Beware the growlers

It’s the weirdest thing. This obsession with the sinking of the Titanic. Go to the BBC iPlayer website and you’ll find eight programmes you can listen to now, if by chance you missed them first time round. Take Titanic: Minute by Minute on Radio 2, broadcast ‘live’ on the very same night (100 years later) that the luxury ship went down. Billed as ‘experimental’, an ‘adventure’ in radio, this blow-by-blow account of what happened on that fateful night in April 1912 took place in real time in the studio in London, beginning at 11.30 p.m., just before the White Star liner hit the misplaced iceberg, and ending three hours later, by which time the Titanic was lying at the bottom of the North Atlantic.

Why, I wonder, would anyone (apart from a radio critic) want to stay up until 2.30 in the morning reliving every single moment of that nightmare in all its terrible, terrifying detail? It’s just not normal.

‘Can they swim?’ asks Jeremy Vine. ‘The passengers in 1912?’ The time is 12.40 a.m., he adds, and the first lifeboat has just been launched with only 20 people in it, first-class passengers to a woman.

Vine was in charge of the evening, commanding his team of studio experts as they relived the drama and the band of eight musicians, commissioned to play on in the studio to the sinking end, just as they did 100 years ago. ‘What state is Titanic in now? Do you think panic is breaking out yet?’ he gasps, his voice cracking with fear.