Titanic: A Question of Murder

The sinking of the Titanic is a tragedy that grips our collective attention and won't let go. All of the elements of what would be a rather fantastic fictional story are present in this real life historical event. A ship, technically the largest and most luxurious of it's day (in a day of sumptuously elegant upper class shipboard appointments), packed with the famous and the wealthy in the elegant first class as well as many hundreds of third class immigrants huddled in the depths of the hold, sinks on it's maiden voyage with tremendous loss of life.

Many documentaries have been made and books written explaining and forensically dissecting the events of that April night in 1912 in the North Atlantic and I have most of them in my personal library, but if I were to take it upon myself to describe why and how and what brought about the tragic loss of 1503 souls on that night I could do no better than to simply screen 'Titanic, A question of murder' and let this production do all the talking for me.

While the narration begins over the depiction of a seance in which the medium is seeking to communicate with a victim of the disaster (this tack did not gain my personal confidence in the documentary, on my first viewing), the production quickly finds its pace and dissects the story in a way that few other such productions have been able. Survivors are interviewed including a heart wrenching interview with the last surviving crew member and that man's haunting reflections. We are given to understand the logical progression of decisions made during construction which made sense to the owners and builders at that time but led to terrible consequences during the disastrous hours of the sinking. We are shown the working relationship and complex interplay between the owners of a ship and the builders who are contracted to fill the order for a great vessel, and how this played out in the event. We are shown how the British Board of Trade had been asleep at the switch as ships in little more than a decade had increased in size and tonnage at an astonishing pace.

In short this documentary tells how it all happened, in such a way that the viewer understands and can appreciate how technology, confidence and a lax bureaucracy contributed to so much human loss.

The closing chilling reflection by that sole surviving crew member gives meaning to the title. I could rate this special nothing but a 10/10.