D-Day: The Unheard Tapes – a 'sombre, vital and masterful' documentary

To commemorate the 80th anniversary of D-Day, the BBC has been showing Mark Radice's superb three-part documentary D-Day: The Unheard Tapes. In a technique previously employed for 2022's "Aids: The Unheard Tapes", the series features actors who lip-sync to the recorded testimony, gathered from archives around the world, of some of the thousands of people involved in the landings, and the fighting that raged afterwards. 

We hear, of course, the voices of British and American veterans, but also those of local people, French Resistance fighters and German veterans. It is phenomenally effective. You feel "you're there with the soldiers", trying, under heavy gunfire, to make it over the "blood-splattered beaches", said Barbara Ellen in The Observer.

This is a "sombre, vital, masterful retelling" in which "the immediacy is jolting", and "the emotional access intimate", said Jasper Rees in The Daily Telegraph. It helps, too, that the cast is "outstanding", able to hint at trauma with just "the tweak of an ear or the widening of an eye". 

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It is "stunning television – stunningly simple, too", agreed Aidan Smith in The Scotsman. And it is full of "diamond quotes". In one memorable segment, Private Harry Parley, of the US army's 29th Infantry Division, describes the moment he became one of the first troops to land off Omaha Beach, on 6 June 1944. 

"You didn't know where you were, what to do," he recalls. "The ramp went down, your asshole puckered up. You took a deep breath and you started to pray."