The boast of this two-part Channel Four documentary is in the title, as we see again the familiar story of the mighty ship's demise told, effectively in colour. All this means really is that all the old photographs and limited film footage of the doomed ship we've largely seen before are cleaned up and colourised to make them more vivid and yes, real.
In point of fact however, these images make up only a small proportion of the programmes' running time, with the bulk of it made up of interviews with descendants of passengers who died or survived the voyage together with various historians covering different aspects of the tragedy.
It is, of course, a compelling story worth hearing again as the ship's tale is told from its ambitious beginning as a super-liner of the White Line shipping company to its terrible ending. I was glad there were no attempts to dramatise scenes on board, although this did make for a static, slow narrative with a lot of repetition of some of the photographs and artefacts from back in 1912.
There was also much reliance on a promotional video film taken on board the Titanic's almost identical surviving twin sister-ship the Olympic, made less than ten years later showing the opulence and grandeur of how the great boat must have looked.
While I didn't learn much that was new from what I saw here, plus the two episodes could likely have been condensed into one, especially if the various auction scenes were omitted, this well-narrated and produced production was nevertheless an interesting retelling of the old ship's sorry tale.
