Am I the only one cheering for the iceberg during ITV's Titanic?

How different it might all have been if Sir Matthew Pinsent had been born a century earlier, so that he could have served as a lookout on the Titanic.

One of his timely cries of “there’s something in the water” might surely have made all the difference, as they did to that witless protester’s chances of survival in the Thames on Saturday afternoon.

Though the greatest risk was not that impressionable children might witness a well-deserved decapitation on live TV, but that the contest might be spoiled by one of the rowers breaking an oar in the process. As it was, that catastrophe was luckily averted, and … oh yeah.

Until this Easter weekend I had never taken the slightest interest in the boat race, even though I grew up in a household where it was religiously observed on our tiny black and white TV. It was one of those annual events that my parents considered simply unmissable, like the Grand National (the only horse race on which they ever placed a bet).

Yet the only thing I can remember from my childhood is some grainy footage of the 1951 Oxford boat sinking, endlessly recycled on compilations of great sporting disasters along with that bloke being pipped at the post of the 1948 Olympic marathon and the Queen Mother’s horse Devon Loch landing flat on its stomach at Aintree in 1956.

Cambridge 1978, not Oxford 1951, but you get the picture

Then came this Holy Saturday, when I was so desperate for a break from the sound of three small children wrecking my garden that I pulled the “I must support my old university” card from my pocket and settled down in blissful peace and quiet in front of the TV. It was certainly a memorable experience. And, what’s more, I only had to see it once.

Unlike Julian Fellowes’ take on Titanic, which is apparently stuck in an endless loop where the same characters do much the same things to each other every week. The big surprise comes right at the end, when the ship sinks. Who could have seen that coming? Surely I am not alone in spending my recent Sunday evenings shouting “Come on, you iceberg!” at the TV?

For variety, next week I think I shall treat myself to a download of the classic 1980 box office flop “Raise the Titanic”, of which Lew Grade memorably observed “It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic Ocean.”

It is strange how Titanic has retained its hold on the popular imagination, despite the subsequent and infinitely greater human tragedies of the First World War. I do not recall any similar fuss being made on, say, the centenary of the Tay Bridge disaster in 1979.

Come on Fellowes, it had first class passengers, too. Anyone for the memorial crossing?

What we can say with certainty is that no one would currently be paying almost £6,000 for a cruise to retrace Titanic’s maiden voyage if it had ended safely in New York. Just as few would remember Donald Campbell’s achievement if he had broken the world water speed record on Coniston in 1967, instead of becoming fatally airborne in Bluebird.

Similarly, how many of NASA’s 135 space shuttle launches have lodged in the memory, apart from the Challenger disaster of 1986?

Call me superstitious, but I would not wish to step aboard a Titanic memorial cruise at any price. Though a century of progress in marine engineering meant that MS Balmoral had to leave Southampton two days earlier than Titanic because it cannot match its speed. This presumably reduces the chances of adverse consequences from any unanticipated encounters with sea ice.

For added authenticity, they have ditched three quarters of the lifeboats

And if by some quirk history should repeat itself, at least the participants will never be forgotten.

Just as the sore losers in the 2012 boat race may console themselves with the thought that they have come as close as any of us ever will to immortality. Because winners soon fade from memory, but people will surely be replaying footage of their tribulations on YouTube for decades if not centuries to come.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Honour our saviour from the euro

Last week brought a flurry of anniversaries, several triumphs of social mobility and a disturbing sense of déjà-vu.

It all began on Sunday 14th, which would have been my parents’ 74th wedding anniversary and was the Prince of Wales’s 62nd birthday. Can you also remember when Charles was the future?

On Monday my father would have been 102, while on Tuesday my next-door neighbours, Andrew and Etta, celebrated 64 years of marriage. I was minded to crack open a bottle of something fizzy in their honour even before I heard the news of the long-anticipated engagement of Prince William and Kate Middleton, which clearly demanded a proper celebration.

The only sour note for me came not from the legions of left-wing columnists churning out their entirely predictable critiques of the monarchy, but from Prince William’s father. Doorstepped by the media in Poundbury, he claimed to be “thrilled” but looked anything but, adding glumly that “they have had enough practice”.

The next day I read suggestions that Kate Middleton’s father bore a passing resemblance to Gordon Brown, both physically and in his evident discomfort as he read out his notes on how happy he and his wife were about the engagement. And as I did so, it occurred to me with mounting horror that the real parallel lies elsewhere.

An intelligent man with passionate enthusiasms who really believes he can do good for his country and is forced to wait far too long to fulfil his destiny. That would serve equally well as a description of both our last Labour Prime Minister and our King-in-waiting.

And given that The Queen is by all accounts much fitter than her mother was at 84, Prince Charles might have to kick his heels not just for another decade, which was long enough to leave Gordon Brown with no real clue what to do when he finally achieved his lifelong ambition, but until he is an octogenarian himself.

Meanwhile William and Kate seemingly resemble Dave and Samantha Cameron. Not appealing to all, no doubt, but clearly rather more in tune with the Zeitgeist.

With the coins already minted to mark the Duke of Edinburgh’s 90th birthday next year, a monarchy with longevity genes on both sides has important questions to consider on how it can continue to project the glamour that seems the key to popular appeal in any walk of life.

My own thinking on this weighty issue was interrupted by another night of celebration on Thursday to mark the 40th birthday of Iceland, the frozen food chain. A charity ball featured amazing pyrotechnics, performances by Dame Edna Everage and Tom Jones, and helped to raise £1.5 million for Help for Heroes. At the time of writing, the only attention this has received from the media has been through an anonymous e-mailer complaining that the fireworks disturbed his horses. As William and Kate surely already know, some people are never happy unless they are moaning.

Meanwhile on Friday, the heady social ascent of Miss Middleton was followed by the elevation to the House of Lords of a load of people no-one other than those passing around the party collection hats had ever heard of, plus Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes. A mere life peerage is surely far too little for a man who is the essence of poshness and has done so much for national morale.

On past form Prince William will be made a duke on his marriage. Why confine this bounty to your own family, Ma’am? Surely the time is ripe for Earl Fellowes?

And, as we watch the precipitous downward mobility of the entire Irish nation, let us also give appropriate recognition to the man who may have failed as PM but performed the truly historic service of keeping Britain out of the euro: Gordon Brown, Duke of Kirkcaldy.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

A barren life without Downton Abbey

I write this in the complete despair of one whose life became a meaningless wasteland when Downton Abbey ended on Sunday night.

By the time you read this they will also have killed off Jack Duckworth on Coronation Street. Cue tumbleweed blowing across the desert of my existence, and serious questioning of the point of going on.

Why is ITV persecuting me like this? Though perhaps the more interesting question is why I, as a would-be middle-class person, have started watching ITV at all?

I was brought up to regard it as common and second rate compared with the dear old BBC. As a child, it is true that I always used to try and catch the magnificent blast of “Blaydon Races” that Tyne Tees TV played at the start of each evening’s broadcasting, but then it was straight over to the other side for Blue Peter, Animal Magic and Look North with Frank Bough, or later Mike Neville and George House.

As well as adopting just the right tone on State occasions, the BBC could always be relied upon to appreciate the crucial importance of airing a good costume drama on Sunday evening. From the black-and-white Forsyte Saga at the start of BBC2 through an apparently endless series of Jane Austen bonnet-fests, they hit the spot time and again.

Yet now ITV has seized the crown with a series that began with one well-worn cliché (the sinking of the Titanic) and ended with another (the outbreak of the First World War) and in which frankly nothing much happened in between. While the press has been buzzing with suggestions that large elements of the plot, such as it was, were lifted straight from the likes of Little Women and Mrs Miniver, and pedants found that the meticulous period detail was slightly marred by the intrusion of TV aerials and double yellow lines.

Admittedly these trifles pale into insignificance compared with the scene in The Tudors where Henry VIII bedded one of his many ladies in a house with two red Calor gas bottles outside.

Still, we snobs can forgive such lapses because Downton Abbey writer Julian Fellowes is proper posh (married to the niece of Earl Kitchener, don’tchaknow). Quite how he follows up his addictive success in the promised second series is open to question, given that so much went to hell in a handcart for the aristocracy from 1914. Fast forward to the Bright Young Things of the 1930s (though Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess would then be about 100) or try a prequel set in the Naughty Nineties? I can hardly wait.

Meanwhile the BBC has been on strike. When I turned on Radio 4 last Friday morning and they announced that they were airing a programme about birds of the Wash in place of Today, I naturally took this for further sabotage by the National Union of Journalists, or a homage to that running joke in the recent Harry and Paul comedy series about two blokes with a microphone making the dullest radio documentary in the world.

I switched channels immediately, and was later surprised to read that the public actually preferred the birdsong of the estuary to John Humphrys. Though perhaps I should have expected it, because Radio 3 also dropped its usual schedule (though why waffling a bit between CD tracks counts as “journalism” is beyond me) and played instead a long programme about my favourite composer, Handel, which made my usual morning car journey fly by.

Back to normal service yesterday, I listened to the usual self-righteous waffle about the Burmese general election (their chance to vote for the usual generals), then heard that the NUJ were threatening to strike again over Christmas. Oh no! Could this mean a schedule packed with repeats of classic costume dramas? Maybe life is not looking so bad after all.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.