It’s the weirdest thing. This obsession with the sinking of the Titanic. Go to the BBC iPlayer website and you’ll find eight programmes you can listen to now, if by chance you missed them first time round. Take Titanic: Minute by Minute on Radio 2, broadcast ‘live’ on the very same night (100 years later) that the luxury ship went down. Billed as ‘experimental’, an ‘adventure’ in radio, this blow-by-blow account of what happened on that fateful night in April 1912 took place in real time in the studio in London, beginning at 11.30 p.m., just before the White Star liner hit the misplaced iceberg, and ending three hours later, by which time the Titanic was lying at the bottom of the North Atlantic.
Why, I wonder, would anyone (apart from a radio critic) want to stay up until 2.30 in the morning reliving every single moment of that nightmare in all its terrible, terrifying detail? It’s just not normal.
‘Can they swim?’ asks Jeremy Vine. ‘The passengers in 1912?’ The time is 12.40 a.m., he adds, and the first lifeboat has just been launched with only 20 people in it, first-class passengers to a woman.
Vine was in charge of the evening, commanding his team of studio experts as they relived the drama and the band of eight musicians, commissioned to play on in the studio to the sinking end, just as they did 100 years ago. ‘What state is Titanic in now? Do you think panic is breaking out yet?’ he gasps, his voice cracking with fear.
At 1.06, he warns, ‘Things are really starting to get quite nasty now.’ To which one of his guests replies, insightfully, ‘Big time, yep.’
Cue doomy music and the bleeping sound of the ship’s new wireless sending out a distress signal in Morse code.
Talk about wallowing in the terror. On paper it probably sounded like a great idea. Let’s commemorate those brave musicians by recreating the music as they played on through the tragedy. On air it just sounded tacky.
At least The Ice Mountain on Radio 4 (Friday) only took 30 minutes to take us through what happened that night, and gave us a totally different perspective. How, for instance, did the iceberg get there, to the middle of the North Atlantic from its origin in Greenland?
A team of glaciologists, birdwatchers and seamen from the International Ice Patrol re-imagined the natural events against a soundscape of splintering ice and roaring water (created by Chris Watson). We were led to think of those ‘bergy bits’ and ‘growlers’ floating in the freezing ocean. How many thousands of years ago did the snowflakes fall from which the ice was made? But the most visual image was of the storm petrels which hover round the edge of an iceberg in the hope of catching not a fish but the breath of a killer whale. Yes, the breath. Apparently, it’s greasy, and the petrels like to eat it.
This programme also left us with the reassuring thought that since 1914, when the International Ice Patrol was set up by the US Coastguard in the wake of the Titanic tragedy, no ship (that has taken its advice) has been sunk by an iceberg.
Bad things happen, but out of them good can stir. That’s not a message we hear much of on radio, TV or the web. It’s as if we’re being brainwashed to live in a state of fearful trepidation. To believe that, unless we control every waking moment, the bad will flood in, like water rushing through a sinking ship.
When John Humphrys announced on the Today programme (Radio 4) just after the eight o’clock news last Wednesday morning that in Bong County, Liberia, children have a 10 per cent chance of dying before they reach the age of five, and that 95 per cent of young people are unemployed, it sounded as if we were in for yet another hopeless tale of an African country riven by violence and plagued by drought, misery and death. ‘When we leave this studio occasionally we tend to go where something dramatic is happening,’ said Humphrys. ‘In Africa it’s invariably for one of two reasons: war or famine.’
But then he added something so extraordinary it stopped me mid-spoonful. ‘In Liberia there is no war and there’s no famine,’ he said. ‘We reckon Africa is important in itself and not just at times of huge crisis.’ It was as if the wireless set were beaming out light, rather than words. ‘There is a different story — the African continent is beginning to get its act together; democracy is taking over, economies are expanding. The potential is vast and if it succeeds its effect on the world economy will be profound.’
Halleluia, we should all be singing. No more fratricidal politicking and/or financial scandal. Or at least a little less, as for a few moments we look beyond these shores to other priorities, different lives. I just wish they’d chosen another place to visit. Humphrys in Bong County sounds awfully like Gulliver in the land of the Yahoos.
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