Titanic In Colour review – a gripping history, once you’ve made it through three minutes of staring at a carpet

This documentary is so obsessed with its odd pigment-based premise that it can feel downright pointless. But when it takes a wider lens, it becomes an intriguing, detail-filled tale

The Titanic was huge and it was huge news; from its inception to its watery grave, the ocean liner – at the time the largest moving object on the planet – had an outsized influence on the world. That significance was only cemented by James Cameron’s epic Hollywood dramatisation of the disaster, which became the first billion-dollar grossing film upon its 1997 release (it’s still pretty popular, going by the Netflix numbers), and bestowed the sinking with a slightly deadening ubiquity.

Yet you’d be forgiven for wondering whether the makers of this new series about the Titanic had ever even heard of it. Titanic In Colour, a two-part documentary, is billed as a valiant attempt to help audiences emotionally connect with the ship’s fateful voyage via specially colourised footage and photographs. The central conceit is that monochrome imagery distances us from history; seeing the past’s true colours makes it less abstract, more engaging, more real.

Titanic In Colour aired on Channel 4 and is available online.

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