Putting the Boot in | 14 February 2019

‘I know, let’s repaint the Sistine Chapel. But this time we’ll get it done by Banksy.’ Perhaps this wasn’t the exact phrase used in the early production meetings for the Sky Atlantic reboot (ho ho) of Das Boot (Wednesdays). It does describe pretty well the net result, though.

Yes, I know James Walton covered it last week but I’m going to have to strongly disagree with him: Das Boot — Wolfgang Peterson’s 1980s miniseries about life on a U-boat during the Battle of the Atlantic — is my favourite wartime TV drama ever. And I’m damned if I’m going to let this travesty of a new version through the net.

Let me say, before I loose my depth charges, that the submarine stuff is perfectly fine — especially the nuanced, believable relationship between rookie Captain Klaus Hoffmann (Rick Okon) and his second-in-command Karl Tennstedt (August Wittgenstein). But the rest is pure cliché and bilge.

Remember the main word used to capture the intensity of that original series? Claustrophobic. So now — such genius! —they’ve decided to open up this confined, smelly and resolutely male world to make it more airy and inclusive. Now we haven’t just got German submariners (and the odd French tart on shore leave). We’ve also got gallant French resistance women, a plucky, attractive female lead, a leering Gestapo man, a Catholic priest, lots of scenes in and around La Rochelle, plus — de rigueur these days — some lesbian sex in episode four.

I’m old enough to remember the era when lesbian sex existed in only two places: perfervid teenage fantasies and the mags that fuelled them. Now it has become so ubiquitous and is so barded with implicit, hectoring worthiness (‘See: no homophobia here!’) it ought to be patented as the world’s most effective anaphrodisiac.