The 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic will see two television shows broadcast -- fittingly -- on each side of the Atlantic Sunday night -- each of which will attempt to refute in part the 1997 James Cameron version of events. In Britain on Sunday, the commercial network ITV plans to launch a four-hour miniseries from Downton Abbey producer Julian Fellowes that ABC plans to air later in the spring. Fellowes told the BBC's Radio Times magazine that he was particularly upset with the way in which the ship's first officer, William Murdoch, was portrayed. The film shows Murdoch shooting panicked passengers and eventually committing suicide. "That was very unfair how Murdoch was depicted," Fellowes remarked during the interview. Murdoch, he said, fired into the air to stop a potential riot. He went down with the ship. In the U.S., PBS on Sunday plans to broadcast Saving the Titanic , a co-production of Tile Films Ltd of Ireland and Gebrueder Beetz Filmproduktion in Germany. In a statement, the studio said that the production will tell "the untold story of self-sacrifice and dignity of the ship's engineers, stokers and firemen in the face of impending death."

20/03/2012