BOYS From the Black Stuff playwright Alan Bleasdale returns to television tomorrow for the first time in 11 years with a long- waited wartime drama.
Two-parter, The Sinking of The Laconia, tells the true story of a converted liner torpedoed by a German U-boat on its return to Britain from Egypt in 1942.
The 2,300 people on board – a mixture of English civilians, Allied soldiers and Italian prisoners of war – faced almost certain death until the U-boat's commander, Werner Hartenstein, went against the orders of Nazi High Command and instructed his men to save as many of the shipwrecked survivors as they could.
Some 1,500 were rescued – around 400 by the U-boat.
Bleasdale said he had not heard of Laconia until 2004, when he met with the BBC2 drama’s producer, Jonathan Young.
