The Warship: Tour of Duty BBC2 review

HMS Queen Elizabeth departs Portsmouth Harbour towards the open sea

(Image credit: Peter Titmuss/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Veteran documentary-maker Chris Terrill has a knack for combing through casts of thousands and finding the biggest characters, said Anita Singh in The Daily Telegraph. That talent is on full display in his “tremendously engaging” six-part series, The Warship: Tour of Duty, about Britain’s biggest warship, HMS Elizabeth (aka “Big Lizzie”).

Among the show’s many colourful characters is Ronnie Lambert, who joined the Navy to kick his cocaine habit and is in trouble for going “a bit Awol”. There is also a “delightfully posh” sublieutenant, and an “endearingly naive” 21-year-old, who joined up “for the travel” and for the chance to deliver humanitarian aid, but isn’t keen on combat (“I don’t agree with war”). By focusing on people, not hardware, Terrill creates a film that is imbued with a “real sense of life”.

It’s true that it’s the people that make this series really sing, agreed Carol Midgley in The Times. But the “military detail” is fascinating too. “The fact that Britain’s biggest warship carries 18 F-35 stealth jet fighters worth £100m each is mind-blowing.” Filming took place in 2021, before Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, but “let’s hope that he’s watching because this is basically a TV muscle-flex of military might, and an impressive one too”.

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Terrill spent months on Big Lizzie during the ship’s first operational deployment, and what he presents is an “odd combination of Top Gun and soap opera”, said Sarah Oliver in the Daily Mail. He said he wanted to capture what life is actually like on the warship. “Mission accomplished.”