It was the best documentary series but it ruined factual TV: each ep of World at War ended with a cliff-hanger from Sir Larry – “Retribution would come… from THE SEA” – and then the picture faded to b&w benday dots and the music swelled up to the size of yr aching heart…
Problem is, every thesp who’s been hired to ham up a Horizon now attempts the same dud stunt. Bernard “Gissa Posh Job” Hill in last night’s (BBC2, repeat) of the Freak Waves mystery – short version: old salts who cla im really big waves exist despite mathematical impossibility are correct, bcz lubber mathematoids were using a very primitive model of wave action – did all the hushed pauses and pregnant “more things on heaven and earth” melodrama he could think of… wh ich of course undermines lots of interesting stuff (for example, how ordinary city technician-like most modern sailors are… the post-wave wreckage of one ship’s bridge looked like a magazine design office after a break-in). Plus CGI’d freak-wave reconstructions look like the cartoons they are, and we’ve all already seen bigger-than-freak-waves so many times (in Deep Impact for example) that we’re blase.
If I’d been directing this, I’d have used the cut back to the dapper officer standing under the bows of the QE2, a plump little Captain Birdseye (old skool) of a figure, and turned his seadogged tale – “It was big as a house! I never saw the like!” – into a scratch-mix sample, a deliberate Morley-esque repetition. And I’d have remembered that those who never felt the call of the sea already assume that ALL stormwaves are 30 metres high or more.