I have been avoiding all the *Titanic *tragedy-porn on TV this week, as they are all the same crap: James Cameron bloviating, cheesy recreations with bad actors dressed up and yelling “Oi! An oiceberg!” The same talking heads over and over.
And it was excellent! Watch it online or catch a PBS rerun. I had never heard of Len Goodman, but he is a nice bloke with a wonderful (Northern?) accent, and the show covered lots that even a *Titanic *queen like myself did not know: the Italian waiters, the female stewards, the sad story of the pregnant fiancee of one of the doomed musicians. He interviewed the grandsons of “villains” Cosmo Duff Gordon and J. Bruce Ismay, for a more nuanced view.
And no cheesy recreations! Grab this show if it floats by.
Thanks for mentioning this. That sounds like an interesting program.
Certainly I think that it would be interesting to see a more nuanced treatment of Ismay, in particular, in the popular mind. (Not to say I think he should be absolved of all blame, just that his decision to get into that lifeboat, at that time is hard to condemn.)
Really, the only thing Cosmo Duff Gordon and J. Bruce Ismay did *wrong *was to not commit suicide when a seat in a lifeboat was offered to them and no one else was nearby to take it. It’s not as though they trampled over a mother and her baby to climb in, though that’s the impression one got from the papers.
Excellent show, and Goodman is a terrific, low-key host.
Interestingly, the mass audience that watches Dancing With The Stars (where Goodman is one of the judges) probably wonders why the heck a professional dancer and reality show judge is involved with a program about the Titanic.
Turns out, in his younger years before he turned to ballroom dancing, he was an apprentice welder for Harland and Wolff … which is one of the companies that helped build the Titanic. It’s true! Not to imply Goodman actually did any of the welding on the Titanic itself … he’s a bit too young for that.
I caught just a few minutes of this show last night. I agree, it looks fascinating.
Last night, there was a very good special on CBC about the engineers working to keep the ship afloat as long as possible, giving the passengers the best chance to get off.
Which is also on PBS in the US. It wasn’t 100% historically accurate — for one thing, it showed the centerline screw going into reverse, which wasn’t possible — but it did give a good feel for what the engineers went through to keep the ship afloat and the lights on as long as possible.
Len Goodman did a terrific job. The entire program was dramatic without being schmaltzy, full of interesting details about the people involved with the ship and its sinking.
I don’t know why, but I was struck by the story of the telegrapher, stuck in the tiny “Marconi room” tapping out distress signals to the very end.
Hmmm. Seems he was in his negative 30s when the Titanic was being built. Did Harland and Wolff refuse to hire non-existent people? Sign of the times, I suppose.
Anyway, I saw this show last night and enjoyed it as well. I hadn’t realized before how many victims were all from the same city, Southampton — and for that matter, that they all lived within a few blocks of each other.
I saw a pretty good Titanic documentary the other day - well, I was flipping channels and I missed the beginning of the show, but I saw most of it. It was called Titanic: Case Closed (link to the show’s National Geographic site).
The show was pretty interesting, and it put forward a theory that I haven’t heard before - several aspects of the Titanic tragedy may be due to unusual atmospheric conditions that the crew didn’t expect.
Basically, the documentary pulls together lots of records from different ships in the areas and eyewitness testimony to suggest that when Titanic sunk it was under perfect conditions to create “cold water mirages” and optical illusions. As the ship passed from the Gulf Stream to the Labrador current the water temperature abruptly dropped and a temperature inversion in the air meant that it’s likely mirages would occur.
On a perfectly clear night with a calm sea and no moon, lookouts primarily “see” icebergs by how they block the light of the stars behind them at the horizon. However, a mirage may have created an optical illusion that “raised” the horizon and obscured the iceberg, so the lookouts couldn’t see it until it was too late.
Also, the show proposes that the nearby Californian which should have been close enough to help the Titanic may have also had this optical illusion. The captain of the Californian stated that he saw another ship near that position, but he was certain it wasn’t the Titanic. After the fact, they determined it could only have been the Titanic, but he swore the shape looked like another ship . The documentary shows how mirages can make an oil tanker look like a cruise ship (when they have quite different shapes/profiles) - so maybe if it weren’t for a mirage the Californian would have recognized the Titanic.
A crew member on the Californian at one point thought they saw a ship signalling to them with Morse code but couldn’t make out a message. When the Californian tried signalling back, they came to the conclusion that it wasn’t really another ship signalling because the flashes appeared to be random and not a message. The documentary argues that the atmospheric conditions that cause mirages lead to lights refracting and scintillating, and this would have disrupted any messages the ships tried to send by Morse lamp and made them look random. This is backed up by other ship’s logs in the area saying there was a lot of “refraction” that evening, and Titanic survivors testified that the stars appeared to be scintillating/refracting more than normal.
i saw that one last night, eve, as well as the one brothercadfael mentioned. both were very interesting. i find getting the storys from the side of the relatives interesting. you get the picture of the disaster, and what was or was not done. hearing how it rippled through families, and communities in the years after gives a more complete view.
on another disaster… anderson cooper mentioned (on his show, while talking to isha about a related subject) rather casually that he had bid on an item of the lusitania. isha asked him about it and he said it was a passenger list, his great uncle was on the ship, and he has it framed. it had me wondering how it was dealt with in his family, what stories were told.
that is what makes the two titanic stories in this thread so good. you get the answers to how it was discussed or not in families, what they hold on to as a momento.
there is a special by robert ballard where he also goes to harland and wolf, to track down the stories of those that built the ship. the fellow that has dug, traced, and gotten info on the people and the families is just fasinating.