A rousing finale to the launch of our new warship
There can’t be many ships so big that a harbour has to be dredged for two years to accommodate them. But that was the case for the HMS Queen Elizabeth, the Royal Navy’s newest and biggest aircraft carrier. The third and final part of Britain’s Biggest
Warship (Sunday), BBC Two’s rousing series following the sea trials of the warship began with the enormous effort to make Portsmouth Harbour deep enough to accommodate her massive 65,000-tonne bulk.
Obstacles to be surmounted included a 500kg wartime German bomb that detonated dramatically, even under a controlled explosion. After that, it was back to the North Atlantic to see how the ship was faring since its dodgy dislodged propeller had been repaired. Her captain, Commodore Jerry Kyd, didn’t want to tempt fate but, after a few more days of throwing his £3.1 billion new warship around the ocean like a skiff in a squall, he agreed the ship was now entirely sound and solid.
Much of this episode was given over to the ship’s unfailingly enthusiastic 700-strong crew, many of them women, and the various branches in which they worked, from logistics to firefighting and gunnery. Unsurprisingly though, it is the ship’s huge technical advances that have been the most striking over the series as a whole. A visiting US admiral was clearly impressed, referring to the ship as the “new top dog” on the block. And one of the more exciting moments came when the cameras took an unexpected trip to America to get a glimpse of the breathtakingly powerful new F-35 stealth fighter planes currently undergoing final flight testing at the Pax River naval airbase in Maryland. These are the aircraft the HMS Queen Elizabeth has been “designed around” and which will eventually take off from her flight deck.
As test pilot Flt Lt Nathan Gray said with suitable top-gun bullishness: “It’s a game changer… there’s nothing in the world that’ll defeat us when we mate the aircraft to the carrier.” That mating, though, won’t take place until later this year.
Appropriately, the series ended with HMS Queen Elizabeth squeezing gracefully into her new home in Portsmouth for the very first time, and the ceremony that saw her officially commissioned into service last December by the Queen. As the white ensign was raised on the stern, it was the Queen’s well-chosen words that were ringing in our ears: “She will, in the years and decades ahead, represent this country’s resolve on the global stage.”
On this evidence, HMS Queen Elizabeth should do that job magnificently.
No one could accuse ITV of being slow to celebrate the upcoming nuptials of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Invitation to a Royal Wedding (ITV, Sun) opened the floodgates for a deluge of royal programming over for the next three weeks, which – given that most of what will happen is, as yet, top secret – promises to be highly imaginative in its jolly, bunting-draped, flag-waving appeal.
Here we had Sir Trevor Macdonald and Julie Etchingham wondering what might be involved in organising a wedding on such a scale. Sir Trev wasn’t short on tips: “Like all weddings, the first thing is to secure the venue,” he said with a knowing smile. Whether he meant simply booking a room, or surrounding it with an impenetrable phalanx of armed police officers, was not clear.
Etchingham, meanwhile, was off meeting a man who wasn’t actually supplying any flowers for the bouquetto-be, but was willing to guess that it might comprise peonies and white roses. She visited the factory that produces Rich Tea biscuits, one of the key ingredients of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s wedding cake in 2011. Oh, the glamour. Then again, she also met the chocolatiers who assembled that cake, and a selection of other lovely, happy people who previously contributed their ingenuity and skill – whether at embroidery, dressmaking, bouquet-making or cake-decorating – to ensure that royal weddings were both exquisite and hitch free.
Best of all were the children from St Edward’s First School in Windsor, invited to act out a full dress rehearsal of the wedding, and afterwards opine upon everything from being a bridesmaid (“gross”) to designing a wedding dress fit for a Markle. My vote went to the little designer-to-be who, along with glass beads and lots of tinsel, suggested attaching love hearts to the dress “to make it look really, really royal”. Now, there’s an idea I’d love to see realised on the day.
Britain’s Biggest Warship ★★★★
Invitation to a Royal Wedding ★★★