BBC's Titanic Sinks Tonight

Over the past two weeks, tne National Geographic Channel ran the four-part BBC series Titanic Sinks Tonight, which has its own Wikipedia entry. This is a peculiar new iteration of the Titanic story from the UK side of the Atlantic; the US version tends to concentrate on the "pride" side of the story in songs like "Down With the Old Canoe", while the UK version tends toward hand-wringing over things like the class system, wealth, and so forth. Per Wikipedia,

The series places emphasis on the social class and sex of the passengers, as well as the perceived mistakes by those in command.

The BBC definitely wrings its hands. It's worth noting that of the six talking heads who offer commentary on the action, four are women. Of the women, one is an apparently mandatory non-white, Somali-born novelist Nadifa Mohamed, whose unsmiling face seems to be there chiefly as buzzkill. That they would need to provide an African perspective on the story is incongruous at best, since the Titanic's passengers and crew, from first class to steerage, appear to have been entirely of European heritage.

The series's strong point is the actors who deliver lines originally spoken by witnesses at the 1912 US Senate inquiry into the disaster, as well as a later UK inquiry. These are direct and authentic, but what detracts from them is the comnmentary of the majority-female talking heads. In addition to Ms Mohamed, there is the particularly annoying Suzannah Lipscom, an upper-class woman with a Gorgon-head hairstyle and a nose stud. Her qualifications for addressing the audience are, according to her Wikipedia entry,

Her research focuses on the sixteenth century, in both English and French history, and covers religious, womens’s history, political, social, and psychological history. She has also written and talked about British and European witch trials.

Between her and Ms Mohamed, we get plenty of perspective on the Titanic from both the African and the sixteenth-century women's viewpoints as a way to understand the first-hand accounts of the survivors. What does this tell us about how the UK upper class, as manifested by the BBC writers, views itself? I can only conclude that it looks in the mirror and cringes, and its reflex is to comfort itself with reassurances over how it's making things up with non-whites and feminists.

The Titanic story that emerges from the witness accounts is a terrible cockup, driven more by complacency than pride, with the upper echelon of ship's officers refusing to recognize the ship is sinking and undertake any sort of organized evacuation. Certainly one can look at the disaster as an omen of the end of the old order, but it's also just a small presage of the much greater world disaster that would follow two years later. The question nobody seems to want to ask is whether what led to the Titanic was the same thing that led to the Marne.

Much of the commentary, for instance, focuses on the interpretation of Captain Smith's order to put the women and children into the lifeboats and whether it meant "women and children first" or "women and children only". Thus many lifeboats were lowered with empty seats, with the final result that 74% of the women and 52% of the children on board were saved, but only 20% of the men. Nobody asks, though, about the equivalent sacrifice of a generation of British men in the First World War.

In fact, too little is made of the controversy over whether, following the US declaration of war against Germany in 1917, US troops would serve under an independent US command, or whether they would be used as replacements in British and French units. The US made it plain that its troops were not to be used, as British and French troops were, as cannon fodder. The peculiar eagerness of the British in particular to sacrifice males to the ideals of chivalry seems to be one basis of both the Titanic and the 1914 world-war disasters.

In fact, the whole subtext of the BBC Titanic special seems to be an attempt to avoid the question of who's sacrificing whom in current British life -- this is clearly a deeply uncomfortable topic. The script briefly mentions the workers in tbe shiip's boiler rooms, who gave their lives to keep the lights on, but it speaks much more of the men in first class who didn't make it to the lifeboats -- while providing little insight into the overall question.

On the other hand, it's clearly important to the producers to give women with no particular background in the subject the opportunity to talk at length about it, eapecially an African woman, who's qualified to speak on it only by dint of being an African woman. Men, especially men of the lower classes, aren't given that chance; they're represented only by actors not of their class speaking lines from the inquests, probably with the help of a dialect coach.

I'm not sure if I like the UK at all right now, to tell the truth.