CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night’s television

By Liam On Jan 23, 2023

The Warship: Tour of Duty

Classification: ****

call the midwife

Qualification: ***

Able Rating Ronnie Lambert pointed a finger at him. He surveyed his shipmates, playing ball games and sunbathing on the deck of HMS Queen Elizabeth in the Mediterranean, and identified why the scene seemed so dated. No one had a mobile phone.

Fun and larks, a rare moment of leisure on the £3.5bn aircraft carrier, known as Big Lizzie, looked like an illustration from a 1950s cruise brochure.

The boys were in their boxer shorts and the girls in bikinis, none of them making out, of course. Relationships between sailors are allowed, but strictly no touching, we learned on The Warship: Tour Of Duty (BBC2), the first of a six-part series.

Ronnie, a cook from Essex, was one of the prominent figures on board the ship, although he quickly took over as presenter of the show. He couldn’t help it: even when he was just cracking eggs, he had to be telling jokes too.

The fun and the larks, a rare moment of leisure on the £3.5bn aircraft carrier, known as Big Lizzie, looked like an illustration from a 1950s cruise brochure. The boys were in their boxer shorts and the girls in bikinis, none of them making out, of course. Relationships between sailors are allowed, but strictly no touching, we learned on The Warship: Tour Of Duty (BBC2), the first of a six-part series.

Lieutenant John Hawke, Second Watch Officer

He showed the camera his cabin and pointed to a bunk where a fellow sailor was sleeping. “He sleeps for days,” said the 29-year-old father of two. He is half man, half mattress.

“Lambert has that pirate chutzpah that represents the best of the Royal Navy,” said Commander Chris Ansel. “You could find a Navy Lambert in every century and recognize him as Jack,” a reference to the archetypal British sailor, Jack Tar. Fortunately for this Jack Tar, the Navy has given up the cat o’ nine tails, because Ronnie was in charge. “I was a little AWOL,” he admitted. ‘When I say ‘a little’, I mean ‘quite a bit’.’

In fact, he was more than six hours late in returning to the ship the day it set sail on a seven-month tour of duty in the South China Seas, leading an armada of seven destroyers and frigates, in 2021. It was the largest british. working group seen since the Falklands War.

Ronnie insisted that he was taking the disciplinary proceedings seriously. But he couldn’t help but complain that his audience attire, the traditional white tropical kit with Gene Kelly bell-bottoms, was “the coolest uniform you could put me in.”

And as he strutted to meet his destiny, he was singing Staying Alive by the Bee Gees, in full falsetto. His punishment was to deny him permission to go ashore in Italy. . . and, when he was done, to be put on “drunken duty,” leading drunken stragglers down the gangplank.

All this hilarity masks the seriousness of HMS Queen Elizabeth’s mission. Although the series was filmed before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine last year, the threat of Russian aggression was ever-present. A Russian spy ship got close enough to force everyone to lock up their phones, an essential precaution against electronic surveillance.

The unexpected benefit was that when that day came on deck, everyone could focus on getting their tan, without the distraction of social media and video calls. If only Russian spy ships could be deployed in concert halls and theaters. Never again would a performance be ruined by some jerk’s phone.

The absence of phones proved to be a nuisance in Call The Midwife (BBC1), with an anxious father sent to the corner phone box by Nurse Crane (Linda Bassett) (right) to dial 999 for an ambulance

They got pardons, but with the Board of Health making noise about Nonnatus House’s ‘eccentricities’, there are growing concerns that midwives may soon be pedaling off into the East End sunset. Probably not

The absence of phones proved to be a nuisance in Call The Midwife (BBC1), with an anxious father sent to the phone box on the corner by Nurse Crane (Linda Bassett) to dial 999 for an ambulance. Nurse Lucille has already left this year and it looked like we would lose Nurse Crane, and maybe Sister Monica Joan (Judy Parfitt) as well.

BEATBOX OF THE WEEKEND: To my generation of British pop fans, African-American music means jazz, soul and blues. Fight The Power: How Hip-Hop Changed The World (BBC2) argued that rap matters even more. But I’ll never believe that no rapper can measure up to the sweet voice of Otis or Marvin.