If Titanic hadn’t actually sunk on its maiden voyage not even Jeffrey Archer would have dared invent such a hammily extravagant plot.
The passenger list — Benjamin Guggenheim, John Jacob Astor IV (Macy’s owner), Isidor Straus, the silent film actress Dorothy Gibson, inventor of the New Journalism W.T. Stead, and sundry English toffs — was just too implausibly rich and diverse. The sudden social levelling induced by disaster too neat and melodramatic. The background details — the band playing on, the lifeboat shortage, the men’s Birkenhead drill stoicism as their female loved ones and children clambered into the lifeboats (or not) — were too upsetting, maddening and moving. And the deus ex machina — an iceberg, for God’s sake? — too ludicrously implausible.
But it happened nonetheless. And a century on, there really can have been no better choice of screenwriter to wring every last drop of class nuance, dramatic irony and pathos out of the tale than Julian Fellowes. Titanic is, of course, Downton Abbey on the Sea — only a hundred times more satisfying because at no point are you sitting there going, ‘Oh, come on! That burgeoning romance between the handsome young American heir and the suffragettishly liberated daughter of an English earl cut brutally short would so never have happened…’
In this new centennial account of the disaster, Fellowes and producer Nigel Stafford-Clark have very wisely decided not to rock the boat — as it were — by trying to adapt the story for modern prejudices. So we’re not invited to believe that reeling, jigging Oirish jollity, decency and raw courage are the sole preserve of the ordinary working folk below deck, while all toffs can do is be buttoned-up and snooty. As Lord Manton puts it to his wife when she says something snobbish about their fellow passengers: ‘They’re just people trying to get from Southampton to New York, like we are.’
Lord Manton seems to be heavily borrowed from Lord Grantham. They’re both fictional earls, they’re both achingly decent and really quite daringly progressive, as you see, for example, when Lord Manton controversially invites a junior business associate and his wife up from the second class for tea. Naturally, this provokes a classic Fellowesian contretremps as the two wives square up to one another for, though both are Irish, one’s Anglo- and one’s Bog and they despise each other to the core.
No doubt they’ll end up sharing a lifeboat together, that’s what the script seems to be leading up to. But we don’t get to find out till the ‘who lives, who dies, and what becomes of them all’ final episode. The first three, meanwhile, follow the same timeline (from leaving Southampton to the iceberg) but from the point of view of different sets of passengers and crew.
This, I think, was another sensible move. One of the big problems with the Titanic story is that you know how it’s going to end. If you had to put up with three whole hour-long episodes of passengers dancing and flirting oblivious to their fate, saying unknowingly portentous things like ‘Wrap up. It’s colder than it was’, I think the tension would be unbearable, not to say irritating. Whereas, the way ITV has done it, you get your nemesis and catharsis at the end of each episode: four iceberg collisions for the price of one, for which relief much thanks.
One of the arguments advanced for the continuation of the licence fee is that it enables the BBC to make drama of a far higher calibre than you would get on the commercial channels. Titanic — an ITV production — makes a nonsense of that case. It’s superbly acted by the kind of all-star cast (David Calder, Celia Imrie, Linus Roache, Geraldine Somerville, Stephen Waddington) they normally reserve for Dickens adaptations, the ship scenes are all so well done that you never think, ‘Oh, that’s blue screen’ or ‘Bet the state rooms looked nothing like that’, nor do you ever feel your intelligence is being insulted.
Sure, Fellowes can lay on the social divisions a bit thick sometimes: ‘I never judge people by their class,’ declares the earl’s daughter as she paces the First Class promenade — and then, with barely a beat, adds, ‘There’s that frightful Mrs Rushton and her horrid-looking dog.’ But then, so could Jane Austen with monsters like Mrs Elton and her caro sposo and we love those scenes, don’t we?
Really, though, this moving, pacy, supremely watchable production is very hard to fault and Fellowes is at the top of his game. I liked the poignant, understated scene where, rather than join the scrabble for the lifeboats Guggenheim, in white tie, orders another whisky. ‘Julio,’ he says to the immaculate waiter serving him. ‘You know I’m not a Democrat but at times like this you are welcome to sit.’
Episode 1 of Titanic will be broadcast on ITV1 at 9 pm on 25 March.
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