It's on every year, and Gordon Jackson falls for it every. single. time. Maybe this year he won't. Maybe this year Steve McQueen will make it over the wire.

Anyway.

The film is based on the book of the same name by Paul Brickhill, who was in the camp but was too claustrophobic to be allowed in the tunnels.

Brickhill used the experiences of his fellow POWs when writing the book, but as with a lot of these things it's a muddy issue as to what really happened, what is him faithfully recording someone else's tall tales and what is him making things up.

All of that said, this blog gives some specific names and places where this happened - to Sq Ldr Roger Bushell (on whom the Richard Attenborough character is based) and Lt Bernard Scheidhauer, a French pilot, near Saarbrücken.

The writer is a "Writer and reader of historical non fiction and fiction, especially escape and evasion and World War 2." so I've no idea of his sources but the story pops up again in the Daily Mail - which is not exactly known for its rigorous standards of journalism.

How true the story is, it only ever seems to come up with regards to those two men, so I'm inclined to think that supports it (false stories often get all sorts of different names attached to them) and that it was a one-off or at least relatively rare occurrence. A suspicious Gestapo man thinking on his feet, rather than something in the Gestapo POW Recapture Manual, so to speak.