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 ...