Is The Great Escaper based on a true story?

It follows events after Irene encourages Bernie to secretly sneak out of their care home so he can attend a commemoration to mark the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy, prompting a police search and eventually creating a media storm when his adventure is made public.

It's an entertaining and moving film, but how much of the story is based on real events? Read on for everything you need to know.

Is The Great Escaper based on a true story?

Yes – the story is loosely based on the true story of Bernard 'Bernie' Jordan, who made newspaper headlines in 2014 when he secretly left his care home to attend the 70th anniversary D-Day commemorations in France.

The title of the film comes from the hashtag that went viral on social media in response to the news, as the British public became invested in Bernie's story and briefly made him a minor celebrity.

At the time, Jordan explained that he "had a good time, every minute of it" and added that he'd "do it again tomorrow", while one of his carers told The Guardian on his return that he'd "had quite an adventure, bless him".

Although the film is very much inspired by that real story, it is by no means a documentary, and heavily fictionalises Bernie's adventures, adding plot strands about PTSD and his relationship with his wife Irene, of which little is actually known.

But other aspects of the film do bear close resemblance to events as they really happened: for example, it is true that he shared a hotel room in Normandy with an RAF veteran, that he met veterans of other (more recent) conflicts on the ferry and even that he left the official commemoration service early because he got bored of waiting for the dignitaries to show up.

Meanwhile, the touching scene that shows Bernie and other former British servicemen meeting a group of German veterans is also based on an event that occurred on his adventure, while it is equally true that he had been unaware of the media storm that had been brewing back in the UK until he returned from his trip.

Speaking exclusively to RadioTimes.com shortly before the film's release, screenwriter William Ivory explained his process of adapting the real story into the fictionalised film.

"I think in the first instance, when it originally happened and there was quite a lot of press coverage, I think there was just a feeling that there was a really interesting story there," he said.

"Well, there was an interesting idea, an event, and there was much that – you know, he's clearly a great old boy – but there was also much that, quite quickly, you could see the way in which the aged could be sort of sentimentalised.

"And also, with the British press, there's that need to kind of create a hero without necessarily contextualising it.

"So pretty early on, and certainly when Oliver [Parker, director] and I started working on it, there was just this question of, you know, there was the story, but what was the story behind it? What was beneath it? And also, in terms of The Great Escaper, that headline, and the cheeky chappy nature of it, how real was that?"

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Asked what had stood out to him about Ivory's script, Parker added: "It was really that he'd taken this quite small event that had been pumped into something for a weekend, although many of us remember it a bit, and almost subverted it, started to look at the implications of that public response and what's beneath it.

"And I felt like his investigation of these characters under that kind of stress was brilliant. In other words, inventing the whole PTSD story is again a subversion of... you'd be tempted to make it a celebration. In fact, it was a commemoration of D-Day, not a celebration, but people often conflate the two.

"And so there's the sense of the glory of war, and William had written a very potent and honest kind of anti-war film, and found a brilliant tie-up between age and war and the battles that both involve."

As is told in a brief message at the end of the film, Bernie died six months after his trip to France, with Irene passing away just seven days later.

The Great Escaper is currently showing in UK cinemas. Check out more of our Film coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on tonight.

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