The wartime activities of a special force tasked with sabotage and subversion behind enemy lines in the Second World War will be revealed in an online talk involving the father of comedian Al Murray.

Retired Lt Colonel Murray served with the Parachute Squadron of the Royal Engineers commander of 131 Independent Parachute Engineer Squadron, and as watchkeeper with Intelligence Cell, 1st British Corps, from 1976-1980. He will also be known to listeners of the We Have Ways Of Making You Talk history podcast, having appeared alongside his son who is famous for playing comic character The Pub Landlord.

Together with Antonia Keaney, Blenheim Palace’s social history researcher, they will lift the veil of secrecy over the the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in an online talk for Woodstock's Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum. 

Saboteurs, Assassins and Subversives! An Everyday Tale of the SOE, will see the pair tackle the question of whether it was effective, and whether its methods were acceptable in a civilised society.

Set up as a volunteer force in June 1940, it was one of the many secret organisations created after Dunkirk at the beginning of the Second World War. The SOE had the task of stirring up clandestine warfare and creating mayhem in Occupied Europe. The underground army's agents demonstrated incredible courage and resourcefulness in their guerilla war. 

READ ALSO: Nine photos show the real Oxfordshire in the 1980s

By working with resistance forces, they provided a boost to the morale of occupied nations.

It had only a short life, but was the model followed by the US in creating the CIA. Many of its more ruthless practices have been copied by terrorist organisations and resistance armies today.

Mr Murray has contributed to many exhibitions at the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Museum as a researcher and historian, including Spy Oxfordshire: Lifting the Veil of Secrecy, and written numerous articles for Bugle & Sabre: The Military History of Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire. 

Ms Keaney has featured on both local and national TV and radio and has also co-curated a number of exhibitions at the palace. 

The talk can be heard from 7pm on March 1 at sofo.org.uk/whats-on/sas-soe/