![]() ![]() On day 12, the engines suffered an even more catastrophic failure as one of the exhaust valves in the engine cylinder jammed, leading to a 35-hour holdup as a team of men worked round the clock to try to fix it.Īt which point, I began to wonder if the whole programme hadn’t been dreamed up by the navy’s PR department. Somewhere in the Bay of Biscay the engines’ cooling system failed and the shop ground to a halt again as someone was sent to tie a clamp round the leaking pipe. After checking through the ship’s manuals, the engineer in charge suggested switching the engines off and then restarting them. Things didn’t get off to the best of starts: within an hour of leaving Devonport, HMS Ocean had ground to a halt as one of her engines had packed up. Over the years, television has done submarines (still just about submerged) and aircraft carriers (long since decommissioned) and we are now on to HMS Ocean, the navy’s current flagship, which was on its way to the Persian Gulf with a cargo of helicopters and marines. The rather grumpy second in command who talks in cliches of “using skill sets” and “doing bad stuff to bad people” the hardened old-timer who saw service in the Falklands the posh helicopter pilot who was at Sandhurst with Prince William and the chirpy 17-year-old woman on her first deployment whose main role on board ship seemed to be the comic ingenue. All the main characters come straight from central casting. Warship (Channel 4) is just like every other documentary about the navy you have ever seen. ![]() But thankfully the TV schedulers have indulged this desire for The Remembrance of Things Past by putting on two new shows which feel exactly like TV programmes you have watched before. The pleasure of having made it to the end of a 36-week marathon in which you have been made to feel increasingly stupid during the latter stages as the questions ratchet up from the hard to the almost impossible, offset by the sadness of knowing there will be a half-hour hole in your Monday evenings for the next 16 weeks. ![]() The final of University Challenge is always a bittersweet affair. ![]()
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