A brilliant piece of telly - why 'Britains Biggest Warship' was a great advert for the Royal Navy

The recent TV series by Chris Terrill (Britain’s Biggest Warship) has now concluded. This three-part show followed the challenges of taking HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH (QEC) out of the builder’s yard and through to becoming a commissioned warship.

Years in the making, it provided a candid perspective on the challenges of what it means to bring a new aircraft carrier into service. The reviews and the commentary online has been overwhelmingly positive, and Humphrey personally regards this as the best TV programme made about the Royal Navy in years. So why did it work so well?

It seems to be surprisingly difficult to make good television shows about life in the Royal Navy. Documentaries about the Army can rely on easy footage of exercises and the dramas of being in the field under fire. Indeed Chris Terrils previous show ‘Commando’ interspersed training footage at Lympstone with his experiences of being under fire in Afghanistan when working with Royal Marines on the ground. This made for compelling TV.

By contrast ships are often harder to film – documentaries that rely on ‘characters’ do not perhaps explore in enough depth what really makes the ship work, while getting usable footage of a ship doing stuff requires time in a helicopter or RIB – which is costly and not always feasible. Unlike Army shows, it is rare to get a TV show where ships fire ordnance either – live firings being an extremely rare feature in any Ships programme.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

A documentary is often filmed over a period of weeks or months, with the film crew embarked usually for a few days at a time over a sustained period. This makes it hard to keep a coherent story going and increases the likelihood of their not being embarked when something interesting is going on. For example, the recent HMS OCEAN documentary covered a routine transit of the Straits of Hormuz but didn’t cover the far more risky and challenging (at the time) Bab-Al-Mendab transit.

It also increases the reliance on personalities and stories, which many viewers, particularly those of a military background, find grating. This though is the only way to get footage that is vaguely usable – the challenge being that over a period of months this must be edited down to a few minutes of usable screen time for each person – which can tell a highly compressed story that does not always accurately portray what went on.

Finally, many documentaries get a negative reaction from their non-target audience. The Channel 4 documentary ‘Sailor School’ was utterly loathed by many serving RN personnel, who saw it as an insult to the work done at HMS RALEIGH. But they were not the target audience, whilst Careers Officers reported a significant rise in many young people applying to join who had seen the show and loved it. Its hard to get a uniformly positive reaction to many shows.

So given these challenges, why did ‘Britains Biggest Warship’ succeed in unifying praise, where so many other documentaries have failed?

The Platform

Firstly the show did a great job of making QEC come to life as a showcase of capability. Rather than focus too heavily on individuals, it instead wove together multiple vignettes and stories to show just how capable the ship is, and how much work has gone into her. Watching it made you realise in a way that endless MOD press releases about the ship being the length of double deck buses didn’t’ just how large and capable she is.

This was underpinned by a film style that really brought home just how capable the UK defence industry is, and how much work went into bringing the ship together. It was pleasing to see the role of industry front and centre – without them, there would be no QUEEN ELIZABETH.

It was also nice to watch a show that was able to capture the challenges of sea trials in a non-sensationalist manner. Sea trials are an inherently complicated part of ship acceptance, particularly for a first of class vessel. The show did a great job of explaining why it was so complicated, and in showing not only things going wrong, but more importantly how quickly they were fixed. The story of the problem solving to get the propeller problem resolved was fascinating to watch and a great example of the skills and co-operation necessary to fix a challenging engineering problem quickly.

Its easy to moan about how the ship went to sea and had problems with her propellers, but sea trials exist to make sure things work as intended. When you’re taking a theoretical design featuring millions of parts and turning it into a finished product 10 years later, it is inevitable that there will be bugs. What matters is how quickly they get fixed. A good contrast is the French experience with Charles De Gaulle, where a propeller fell off on sea trials and the flight deck was found to be too short.

The People

Where this show succeeded was in telling the human story of the ship and her crew. It was clear in all the interviews conducted that there was a real sense of enormous pride by all the crew in the vessel and what she was capable of.

It was genuinely uplifting to watch and listen to young naval ratings talk with real confidence about their careers, the opportunities they had and the great future that a career in the Naval Service had given them. They were a real credit to the Service. Similarly, it was good to see the show avoid the lazy trap of ‘drama’ by catching sailors on a bad day for an interview (easy over 2 years of filming) and turning a short bad day into ‘DRAMA’.

Instead the show really brought out the finest qualities of the men and women of the Naval Service and helped show how much it has changed. It was interesting to note the comments online by former ratings who were pleasantly surprised at how much the modern Officer corps differed from the ‘Old Etonian’ model they remembered. They admitted the show had gone a long way to breaking down their past stereotypes by showing how different the RN is today.

Watching the show, one was left with a real sense of delight at the pride shown by everyone in their platform and in meeting and overcoming the challenges they faced. It was great too to hear the stories of how people had been given a second chance and made something of their life in the RN – the former convict who’d turned his life around was a great example of how the Navy makes people into something better than who they used to be.

It was particularly interesting to see how the show approached the issue of women at sea. Chris Terrill was also the producer of ‘HMS BRILLIANT’ a documentary which covered the deployment of the Type 22 Batch 1 Frigate to the Balkans in the early 1990s. There was controversy at the time due to the reception by many of the Ships Company to the presence of women onboard – still a very new development for the RN.

In 2018 the idea that there was once an issue with women at sea would seem ridiculous to the overwhelming majority of RN personnel – many of whom were born after the ban was lifted. But in the early 1990s, there was still a very large contingent of personnel who had spent many decades serving at sea in all male ships. The level of cultural change required to adapt to an entirely new way of working and life in what was a very close-knit community was difficult – it is reasonable to say that the documentary captured how challenging it was at times.

But, equally this is now almost 25 years ago – a literal lifetime to many of the crew on QEC. The RN has changed and now almost all its personnel will have joined after the ban was lifted and have never known anything different.  In some ways this series represents the completion of a journey, by showing how the RN has changed, adapted and overcome its early problems and now wholeheartedly integrated women into sea service.

Particularly interesting was the way in which the 1^st Lieutenant was shown on the original documentary to have clear views on women at sea, which he admits he holds, but also admits that he would not go to sea without them. His very honest and human way of explaining this captured the challenges some of the older sailors who remember life before women were at sea must feel. While his views may seem anachronistic now, it is worth remembering that the RN has come a very long way in 30 years, and that there are still people out there who remember the Navy of old.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

The Potential

The final great thing about the show was the way it showcased the enormous potential offered by the QEC / F35 combination in a manner that avoided slipping into unnecessarily technical or jingoistic speech.

The QEC platform has huge potential for the future, and is very much a world leader. It was telling to consider that when she was pictured next to the USS GEORGE BUSH, one was looking at a class of ship whose namesake (USS NIMITZ) was laid down in 1968 – 50 years ago, and is still in service.

The NIMITZ class are very impressive platforms, but they are at their heart based on an over 50 year old design. The QUEEN ELIZABETH represents the first entirely Western new carrier design in decades, and is being keenly watched by the USN, who are reportedly very impressed (and envious) of the ship and her capabilities.

The show managed to put across a simple but very effective message. The UK is a nation capable of building astoundingly complex warships able to use the most modern technology and conduct operations across the globe at a time and place of its choosing. This would not be possible without the enormously capable UK shipbuilding and wider defence industry, or the efforts of both DE&S and the Aircraft Carrier Alliance to deliver these ships into service.

The show did an outstanding job of showcasing just how much work went into getting QEC ready to become a commissioned warship. Chris Terril and his team should be immensely proud of their show, and the MOD deserves real credit for supporting and enabling it to happen. Is it too much to hope that a 2^nd series will be made to follow the flying trials and embarkation of F35 though?