THE FILM, Titanic gives an unfair portrayal of my grandfather, Bruce Ismay, chairman of the White Star Line. Please allow me to set the record straight.

You couldn't escape Zippergate '98 anywhere this week, even at the Whitbread Book of the Year party on Tuesday. Despite the presence of Commons luminaries (Chris Smith, Mark Fisher), literary controversialists (Raymond Seitz, Salman Rushdie) and assorted televisual dreamboats (Mariella Frostrup, Kate Adie, Clive Anderson, Alexei Sayle), the level of conversation remained distressingly groinal. "What's the difference between Bill Clinton and the Titanic?" I was asked by a serious bluestocking in black crepe. "Only 1,500 people went down on the Titanic." As Sir Michael Angus, the sponsor's bluff chairman, praised the world of imaginative literature, a note was pushed across to me by a famously dour publisher. "Why does Bill Clinton wear underpants?" it read. "To keep his ankles warm." We ate delicious breast of guinea fowl with pancetta and shallots, and discussed the first stirrings of magic realism in 19th-century Irish writing. On stage, Jeremy Treglown made an impassioned plea for more enlightened subsidies for writers. "Have you any idea," hissed a passing voice, "what Bill Clinton says to his wife, immediately after sex? He says, `I'll be home in half an hour, darling'." It went on like that, intermingled with some awed discussion of the spectacular resurrection of Ted Hughes's reputation (his Tales from Ovid won the big prize, while the Plath poems, Birthday Letters, will be the country's number one bestseller this weekend, the most popular verse collection since Larkin's Collected Poems). Alas, it wasn't long before someone was asking, "What's the most popular game at the White House? Swallow My Leader."

TITANIC (12) is one of the most spectacular films ever made. It's also one of the most badly written. And yet, despite the abyss between James Cameron's meagre screenwriting talents and the apocalyptic grandeur of his direction, Titanic stays afloat. The dialogue may be unspeakable, but the film remains unsinkable.

the big picture

But what was the tune the band struck up as the ship went down? Few who have seen Roy Ward Baker's 1958 film of the Titanic's doom, A Night to Remember, will forget the scene. As panic sweeps the decks, real men rush about shouting "Women and children first!" while wimps head lemming- like for the stern. Wallace Hartley, leader of the ship's band, puts down his fiddle. "It's the end, boys," he stoically observes. "We've done our duty. We can go now."

THERE IS a thriving market already in props used in the making of Titanic, which is perhaps the most bizarre measure of the extraordinary success of this $200m Hollywood movie. In the three weeks since it opened in America, Titanic has ceased to be a mere epic and has become a phenomenon. It may well turn out to be an epic phenomenon, quite apart from being the most extravagant movie ever made - perhaps the last of its kind.

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Forget the summer blockbusters. Full-scale war breaks out only once a year in the movie industry, and that's at Christmas time, with the lucrative holiday box-office up for grabs and the Oscar race in its all-important final stages. The mad rush starts this week with the long- delayed docking of James Cameron's Titanic, drifting in on a tidal wave of gush from enraptured US critics. It's probably safe to say that you can see where every last cent of the $200m budget went in this lavish spectacle; my main complaint is that you also can't help but feel every last second of its three hours and 14 minutes (the "official" running time, as cited by the studio, is "two hours, 74 minutes"). In Cameron's version of events, the lookouts fail to notice the iceberg because they're busy watching Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet make out. As post-collision chaos erupts, DiCaprio's character - street-smart scamp that he is - shrewdly notes: "This is bad." (DiCaprio has already butchered Shakespeare and reinvented Rimbaud beyond recognition; Titanic merely fortifies the argument that he should never, under any circumstances, appear in a film set before 1980).

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You can tell from his films that Leonardo DiCaprio likes a challenge. But was `Titanic' a trip too far?

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Peter Parker reviews an exhilarating new novel about the Titanic disaster; Every Man For Himself by Beryl Bainbridge Duckworth, pounds 14.99

(So said Lew Grade in 1979. Yesterday the pounds 3.3m operation to rais e the Titanic was abandoned)