Downton on sea

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.