The actor’s 97-year-old grandfather may be a master of understatement – but he’s also one of the few people left who can recall the ‘hell let loose’ of the D-day landings. His story makes for staggering TV
I don’t mind admitting that I had a tear in my eye long before the end of Vicky McClure: My Grandad’s War. This moving documentary puts the Line of Duty and This Is England actor into the role of historian, presenter and interviewer as she tells the story of her grandfather, Ralph McClure, who was a ship’s signaller in the Royal Navy on D-day in 1944. It shares a few camera angles with Who Do You Think You Are? but it goes one better, as Ralph is now 97 and on hand to tell his granddaughter, and us, his own story.
The pair live around the corner from each other in Nottingham, and are clearly close. But as McClure points out, while she knew he was in the Navy, she really knows nothing about his experience of war. Ralph must be one of the last survivors still able to tell his story, and getting McClure to ask him about it gives it an intimate feel that seems just as revealing, if not more so, than the history we get from the textbooks.
