Today I am going to tell you about a 14-year-old television programme. It isn’t being revived. It won’t be airing on any traditional channels any time soon. And yet it has occupied my mind completely for the past few days. I am talking about the 2006 David Jason vehicle Ghostboat.
I know you have questions. “What is a Ghostboat?” you are asking. “Can a show called Ghostboat possibly live up to the absurd promise of its title?” “Why is it called Ghostboat and not Ghostship?”
I discovered Ghostboat by chance, while scouring the streaming platforms for shows to include in another article. To be thorough, I signed up to BritBox. As a service, it isn’t bad. It is full of comfortable, reassuring old shows that are perfect for times such as these. My dad is 70 and will be quarantined alone for the foreseeable future. He would go bananas for BritBox.
But then I saw it. A picture of Jason – not as old as in his Still Open All Hours guise, but greying and bearded nonetheless – glaring into the camera. He was holding a rail, standing over a submarine, the sky made entirely of skulls. There it was. Ghostboat.
I will level with you, the poster looked fake. It looked like the winner of an online competition to determine the dumbest combination of images, people and words. So I Googled the show and found the Wikipedia page. Ghostboat, it said, was a two-part drama about a submarine that goes missing during the second world war in 1943, only to resurface unaged in 1981. A crew boards the empty vessel only to “find themselves fighting second world war ghosts”. At this point, there was zero chance of me not watching it. Ghostboat had its claws in me.
What fascinated me most, though, was Wikipedia’s description of Ghostboat’s reception, offering only a terse: “The film was highly successful. Both ratings and reviews were excellent.” The first review I found was from the Observer, which called it “tripe”. Who was right? I had to find out.
It turned out the Observer was right. Ghostboat is nearly two and a half hours long, spread over two episodes, and the overwhelming majority of that time is deathlessly boring, with anonymous people trading meaningless submarine jargon during interminable scenes about nothing. So, should you watch Ghostboat? Yes, because the silly moments are just about silly enough to tip the scale.
In Ghostboat, Jason plays a daredevil professor. We know this because, in his first scene, he pulls out a piece of paper, while scuba diving, that has the word “PROFESSOR” written on it. Moments later, he is able to identify a stranger’s profession, rank and mission on sight alone, despite being an alcoholic amnesiac.
It becomes apparent that Jason was the only survivor when the submarine went missing in 1943. Why did it go missing? Nobody knows, but they decide the best way to figure it out is to board the submarine and retrace its final voyage, even though that involves sailing a warship into Soviet waters without permission at the height of the Cold War. At no point does anyone explain why this would help or what it would achieve, other than getting them in trouble with the Soviets. Which it does.
Little by little, the interior of the submarine becomes taken over by the spirit of 1943. 1981 crew members start to become possessed by 1943 crew members. This reaches its dramatic peak when a man’s Sony Walkman suddenly starts playing Nazi music instead of The Only Ones, and the man smashes it up in a fit of despair and anger.
Jason tries to shake the crew out of their stupor by shouting things such as: “The past is breaking through!” and: “The boat is using you to get what it wants!” The submarine is attacked by a fleet of ghost planes. Jason realises that the submarine is haunted and comes to a typically daredevil-professor conclusion: “We’ve got to kill the boat!” They then climb out of the submarine, a man gets struck by lightning and goes “zzzt”, Jason gets shot and dies and the submarine blows up. But get this: it is later discovered that the real submarine sank in 1943. Ghostboat!
Ghostboat is 14 years old, but it feels so much older. This is probably because it is so stupid. It is The Hunt for Thick October. It is Voyage to the Bottom of My Will to Live. It is Das Twat.
The most infuriating thing is that just 5% more self-awareness could have saved it. If one person involved in the making of this idiot drama had realised that this was the dumbest story ever told, and at least given the viewer a hint that it understood this, then Ghostboat could have been a masterpiece. Instead it vanished without trace.
Further investigation revealed that Ghostboat was originally a novel, that adapting Ghostboat for television was Jason’s idea and that Ghostboat was one of ITV’s most expensive dramas. You should sign up for a free trial of BritBox and see for yourself.
Please join me again soon, when I will write about another 14-year-old show from an obscure streaming channel that nobody is talking about and I didn’t enjoy. This self-isolation is tough.
