Return of the Little Girl Giant

I’m really excited to hear that the Little Girl Giant is going to star in Liverpool’s Titanic centenary events. The pulchritudinous puppet will perform a Titanic-related love story in the city’s streets, as part of the three-day Sea Odyssey extravaganza; her retro aesthetic makes her an ideal fit for the part.  I missed her when she came to London with the Sultan’s Elephant in 2006, but I’ve seen the elephant in action in Brittany, and it’s breathtaking beyond belief.

Here’s a clip of the Little Girl Giant in London:

It is a lucky thing me granny get sick . . .

The first selection from my top ten Titanic recordings, as featured in the Rough Guide to the Titanic – and it’s a reggae classic. Jamaican DJ General Echo was best known for “slackness”, or sexually explicit material. His 1979 single Titanic, though, focussed instead on his grandmother’s failure to board the Titanic – “It is a lucky thing me granny get sick, or else she would have sink in the Titanic”. Her doctor orders her to stay home in bed, and so she misses the rest of the story –­ the captain sighting the iceberg, the people singing Nearer My God To Thee, the whole sorry saga. Echo himself wasn’t so lucky; he was shot by police a year later.

Click on the image to listen to the track, or here to buy it from Amazon in the US.

Fictitious victims of the Titanic

For TV viewers, April 10 is the big date on the Centenary Calendar – it’s the start of Julian Fellowes’ new four-part Titanic miniseries.

The first series of Fellowes’ Downton Abbey kicked off with the deaths of Downton heir Patrick Crawley and his father James in the Titanic disaster (though you have to wonder just who Edith was talking to in series 2).

Fellowes wasn’t the first author to kill off his characters on the Titanic. Noel Coward established one of the great tropes of Titanic fiction in his 1931 play, and 1933 movie, Cavalcade. Stepping away from the rail of their honeymoon-bound liner, newly-weds Edward and Edith Marryot revealed a Titanic lifebelt to the horrified audience.

Downton precursor Upstairs Downstairs did it too. Lady Marjorie Bellamy, the central figure in the first two series, drowned on the Titanic, although at least her ladies’ maid – and her jewellery box – survived.

In Danielle Steel’s No Greater Love, heroine Edwina Winfield lost both parents plus a fiancé on the Titanic, leaving her to battle to hold the family publishing empire together.

And then of course there’s the utterly fictitious Jack Dawson . . .

They just builds ’er and shoves ’er in

The Titanic was launched in Belfast on May 31, 1911. The White Star Line didn’t believe in christening its ships with champagne; as a shipyard worker commented to a watching journalist, “They just builds ’er and shoves ’er in”.

Today’s the launch day for my book, The Rough Guide to the Titanic.

The book took a year to write. And now that I’ve built ’er, I’m shoving ’er in . . .

Today’s also launch day for Blogtanic. As the centenary of the disaster approaches, I’ll be using this blog to spotlight upcoming events; review the latest Titanic books, movies and TV programmes; and share stories from the final days of the great liner.

If you’re arranging an event, or commemorating the anniversary in some other way, contact me at info@gregward.info, follow @rgtitanic on Twitter, or simply leave a comment here.

In the meantime, to celebrate launch day, here’s the oldest surviving Titanic movie, In Nacht und Eis, a wonderful silent melodrama made within weeks of the disaster and long thought to have been lost.