Speaking of buttoned-up Brits, Julian Fellowes's new series Titanic is on television in time for the 100th anniversary of the most famous sinking of all time. As a kind of Downton-at-Sea, it is natural territory for him. But the cinema too is doing its bit, with the re-release this month of the 1958 British film A Night to Remember, and James Cameron's epic from 40 years later, Titanic, which has had 3D added. The mysterious appeal of the ship that could never sink accounts for it having featured in nearly 30 films and TV dramas, but apparently historians regard A Night to Remember, which was directed by Roy Ward Baker and starred Kenneth More and Honor Blackman, as the most accurate of them all. 

This shouldn't necessarily make it a better film, but there's something in its measured, almost documentary approach which certainly makes it more convincing than Cameron's, with its dominating teenage love story, synthetic hysteria, and grudge against the nasty upper-crust types in first-class.