AIBU in being completely fed up with the Titanic (rant warning)

[Minimammoth]

Talk about overload. If there is another radio or tv program about it, I will, well ...I will. Lost for a good threat. It was big, it went down, lives were lost. Now can we move on.

I find Titanic quite interesting and have watched some but not all of the programmes about it, YANBU to think that maybe the coverage is OTT but nobody is making you watch it . I would disagree that none of the programmes/films give a good portayal of the terror felt by those on the sinking ships, I have found some of them quite harrowing, watching steerage passengers being locked behind gates and left there, crew members in the ship's engine rooms being trapped by the closing gates as the hull filled with water, it's not hard to imagine the despair and helplessness they would have been feeling as they died.

I find the trauma part of it extremely voyeuristic; the drama part of it exploitative; the history part of it repetetive; and the 'human interest' a sop to tourism.

Thanks for fixing my link.

As for animals taking place of babies, it wasn't a matter of space, at least not at first. Many of the lifeboats went out half empty.

I do find the history fascinating. Always have. But there's nothing new for 2012. Just different wrappings.

There was a great documentary on the bbc world service in the early hours this morning. It was told from the ships point of view or rather the messages sent via morse code radio between titanic and other ships in the area over the course of the evening and up until the ship sank and just after when the carpathia was the first on the scene.

I didnt know that if the nearest ship (just over 50 miles away) had not had its wireless turned off and thus unable to hear or respond to the Titanics distress calls then many more lives could have been saved. As it was the carpathia took hours to get to the scene as it was some distance away.

yes the sight of folk in edwardians with beaming shiney faces was a bit too much to stomach.

In the book The Kite Runner it mentions how big the film was in Afghanistan and how there was a huge market devoted to selling the merchandise! No idea if this is true but would be an odd thing to invent.

nothing new for you linerunner but lots for people like my son who are really interested in it. more the reasons why the ship sunk than the human tragedies.

southeastatra, I'm really interested in it as well. It's just that the whole gut-fest of it being dressed up as new is a bit crap. There's been loads of great docs over the years that I've loved watching. But I take your point about the new audience. (No 3D tits, though, that's Too Far.)

Ship was built
Ship sank
There we go

No need for Len Goodman.

someone said upthread that before the film "titanic" no one really bothered about it . although i feel there is ghoulishness in some of the rememberence, fascination in the titanic story is nothing new. As early as the 1950's films were being made about it " A night to remember" and in the early 1980's "Raise the Titanic" was a film shown at the cinema .

It's not a new thing. I wonder if people will still make films about it in another 50 or a 100 years?

I'm with Perry.

Oh, and does anyone remember the arguably unedifying experience of James Cameron collecting the Oscar and asking for a heads-bowed-tumleweed silence for the Titanic deceased, before screaming 'I'm the king of the world!' whilst holding the little gold fella aloft?

arguably unedifying? I'd say there was very little to debate...

Well KW's tits apart, I am suspecting that the scenes of sinking could be done pretty effectively in 3D - no idea actually how they turn it to 3D but if you get a sense of distances and background and seeing the gurgling water on deck in 3D it could convey a better sense of terror in the audience.

That and Kate Winlet's outstretched hand thrust onto the windowpane of the stowed car, after ... it.

I quite enjoyed that film, to be honest. In the nineties.

All I remember about seeing it in the nineties was that it was loooong, and I was desperate for the loo, but kept thinking it was about to end so hung on a bit longer. By the time it finally did bl**dy sink, I was delighted!

Agree with LeBof,it was the End of an Era,the tragic Edwardian Swansong before the Flanders mud.
A metaphor for the end of the Old Order and the new .
am fascinated,hv been for years.

Saw a tiny and interesting display about it in Swanage recently - with menus and pay slips and so on. The End of an Era thing is certainly true, and the class system elements are fascinating.

The film and the song did go on and on (and on and on and on...) though.

Titanic

The Titanic

which is it?

Regarding the memorial cruise, its doomed to as Ive just saw on Sky News that its had to turn back because a passenger has had a heart attack!

I was just listening to something on the radio which suggested that the reason for our fascination is partly because we want to change what happened that night. It was the perfect storm of cock-ups; from the guy who tried to turn the ship away from the iceberg when a head on collision wouldn't have sunk it to the way the crew handled the evacuation and loading of life boats or why, in what was a massively busy shipping lane, there were no other vessels near by. Partly due to this catalogue of disasters the Titanic did lead directly to SOLAS the international convention on saving lives at sea which set the standards for number of lifeboats etc which are still in force today so in a way the Titanic has saved a fair few lives too.

It is the 100th Anniversary of the loss of a great number of lives - I really do think it's crass and heartless to complain about the amount of coverage it's getting. How would you feel if it was one of your family members that had died on it?