[BITList] The truth about Titanic, yet again

[HUGH]

Tuesday evening,

Last night I caught the second half of a TV "docudrama" about the Titanic called The Unsinkable. No marks for originality there, then.  I was glad I'd missed the first half.

The action was punctuated by statements from "experts", only one of which I'd agree without further evidence actually was an expert - this lady is a forensic metallurgist and she reckoned the rivets were sub-standard, being grade 3 instead of 4 - too many inclusions of slag. Her point was emphasised by a short sequence showing a hand inscribing grade 3 in immaculate copperplate on an order for X gross of rivets. This deficiency, she said, may never have mattered had the ship lived a normal life, but the stress of the iceberg shelf running along the hull, she reckoned, popped too many rivet heads off.  I'll buy that - what I'll never buy is TV's utter failure even to attempt a credible portrayal of what was down below and not inhabited by people in evening dress or asleep in nice cabins.  One sequence portrayed a fireman giving evidence - according to the commentary he had been the only fireman who survived, so what can we assume from that? Bugger all is the answer.  The engineers, all of whom who drowned, were ignored in the second half - they may well have been mentioned in the first half - greasers, etc, ditto.  The fireman's evidence (he said he was in charge of the watch) was illustrated by a sequence where a rather ragged and filthy man holding a shovel annoyed a scattering of small lumps of coal, or it could have been stone, on the floor (there was no discernible marine connection at that point, so I refrain from calling it a deck) of a dim and rusty filthy room smeared with god knows what, with a sort of box affair in the middle.   Titanic was about ready for the scrappers according to whoever thought that lot up.  Each time it became necessary to emphasise the bit about water coming in, the camera focused on the far wall, an area of about 12 ft x 12 ft, which was revealed to have many lines of rivets horizontally and vertically and some vague bars.  Also, it was filthy.  The water gushed through this convincingly on cue, but to what effect was never revealed.  Laugh?  I couldn't stop.

Hugh.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/pipermail/bitlist/attachments/20081104/1e8bbd42/attachment-0001.shtml