama and social realism. Turner specifically called out *Raining Stones as a favourite. (He was, in his own words, "heartbroken" to read that Loach publicly disliked Benefits Street* when it aired.)
- ▪Shane Meadows — This Is England and the state-of-the-nation tradition of British community storytelling. Turner identified strongly with Meadows's approach, given his own Halifax community roots.
The through-line across all three is documentary's natural adjacency to drama. Turner's documentary work leans into the same narrative techniques that drama uses — character, arc, place, community — rather than the news-report grammar that most factual television defaults to.
Inside SAS Who Dares Wins — The Bubble, the DS, and the Recruits
SAS: Who Dares Wins has a tight operational discipline on set. Turner described how it actually works:
- ▪The Directing Staff (DS) — the ex-special-forces instructors — and the recruits live together on a military-style camp for the duration of filming. They are all on calorie-deficit meals (rice, mushrooms, porridge) and the physical conditions of selection are real.
- ▪The production crew — directors, camera people, producers, ADs — sleep off-camp in a hotel with actual beds, hot showers, and proper food. This is the quiet imbalance Turner acknowledged immediately: the recruits and DS live the show; the crew films it.
- ▪When the recruits arrive, the bubble closes. There is no more playing around. Directors embed in cars, on tasks, inside the action — but do not interact with the recruits and do not break the fourth wall.
- ▪Directors almost never ask a question in shot. Turner estimates he has asked a single question that made it into any broadcast episode — addressed to Harvey in Morocco, who had drifted to the wrong location in a "beasting." "Are you meant to be over there?" — "Where?"
The recruits are not actors. Everything that happens on screen — the collapses, the confessions, the broken-down interviews with the DS in the black chairs — is real. There is no acting class that teaches what the camera catches. The production's job is to stay out of the way enough that the experience can unfold.
The show's emotional register comes from the DS interviews — the revelations that recruits volunteer to Ant, Foxy, Billy, Rudy, or Remi across a small bare room. Turner's framing:
"I think all of us somewhere in our core have got a story to tell. SAS is wonderful at how it unlocks people's innermost secrets and then can transform a person into a superhuman — because I genuinely think we've all got that in us."
The US-UK Integration — Remi Adeleke and Rudy Reyes
Season 7 introduced two new American DS: Remi Adeleke (former Navy SEAL, actor, author) and Rudy Reyes (US Force Recon Marine, actor, widely regarded as one of the most physically-capable elite-operator media figures working today — friend of Sylvester Stallone, 51 years old at time of filming).
For Turner, the additions were a genuine show-level recalibration. SAS: Who Dares Wins had previously been a British show with British DS. Adding two Americans — both with serious tier-one credentials — changed the dynamic, partially by design and partially by accident.
The initial friction was testosterone-driven. The COVID-era filming bubble forced the four alpha men into extended close quarters before filming could begin. The 5am Tyson Fury fight was Turner's intervention. It worked.
Once filming started, the chemistry that emerged on screen was palpable — an ally-force dynamic that Turner argued was always implicit in the real special-forces world and now made explicit in the show. Rudy Reyes in particular, Turner said, functioned as a morale force multiplier beyond the recruits:
"Rudy Reyes is insane. His workout ethic, I swear to god. He got all our shooting producer directors, aps — we'd do 'swarm patrol.' He'd get us out every morning to do workouts with him. He's a monster. But it was also a million percent positivity from him at all times."
The implicit argument the show made with the US additions: special-forces culture is an international rather than a national phenomenon. British tier-one operators and American tier-one operators share more with each other than they share with civilians in their own countries.
Health and Safety on the Toughest Show on Television
SAS: Who Dares Wins is, in Foxy's phrase that Turner quoted, "the toughest show on television." And it's filmed in environments that are literally dangerous — Chile, Morocco, Scotland, Jordan, the Jordanian desert, rivers, cliffs, suspended ropes, fast vehicles.
The show has not had a fatal incident across nine seasons, despite the physical extremity of what's been filmed. Turner was clear that this is not an accident. The production runs with:
- ▪On-set doctors and paramedics immediately available
- ▪Medivac helicopters on standby
- ▪Satellite phones across remote locations
- ▪Full procedural readiness for every foreseeable scenario
- ▪A red-flag rule: any health-and-safety concern from any team member stops everything
Health and safety in this kind of production, Turner argued, should be reframed from a bureaucratic constraint to a creative enabler. "If you deal with it in the right way, in a positive way, you can see what you can actually do. And what you can do is generally more than what you expect."
The one genuine scare he cited was the first celebrity season in Chile, when AJ Pritchard (the professional dancer) collapsed at the top of a mountain during one of the early tasks — eyes rolled back, sudden loss of consciousness. The medical response was fast, AJ recovered, and she continued the series with distinction. The crew had not seen anyone go down that way before.
The Other Assignments — Ambulance, Orphanages, and My Last Summer
Alongside SAS, Turner has spent years embedded inside some of the more harrowing subjects in British documentary television.
- ▪Central Methodist Church, Johannesburg. Working on a BBC documentary about children caught up in the South African orphanage system. Turner described the weight of those stories as still audibly present years later.
- ▪Comic Relief series. Multiple films.
- ▪Ambulance (BBC One). Embedded with the Helicopter Emergency Medical Service (HEMS) in Manchester and Liverpool. Turner was in the back of the vehicle with a young gunshot victim at 3am when the ambulance doors opened to five armed police officers with rifles drawn — "Not expecting that, you know."
- ▪*My Last Summer* (Channel 4). The documentary Turner described as hitting him hardest. He followed five terminally-ill people through the final months of their lives. They shared things with him they weren't sharing with their own families. Many of them described their friends and family pulling back after the diagnosis; Turner, as their videographer, became the person they told everything to.
"You can hear it in my voice now thinking about it. You've got this overwhelming sense of guilt — what are you even doing there?"
Years of that kind of documentary work cumulatively became too much. Turner made a conscious decision to pivot out of terminal-illness and war-zone-adjacent subjects. The SAS: Who Dares Wins work, the Apple TV+ surfing series, and the tennis documentary he's now working on are partly a creative choice and partly a protective one.
Mental Health Support in Documentary TV
One of the most valuable parts of the conversation was Turner's honesty about the mental-health support landscape in UK documentary production.
Ten years ago, he said, you mostly did the work and went home. Counselling for crew was not something productions formally provided. If you were affected by what you filmed — refugees, dying people, gunshot victims, children in orphanages — you coped with it privately, or you didn't.
The shift has been meaningful:
- ▪Ambulance (BBC One) offered 24-hour counselling for crew throughout the production.
- ▪*My Last Summer* had psychological support available throughout filming.
- ▪*SAS: Who Dares Wins* has genuine mental-health infrastructure for recruits, DS, and crew — and the show itself champions mental-health awareness in a way that has given public permission to male-presenting audiences to open up.
Turner specifically credited Tyson Fury's public opening-up about his mental health after winning the world heavyweight title. "If this guy who's the 20-stone heavyweight champion of the world can open up and talk about his mental health, then surely I can, I can do that as well."
The message-to-audience that SAS: Who Dares Wins carries — that physical and psychological extremity can be shared and survived, not hidden — is, in Turner's view, the show's most important contribution. The criticism that "the backstories slow the show down" misses the point. The backstories are the point.
Make or Break — The Drive to Survive of Surfing
Turner's current project is *Make or Break — a World Surf League documentary series for Apple TV+, produced by Box to Box Films (the team behind Drive to Survive* and similar sports-documentary franchises).
The format will feel familiar to anyone who's seen Drive to Survive:
- ▪Follow the elite athletes on tour for a full season
- ▪Capture what happens before and after the surf, not just the waves themselves
- ▪Find the interpersonal dynamics, rivalries, and backstories that sports journalism typically misses
- ▪Edit for character and narrative rather than for heats and results
The tour locations for the series he's currently shooting: Hawaii, Australia, Indonesia (J-Bay), South Africa, Tahiti, Los Angeles — the World Surf League "dream tour," on the world's best beaches with the world's best surfers.
Season one is streaming now on Apple TV+. Season two drops in January.
The parallel tennis project, also for Box to Box, is in production and will follow roughly the same template. Turner described the new world of streaming audiences — three million viewers for a Channel 4 Thursday-night documentary was a major success; Benefits Street at seven million was a national event. Apple TV+ opens an international audience an order of magnitude larger. The scale is exhilarating and slightly destabilising.
His favourite story from filming season one: tracking down a final-season interview with Gabriel Medina — the Brazilian world champion surfer whose schedule was a moving target for weeks. Turner's team eventually flew from Hawaii back to Los Angeles to catch Medina at a small window when he was willing to sit down. The interview made the final edit. Without it, Turner said, he would have gone home feeling like a failure.
Key Takeaways
- ▪Phil Turner is an award-winning documentary producer-director with twenty years of British and international television credits, including nine seasons of *SAS: Who Dares Wins (Channel 4), Benefits Street (Channel 4), Famous, Rich and Homeless (BBC), the first series of The Great British Bake Off, Ambulance (BBC), My Last Summer (Channel 4), and currently Make or Break* (Apple TV+).
- ▪His career started by accident — a £175 one-way ticket from Halifax to Perth at 17, a chemical-factory job in Kwinana, a chance encounter with an Australian Film School student on a bus, a week-long documentary course in Melbourne, and a decision to go back to the UK and enrol at Bournemouth Film School.
- ▪SAS: Who Dares Wins is a genuinely closed production bubble. The DS and recruits live together on camp with real calorie-deficit meals; the production crew stays off-camp in hotels. Directors almost never ask questions on camera. The show is 100% real — no scripting, no performance direction.
- ▪The US-UK DS integration (adding Remi Adeleke and Rudy Reyes to the British team alongside Foxy, Billy, and colleagues) was a deliberate show-level recalibration. Initial friction dissolved during a 5am group viewing of the Tyson Fury vs Deontay Wilder rematch on the eighth day of COVID isolation in the Jordanian desert.
- ▪The show has run nine seasons without a fatal incident despite the physical extremity of what's filmed. That's not luck — it's the product of on-set doctors, paramedics, medivac helicopters, satellite phones, and a red-flag rule any crew member can call.
- ▪Mental-health support in documentary television has transformed in the last five years. Ambulance offered 24-hour crew counselling; My Last Summer had psychologists throughout; SAS: Who Dares Wins has genuine infrastructure for recruits, DS, and crew alike. Tyson Fury's public openness about mental health is credited widely as having shifted the cultural permission to talk about it.
- ▪Turner's current project, *Make or Break (Apple TV+), is a World Surf League documentary from the Drive to Survive producers Box to Box Films*. Season one streaming now; season two in January. A parallel tennis project is in production under the same template.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who directs SAS Who Dares Wins?
Phil Turner has directed nine seasons of SAS: Who Dares Wins for Channel 4, making him the series's longest-tenured director. The show is produced by Minnow Films, with Sophie at Minnow among the key production leads.
Is SAS Who Dares Wins real or scripted?
Entirely real. The Directing Staff are genuine former special-forces operators; the recruits are real members of the public who have applied to take part. All tasks, physical extremes, calorie-deficit meals, and DS interviews happen as shown. Directors and cameras are embedded throughout but do not interact with the recruits — the only question a director has ever asked in a broadcast episode was addressed to Harvey in Morocco, a short "are you meant to be over there?" that made the cut.
Who are the new SAS Who Dares Wins US DS?
Remi Adeleke (former Navy SEAL, author, actor) and Rudy Reyes (US Force Recon Marine, 51 at time of filming, friend of Sylvester Stallone, widely regarded as one of the most physically capable operator-media figures in the industry). They joined the British DS team (Foxy, Billy Billingham, and colleagues) after Ant Middleton and Ollie Ollerton departed the show.
How is SAS Who Dares Wins kept safe?
With a full medical infrastructure on site: on-set doctors and paramedics, medivac helicopters on standby, satellite phones across remote locations, and a red-flag rule that any crew member or health-and-safety staff can use to halt production instantly. No fatal incidents have occurred across nine seasons of filming.
What is Make or Break on Apple TV+?
Make or Break is a World Surf League documentary series produced by Box to Box Films — the team behind Netflix's Drive to Survive — for Apple TV+. It follows the elite surfers on the Championship Tour across Hawaii, Australia, Indonesia, South Africa, Tahiti, Los Angeles and other "dream tour" locations, capturing what happens before and after the waves rather than just the competitions themselves. Phil Turner is a shooting director on the series. Season one is streaming now; season two arrives in January.
How did Phil Turner get into documentary television?
By accident. A £175 one-way ticket from Halifax to Perth at 17, a chemical-factory job in Kwinana, a chance meeting with an Australian Film School student on a bus in Perth, and a week-long documentary production course in Melbourne. He returned to the UK, enrolled at Bournemouth Film School, and worked his way up from tea-making runner to director over 20 years.
What was Turner's hardest documentary?
My Last Summer for Channel 4 — following five terminally-ill people through the final months of their lives. Turner describes it as the project that hit him hardest. The contributors shared things with him their friends and families didn't know. He made a conscious decision afterwards to pivot his work toward less emotionally harrowing subjects, which partly drove the move to SAS: Who Dares Wins and the sports documentaries he's making now.
