How the Titanic sank
Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The sinking of the Titanic is one of those historic events that only grows more vivid in our cultural imagination as the years go by. More than a century later, everyone has a friend with encyclopaedic knowledge of what happened, and there have been countless retellings across novels, Hollywood films and television dramas that have made even small details of the story notorious (the Case of the Missing Binoculars!).
And here we have a major new podcast from the history company Noiser, hosted on BBC Sounds, which tells the story of the catastrophe over 13 lengthy episodes. Titanic: Ship of Dreams is narrated in ominous tones by Paul McGann, of Doctor Who and Withnail and I fame, who has a personal connection with events (his great-uncle, Jimmy McGann, was a trimmer down in the ship's engine room), and interspersed with the voices of experts, from historians to Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey and the 2012 TV drama Titanic. One talking head suggests there is only one story that is more popular 'in the history of mankind, and that is the story of how Jesus was crucified'.
The pace is slow, yet it remains deeply compelling. Duncan Barrett's script is arresting and immediate. Unfolding in the present tense, it is full of human colour and overloaded with detail: not just crucial information such as the number of lifeboats and, yes, the location of the binoculars onboard, but the number of seconds it took for the ship to slide off the slipway and into the water at its launch on 31 May 1911 ('the longest 62 seconds in history') and the material used for the chairs in the Parisian-style bistro for first-class passengers (wicker). These small observations bring the ship vividly to life, and the scale of the project strikes us anew: not just the size of the vessel, but the number of people employed to build and sail it, the unfathomable luxury of the interiors, and the ambition with which it was executed. Clearly, the story has not been exhausted yet.
[See also: The music of resistance]
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