We might believe we know all we need to know about the sinking of the Titanic, through all the repeated films that have been made of this disaster at sea. A large luxury liner hits an iceberg, sinks to the bottom of the ocean with a huge loss of life, end of story. This BBC series of four programmes, Titanic Sinks Tonight, takes you through the two hours plus of its sinking. In 'real time' showing you minute by minute how the disaster developed and it's aftermath. What gives this programme its power to grip you, even though you know what the outcome is, is the vividness with which it portrays what is happening through its dramatic reconstruction, and the verbatim accounts from the surviving passengers and crews testimony.
It also makes great use of historians, disaster, migrant and trauma survival experts, and most significantly here the writer Jeanette Winterson. Who is amazingly good at conveying the often curious logic behind human behaviour, when its put in the pressure cooker of a highly stressful situation. How we think and respond when we are in heightened panic mode. She is just so down to earth and humane, touchingly reminding you not to jump to moral judgements here. For no one knows how they would really respond in the midst of such a crisis. How we believe we would react, is just wishful thinking. When it comes to self preservation, to survival, something much more instinctual kicks in, and that might be far more selfish and ignoble than we'd like to imagine we would be.
As it takes you through the agonising process of sinking, the number of missed opportunities, and individual failings or mistakes start to pile up. You get a vivid picture of why this turned out so badly. How much the 'unsinkable' claim, made everyone complacent and slow in their responses. Early warnings about icebergs that were ignored because it wasn't flagged up via the correct terminology. The complete lack of a ship wide communication system, to convey information from the ships boiler room, eg - to the captain, or to inform passengers. The Captain who decided that in order to avoid panic, he told hardly anyone, even in his own crew, that the ship was in the process of sinking. No one knew what to do. People had to decide for themselves what was happening and how best to respond. One officer misinterpreted the 'women and children first' ethos, as women and children only. Which made married couples reluctant to get on the boats, the boats that were inadequate in number anyway. The assumption that there would be a ship near by to come to the rescue, which there wasn't. The list goes painfully on.
Its a very tense and distressing watch, because you really feel for the wide range of people whose testimonies are being brilliantly portrayed here by actors, The chilling fact that those who got in a boat could hear the screams and pleas of the hundreds of passengers floating in the ice cold water, and could also hear the slow descent of an eerie quiet as hypothermia silenced those sounds of distress. There is also a sense of the real injustice that the engineers who'd heroically and doggedly fought on to the last moment trying to keep the ship afloat, were the last to reach the upper boat deck, only to find there were no boats left to take them.
If you were a first class passenger you were far more likely to survive. If you were a woman or a child you were far more likely to survive. If you were a man, or a member of the crew, you'd be forced into a pose of stoicism and stiff upper lip about your prospects of surviving, which were incredibly small. The men who did survive, had to face public disapproval that their survival was a dispicable dishonourable stain upon their moral integrity. Of the nearly 1500 passengers who died, nearly 1100 of them were crew or third class passengers. There was a hierarchy of survival at work here based upon the implied greater value in being wealthier. Which is quite shocking when laid so factually bare like that.
I highly recommend watching, its quite compellingly told, one episode and you're hooked
CARROT REVIEW - 6/8 
Available to stream on BBC IPlayer.
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