Titanic in Colour

This is a documentary on the Titanic. The gimmick for this one is colorizing the videos and pictures using computers. Since the Titanic existed in the early 20th century, all the old footages are black and white. In fact, some pictures here are still black and white. Every show has to have a gimmick. Otherwise, this is a still bow to stern examination of the life of the boat within two hours. They even have a hotel lounge room which has been decorated with the auctioned remains from sister ship Olympic. On the other hand, they bring out a tiny carpet square like it is the Shroud of Turin. The second episode has more on the collusion and the sinking. The personal stories are very compelling. I don't know about the auction which always seem a bit unseemly. I don't make much of the colorizing gimmick although this has some good information.

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.