The Whale; The Ladybird Books Story – TV review

A sinking ship of a drama that managed to be neither monstrous nor deep"Thar she blows!" said one of the crew as a whale came to the surface. The cetacean wasn't the only thing blowing heavily in The Whale (BBC1), a 90-minute dramatisation of the sinking of the Essex, a Nantucket whaler, by a sperm whale in the Pacific. This was the shipwreck that inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick; the BBC film was so laboured it only served to unintentionally remind me of Melville's genius.The Whale felt like a big-screen movie epic trapped inside a relatively small-budget TV programme; the vastness of the ocean, skies and the whales got hopelessly lost. Worse still, it was structurally flawed, unable to make up its mind whether it was a rite-of-passage story for the young Tom Nickerson on his first voyage, a clash of wills between the two leads – the smouldering First Mate Chase and the even more smouldering Captain Pollard – talking in pirate-speak or Orca Strikes Back. Inevitably, it fell between every stool.The biggest disappointment was the whale itself. The whale scenes had been filmed by the BBC's natural history unit and they looked like it. They were beautiful, precise and graceful and wouldn't have been out of place in a David Attenborough film. What there wasn't was any sense of the menace or personality that had captured Melville's imagination and was supposed to be present here.When the whale attacked the boat, it came from out of the blue rather than from the... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2013-12-23 00:00:00 UTC ]

Other news stories related to: "The Whale; The Ladybird Books Story – TV review"


Monoray signs ex-Paratrooper O'Connell's Falklands 'masterpiece'

Octopus imprint Monoray has acquired “masterpiece of oral history” 3 Days in June, the minute-by-minute retelling of the battle of Mount Longdon in the Falklands War by former Paratrooper James O’Connell. Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2021-02-18 08:07:47 UTC ]
More news stories like this


SAS commander’s account of the Falklands War to Hurst

Hurst Publishers is to release an SAS commander’s account of the Falklands War with a foreword by Sir Max Hastings. Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2018-08-25 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


The Whale; The Ladybird Books Story – TV review

A sinking ship of a drama that managed to be neither monstrous nor deep"Thar she blows!" said one of the crew as a whale came to the surface. The cetacean wasn't the only thing blowing heavily in The Whale (BBC1), a 90-minute dramatisation of the sinking of the Essex, a Nantucket whaler, by a... Continue reading at The Guardian

[ The Guardian | 2013-12-23 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this


Falklands account to Preface

Written By: Charlotte Williams Publication Date: Fri, 27/05/2011 - 10:46 Preface has acquired an inside account of the Falklands War, written by Harry Benson who took part in the conflict as a 21-year-old Royal Navy commando helicopter pilot. Scram!: The Untold Story of the Helicopter War in... Continue reading at The Bookseller

[ The Bookseller | 2011-05-27 00:00:00 UTC ]
More news stories like this