Terror’s scary enough without the monsters
PERHAPS I spent too much of my childhood hiding from chores, or from activities that I had been assured would be ‘fun’ (a word I came to dread, especially at boarding school).
I loved finding a secret corner where I could forget the cares of the day, lost in the pages of Arthur Mee’s obsolete Children’s Encyclopaedias. These described a thrilling world of courage and adventure, now largely abolished by modernity.
I was enthralled by the mysterious tragedy of Sir John Franklin’s 1840s expedition in search of the North-West Passage, in the two grimly named ships HMS Erebus and HMS Terror.
After 60 years, I have now found the intensely moving account: ‘For the rest there were tales told by Eskimos of gaunt men dragging boats from foundered ships, wearily, like grey ghosts across the starving land… the men dropped dead as they walked.’
So I could not resist the new BBC series, The Terror, which tries to imagine the still mysterious disaster.
It is in some ways very good – the frightening beauty of the ships trapped and lost amid the ice is wonderfully done. But the tragedy would surely be exciting enough without a supernatural monster and large dollops (literally) of blood and guts.
And yet again, despite tremendous efforts to get clothes and hair right, the dialogue is full of modern expressions, and why doesn’t anyone know that in the Navy of those times you were never ‘on’ a ship, always ‘in’ her? It could be so much better.