It's a lovely old ship, and the restorers are characters - but is it really worth £50m?
I enjoyed Cutty Sark: National Treasure (BBC2). I like ships, and the Cutty Sark is a lovely one. It – sorry, she – has a good story, too. Built to bring tea back from China, that trade was then stolen from her by steam ships. So the Cutty Sark had to go further afield for cargo – Australia, in fact, to bring back wool. It's a shame there's no footage of her bowling along on the huge waves of the Southern Ocean. In fact, there's no film of her at all. We'll just have to imagine the pitching and the rolling, the creaking and the spray.
After retirement, she was put into dry dock in Greenwich, where for years she was admired by tourists while she slowly rotted away, until something had to be done. This programme is mostly about the restoration process. It's fascinating, not just because it involves some nice old-fashioned crafts – such as gilding and caulking (sealing gaps between the planks) – but also because the people who do it are real characters. Take Paul and Matthew, the father and son gilding team. And Jim, who brushes lanolin, an oily secretion from sheep's wool, into the rigging to stop it corroding. "You never see a rusty sheep, so it must work," he says. I suspect he may have said that before. It's fitting that something that comes from wool should be used to restore the Cutty Sark. Also that everyone stops for frequent cups of tea.
One thing I couldn't quite get my head round is the cost: £50m to restore the ship and the dock, about half of which appears to come from Lottery money. The fire in 2007 obviously didn't help. But a lot of this has been about doing everything just right: preserving and reusing the original planks, putting the deck down exactly as it was, using the same special teak, the same old methods, not cutting any corners.
Does it really matter, though? The planks alone took four years. It's not as if they are thousands of years old. Once they're painted, is anyone going to know?
And £50m! Can you really justify spending that kind of money to put an old ship – even such a lovely old ship – back together? I'm not sure.