Television
Sitting duck
Clive Gammon
I once met a stage-American at Kinsale. He wanted to charter a launch that would take him the dozen miles off the Old Head to photograph the actual bit of sea where the ' Lusitania ' went down in 1915. The price, as prices do at Kinsale, turned out to be somewhat stiff. When he shied at the sum required an Admiralty Chart was produced to show him what a long way it was through the Inner Harbour, the Outer Harbout and so on, even before he made the open sea.
"Say, can I buy that chart?" he exclaimed delightedly.
Naive, maybe, but no more so than the underlying assumption in Sunday night's Who Sank the Lusitania? (BBC 2) that the sinking of the finer by a German U-boat was a direct cause of the United States entering the first world war two years later. Historically this is quite untenable— it wasn't even an immediate cause though it must have marginally strengthened the pro-British party in Washington at the time
—and this, afraid, did something to dilute the impact of the programme. The US would have come in anyway.
Aside from that, it was fine. It's hard to go wrong with a good disaster as long as it is well-removed from recent memory and Nicholas Tomalin the writer and Paul Bonner the producer faltered only once, in an unnaccountably silly piece of japery midway featuring a comic squad of sailors. I couldn't see what this was meant to prove.
But the experiment of using actors to speak for the Admiralty, the German government and so on was entirely successful, so successful indeed, that when some real survivors of the sinking came on screen they were somewhat shadowy and unreal compared with the passionate advocates we had been listening to. And so convincing were the actors that it was hard to take sides. Not that anything very much that was new emerged anyway. The ' Lusitania ' was probably carrying contraband munitions with the knowledge of the Americans. The Captain was surely negligent and so was the Admiralty. The 'second explosion' controversy remained unresolved: the testimony of the diver who had worked on the wreck in the early 'sixties was rather suspect because of his obvious resentment of the US Navy's withdrawal from co-operation with his project and there was no evidence called from another and bigger team of divers who, more recently, were working on the wreck.
But the central question surely needed no answer anyway. The Germans sank the unarmed 'Lusitania' without warning and drowned 1,195 people and, spin as much sophistry around it as you will, this was an atrocious thing to do. The suggestion that Churchill actively connived at this wasn't seriously maintained. I have always been fairly well convinced (for the controversy is an old one) that the Admiralty honestly, if short-sightedly, believed that the ship's speed was enough to protect her from undersea torpedo attack. And if the Captain had stuck to his instructions and zig-zagged instead of keeping to a straight course then it would have been enough.
Full marks, all the same, for this production. And now, what are the chances of a go at the Tay Bridge Disaster, a special favourie of mine?
Meanwhile, in the desert of Saturday night, I found the first in the new series of the sub-Forsyte Upstairs, Downstairs (ITV) a little dull until the glorious appearance Of John Alderton as a sly Welsh valet. The ill-digested social history had been hard to take up to this point but Alderton redeemed all. Saturday night saloon-bar takings, I fear, are in for a slide.
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