Last night, I wasted three hours of my time watching a 1988 made-for-tv two-part miniseries called The Great Escape II: The Untold Story. This was definitely a story that should have remained untold.

I was seduced into it by two things: the participation of Christopher Reeve, who was a fine actor, and the promise (unfulfilled) of more background on a story that fascinated me growing up. I should have known better, having seen the Steve McQueen film (eyeroll). I even remember having a discussion about that story with my 10th-grade English teacher, Mr Cacciatori.

Mr C was a nice fellow in his early 30s who didn't want to be teaching English. They never did: they were hired to coach some sport or another, and had to teach whatever they had paper qualifications for, usually something they'd 'minored' in, and they hate-hate-hated it. He refused to do much teaching, preferring instead to debate me on the literary merits of this or that, while everybody else in the class gratefully slumbered. (It was after lunch.) I didn't hold it against him. Our Problems of Democracy teacher, also a 30-something coach, refused to teach civics because his major was in English, but when he was hired, the English slots were full up. It's a shame they couldn't have switched subjects. But I debated Byron with Mr C, and we all read the movie reviews from Time Magazine with the POD teacher, who was particularly interested in a film called I Am Curious, Yellow. C'est la vie.

One day, Mr Cacciatore insisted that the film The Great Escape was unrealistic. I agreed, largely because of the amount of motorcycle footage involved, also James Garner. No, Mr C said, it was the plotline. 'If it had been real, they all would have failed. In the film, three guys make it home from the escape.'

My hand shot up. 'But three men did make it home,' I insisted.

Mr C looked at me accusingly. 'You read the book, didn't you?' I nodded. He sighed. 'That just goes to show you: truth is stranger than fiction.' On that, we could both agree.

Now, this 'sequel' to the story actually went back and retold the tale of the escape – the most massive POW breakout in modern history – along with the recapture of 76 prisoners and the illegal execution of 50 of them by the Gestapo. The second half of the miniseries concerned the post-war hunt for the perpetrators of this war crime. Unfortunately, none of what happened in the miniseries was true. Yes, 'Johnny' Dodge (a 50-some-year-old Brit played by a 35-year-old American) was involved. But his American assistant, played by Judd Hirsch, was not. (It was the RAF.) Oh, and Judd Hirsch dies in the series, picturesquely, as they engage in a desperate gun battle with a fictitious Gestapo man. Charles Haid dies, too, as I knew he would when I saw him on the cast list. Charles Haid always moves the audience, so his death is bound to be a two-hanky job. And then there's the utterly unnecessary but apparently obligatory French Resistance heroine/torch singer who saved the life of one of our American heroes, only to be falsely accused by her countrymen. She is, of course, exonerated, rescued, and presumably married by said hero. Gag me avec une cuillière.

Don't do this, people. In this 'story', the Commandant of Stalag Luft III was shot, whether by the Gestapo or the Allies, I forget. This in no way happened. The gentleman in question, Friedrich-Wilhelm Franz Max Erdmann Gustav von Lindeiner genannt von Wildau, who wasn't considered guilty of anything by anybody but the Gestapo, managed to feign mental illness and survive, not only Hitler and the Allies, but moviemaking assassins. He died of old age in the 1960s. One assumes he was killed off by the screenwriters for the sake of economy, and so nobody would have to pronounce his name.

You can't do a miniseries like this without doing some research. And, apparently, filming in Yugoslavia. It was the late 1980s, the time when Second World War films started to become really bad. In fact, they neared the level of ahistoricity predicted a couple of decades earlier by Philip K Dick in The Penultimate Truth. In that novel, even people who'd lived through it now remembered things the way the movies said. And this appears to have been the case here. There's a Frenchwoman because…there's always a Frenchwoman…

Yes, there was a Frenchwoman in Combat!, the 1960s tv series. Yes, when she came running out and cooing, 'Mon cher!', my dad chuckled and said, 'That's just the way they said it,' but he was only teasing my mom.

Here's a novel suggestion: try writing stories that are true. Or true-to-life. About things that really happened. You might be astonished at how 'original' you've suddenly become. These people in the past actually solved a problem by working together? Wow, would have thought it?

Try writing fictional stories that don't cater to prejudices and expectations. Try sending the characters off in a new direction. Be honest about their motivations and actions. See what that does for you. Maybe not all of your characters need to be carbon copies of movie posters from whatever era. Try letting the best friend or the comic relief take centre stage for once.

I really recommend you go and watch Tim Robbins' The Cradle Will Rock, even if you have to pay for it. (You will.) It's a brilliant retelling of the time Marc Blitzstein's WPA musical got locked out of its theatre. Yes, he moves the chronology around a bit. But he doesn't tell lies. And for once, Orson Welles is not the star of the show. The result will blow you away. And you'll learn something.

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Dmitri Gheorgheni

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