Downton on sea

If Titanic hadn’t actually sunk on its maiden voyage not even Jeffrey Archer would have dared invent such a hammily extravagant plot.

The passenger list — Benjamin Guggenheim, John Jacob Astor IV (Macy’s owner), Isidor Straus, the silent film actress Dorothy Gibson, inventor of the New Journalism W.T. Stead, and sundry English toffs — was just too implausibly rich and diverse. The sudden social levelling induced by disaster too neat and melodramatic. The background details — the band playing on, the lifeboat shortage, the men’s Birkenhead drill stoicism as their female loved ones and children clambered into the lifeboats (or not) — were too upsetting, maddening and moving. And the deus ex machina — an iceberg, for God’s sake? — too ludicrously implausible.

But it happened nonetheless. And a century on, there really can have been no better choice of screenwriter to wring every last drop of class nuance, dramatic irony and pathos out of the tale than Julian Fellowes.