Bill Ash escaping activities. He ended the war as a flight lieutenant. In August 2015, the BBC reported: "When Ash died aged 96 last year his obituaries noted that he was said to have been the model for Virgil Hilts, the lean, leather-jacketed airman played by Steve McQueen in the 1963 film "The Great Escape"". The character Hilts, nicknamed "The Cooler King" because of the time he spends in the prison camp's punishment block (which the prisoners call the "cooler") for his persistent escape attempts, steals a motorbike and tries to escape to Switzerland but is caught while using it to jump
The Great Escape (book) a live drama adaptation as an episode of "The Philco Television Playhouse", starring E.G. Marshall, Everett Sloane, Horace Braham, and Kurt Katch. The live broadcast was praised for engineering an ingenious set design for the live broadcast, including creating the illusion of underground tunnels. In 1963, the Mirisch brothers worked with United Artists to adapt the book to produce the film "The Great Escape" starring Steve McQueen, James Garner and Richard Attenborough. The film itself was also an inspiration for the film "Chicken Run". In 1986, Ocean Software released the first "Great Escape" video game for the Commodore 64, ZX