TV’S Titanic hits a ratings iceberg... millions lost

IT was hailed as ‘Downton Abbey at sea’ but audience figures for new TV drama Titanic have started sinking at an alarming rate.

With a budget of £11million for just four episodes, Julian Fellowes’s show is one of the most expensive in British television history.

The Sunday night drama on ITV1 got off to a flying start with its maiden outing last month opening with peak figures of over seven million, outshining BBC drama Upstairs, Downstairs.

But within a week it seems Titanic has struck problems with ratings slumping to little more than four million.

Titanic is struggling to compete with BBC1 stalwart Silent Witness, which returned on Sunday night and pulled in 6.9million viewers.

Fellowes had claimed that his mini-series would tell ‘the whole story’ for the first time, earning it the nickname ‘Downton at sea’ thanks to the Oscar-winning screenwriter’s tried and tested formula of interweaving the lives of the upper and lower classes.

In a dig at James Cameron’s movie version of the tragedy, which scooped 11 Oscars, Fellowes said the 1997 film was just a ‘love story’ set against the backdrop of the ship’s sinking.

The four-part drama marks 100 years since the ‘unsinkable’ ship hit an iceberg and foundered on its maiden voyage to New York, claiming the lives of 1,500 people.