Aidan Smith's TV week: Why stunning D-Day 80: The Unheard Tapes gets my first ever give-star review

Ethan McHale voices the D-Day memories of Private Harry Parley. Picture: BBCEthan McHale voices the D-Day memories of Private Harry Parley. Picture: BBC
Ethan McHale voices the D-Day memories of Private Harry Parley. Picture: BBC
Daniel Bruhl rocks tinted aviators as Karl Lagerfeld, while D-Day: The Unheard Tapes is simply stunning television

Becoming Karl Lagerfeld Disney+ **

D-Day 80: The Unheard Tapes BBC2 *****

Queenie Channel 4 **

Daniel Bruhl (left) as Karl Lagerfeld and Theodore Pellerin as Jacques de Bascher. Picture: Disney+Daniel Bruhl (left) as Karl Lagerfeld and Theodore Pellerin as Jacques de Bascher. Picture: Disney+
Daniel Bruhl (left) as Karl Lagerfeld and Theodore Pellerin as Jacques de Bascher. Picture: Disney+

What do we think of Becoming Karl Lagerfeld for the name of a TV show? A bit portentous, even pretentious, perhaps, a bit this-had-better-be-bloody-good. I mean, we’d never call a programme Becoming Lorraine Kelly, would we? Or Becoming Sydney Devine or Becoming Fran and Anna, though personally I’d watch all of them.

Fashion biopics, it’s true, are catwalk-hot right now. Maybe not quite at the rapid rate, as Sister Sledge had it, of “Halston, Gucci, Fiorucci”, although Ewan McGregor did play the first-named for Netflix. I remember wanting that drama to be more like Zoolander. A frivolous critique but, hey, this is frivolous subject matter.

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So, Lager-Lager-Lagerfeld, though I don’t suppose he’s ever been called that. I saw him once, in London’s Selfridges. Security lunks cleared a path through the perfume aisles as if this was the visitation of a rock god, and with his swooping white mane and Warholian shades he kind of resembled one. Daniel Bruhl – tinted aviators, flares, Cuban heels – begins his portrayal in 1972 when Lagerfeld was jobbing in ready-to-wear and being ridiculed for it.

His own mother calls him a “mercenary” and when he arrives at a fashion show there are dark mutterings: “What’s the Kraut doing here? … He’s inept … Relies on the talents of others.” Mee-ow. So Lagerfeld slinks off to his favourite bar, popular among “rich old men with their twinks”, where he bops sadly and alone to David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream” - an undanceable choon, anyway - while pondering a career going nowhere.

Dionne Brown as Queenie. Picture: Channel 4/Latoya OkuneyeDionne Brown as Queenie. Picture: Channel 4/Latoya Okuneye
Dionne Brown as Queenie. Picture: Channel 4/Latoya Okuneye

Then, enter handsome young Jacques de Bascher. A twink? Not exactly, an aspiring writer, although much taken with Lagerfeld, encouraging him: “The world’s grey - you’re in colour.” He does have romantic intentions but Lagerfeld fends off the advances, despite or perhaps because of Jacques announcing: “My ass is sweaty and my balls are itchy.”

That fashion show was for Yves Saint Laurent, a 10th anniversary celebration. YLS and Lagerfeld have previous, possibly as lovers, and suddenly it dawns on our man that he should be sweaty and itchy for a similar standing in haute couture. I’d been hoping for more mee-ow moments and, going by what little I know about Lagerfeld such as how he once said of Adele she was “a little too fat”, these should come later - especially after the success of the debut collection in his name. One of the beautiful people gushes: “Your work with muslin is so daring!” Now that’s exactly what I was going to say …

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Part of a cluster of anniversary programmes, D-Day 80: The Unheard Tapes plays in the background. It’s actors as invasion veterans – again – and, in a flip judgement, I decide this will struggle to stand out from all the accounts there have ever been.

What’s wrong with the sound? It’s different for each man and occasionally gurgly. Later I watch from the beginning and am soon chastising myself. This is stunning television – stunningly simple, too. No Spielbergian special-effects are needed when words alone are this powerful.

The actors are lip-synching – perfectly - recordings on old reel-to-reel tapes of variable quality, hardly surprising given their age, and the gurgling just makes the stories more haunting, such as when Private Harry Parley describes the moment his Higgins boat – part of the Allies armada – deposits him on the Normandy shores: “You didn’t know where you were, what to do. The ramp went down, your arsehole puckered up. You took a deep breath and you began to pray.”

There are plenty of diamond quotes like this, ones that seasoned scriptwriters on war films would crave. James Kelly signed up for the Marines at 17 because his two older brothers in their uniforms looked “magnificent”. Another commando, Warwick Nield-Siddall, is equally awestruck by the view from the bridge: “Ships of all shapes and sizes, in Technicolor, almost psychedelic, and it was lovely knowing they were all ours.”

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Further inland come the glider-borne infantry. On the side of his aircraft, Wally Parr had chalked “Lady Irene” after his wife. “Bloody great machines,” says Major John Howard. “And damn great footballs of sweat across my pilot’s face.” Howard’s task is to lead the crucial assault on Pegasus Bridge. There’s a damn great hole in the side of his glider but, realising he’s been deposited just 50 yards from the target is “the most exhilarating moment of my life.”

An American, Tom Porcella, parachutes into fields deliberately flooded by the Germans. “Up to my neck,” he says. Back on the beaches his countryman Chuck Thomas describes the “zzzzp, zzzzp” of bullets hitting the sand. “It was as if the whole beach was sucking us up.” Ray Nance is asked if Omaha, where the US troops landed, was like hell. “Never been there,” he says. “If it’s like that I don’t want to go. But it was worse, I’m certain.”

From the other side, machine-gunner Franz Gockel, who’s sent four long letters every week by his mother, is going to “fight to the last cartridge … fight and die”. But the Germans in their bunkers are hit by “feuerwalze”. Historian Peter Lieb explains: “A rolling barrage of artillery fire, huge noise, men screaming, bodies being ripped apart … psychologically one of the most terrifying things soldiers can ever experience.”

Hitler’s response that night, 80 long years ago? To carry on snoozing. “The Panzer division could only be activated on the Fuhrer’s personal order,” reveals Herbert Meier. “We were told: ‘Don’t wake me.’” Meanwhile, although the effort was far from over and casualties would be huge, Wally Parr and his mates drink a toast in the cafe next to Pegasus. “The proprietor had buried 100 bottles of champagne in his garden to hide them from Jerry.”

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At the start of Queenie, first-time author Candice Carty-Williams’ “black Bridget Jones”, our heroine is legs aloft on stirrups as the gynaecologist calls for second and third opinions and she mutters to herself: “A guy was mopping up some sick when I arrived. Why don’t you get him in here too?”

That’s quite Bridgety but the rest of this comedy isn’t. Dionne Brown is fine in the lead role, with Queenie living through her “quarter-life crisis” in an unfulfilling social media job, having split with her white boyfriend and - in “getting under someone to get over someone” - making one bad dating choice after another. But there are flashbacks to some old trauma because, apparently, all comedy needs to have them now.

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