Channel 4 jumps gun on next year's 70th anniversary of second world war battle with real-time experiment starting Wednesday
The story of the "soldier in the surf", the subject of the famous photo that inspired Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, will feature in a Channel 4 history initiative marking the 69th anniversary of the D-Day landings next week, with 24 hours of TV and Twitter coverage recreating the events of the pivotal second world war battle in real time.
D-Day: As It Happens will follow the stories of seven individuals involved in the 6 June 1944 operation to land more than 150,000 Allied troops on the Normandy beaches, through regular updates on TV, social media and the internet over 24 hours from 9pm on Wednesday 5 June.
They include Huston "Hu" Riley, then 22, a US soldier captured struggling through the surf under intense German gunfire by photographer Robert Capa in a black and white picture published in Time magazine. The story of how he survived, despite being hit several times by machine-gun fire, will be told by Channel 4 through tweets and TV voiceover by an actor, based on interviews Riley gave before his death in 2011.
Channel 4's real time initiative also draws on archive film, photographs, radio reports, diaries, letters and official records, along with previously unpublished research by historian Colin Henderson, to piece together the experiences of Riley and the six other D-Day protagonists, only two of whom are still alive, in meticulous detail.
Peter Snow and former marine Arthur Williams will host pre-recorded shows bookending Channel 4's coverage on the evenings of 5 and 6 June. In between viewers will see short archive clips of D-Day events broadcast at intervals during the Channel 4 schedule. D-Day: As It Happens can also be followed on a dedicated Twitter account and website.
"We're trying to take the information revolution we've all lived through and apply it to TV history," said Channel 4 specialist factual commissioning editor John Hay.