Warship

Warship is one of those lost treasures from the Golden and Silver Age of Television. Its great balance of strong story lines and characters set against the rough but romantic backdrop of the cruel sea made it unusual for its time, but nevertheless very engaging. Almost 40 years on it deserves a release on DVD. Solid characters, engaging drama, real tension....Warship survived because of its quality production values. With renewed interest and demand in older series, Warship is one which could easily find a loyal new audience and recapture an old one in 2010! We can only hope that in an era of DVDR on demand from the studios, it will get the opportunity to re-establish its pedigree as part of UK TV history. 2014 Note: Series 1 of Warship available on DVD from Amazon UK

Warship was an excellent series about the Royal Navy in the 1970s. Naturally in a series about a warship in peacetime , you couldn't expect flaming guns every episode- the show dealt principally about the private and professional lives of the ship's company,but was interspersed with moments of high drama, including if memory serves, high seas terrorism, submarine rescue, and a parallel Amethyst incident. The cast, especially the c.o. were very good,I believe on occasion they even fooled the regulars. It belonged up there with the best BBC productions , and certainly warrants release on DVD. Compared to the absolute tripe that passes for free to air television entertainment today, WARSHIP would be a breath of fresh (sea) air.

Stirring stuff opening titles with HMS 'Hero' plunging through the waves bow on to the camera, gave way to a fairly mundane 'soapy' drama about the crew of a destroyer in the Navy.

Being mainly exteriors and pre-dating electronic portability, most of this was shot on 16mm film, with a few studio based shots having completely different sound and picture quality. Very often the crash edits between the two media provided the only dramatic elements to these shows and would wake you from the slumbering state the script had left you in.

Standard plot vehicles were members of the crew smuggling drugs, affairs between crew members and each others wives, crew members resorting to crime to solve some financial crisis. Very occasionally there would be a rescue from some foreign shore, or a bit of gunboat diplomacy. You get the feeling though that being some time after the last 'high profile' navy engagement with Iceland in the Cod War and before the Falklands, the writers couldn't bring themselves to imagine the ship engaged in any kind of warfare. I think the only shots fired were warning ones from the Bofors machine gun in the bow.

Of course the appeal was the crew were all young and dashing, although none of that rescued this rather cheap looking series from its below par performance. Curiously some 30 years later the surviving cast are all turning up as old crocks on 'The Bill' 'Casualty' and all the other soaps that pervade the UK channels at present.

A much better treatment of life in the Navy was the documentary 'Sailor' made in the late seventies. Raw, and uncompromising this doco was a hit, but is puzzlingly absent from the IMDb's pages.

Series 1 & 2 of Warship bring back great memories of my teenage years and good old fashioned high quality TV - something we seem to have lost along the way.

I have just received an e-mail reply from SimplyMedia, the DVD company for Warship and I'm delighted to share the news that Series 3 will be released on 3 April 2017 and Series 4 on 25 September 2017.

Considering the low-tech approach to TV production in the 1970s, series such as Warship manage to convey a realistic feeling of being on board HMS Hero that modern production methods just don't manage.

Really looking forward to Series 3 & 4.