IT WILL have escaped few people's attention that today marked 100 years since the Titanic sank with the loss of 1,514 lives.
At 2.20am on 15 April 1912, the ship went under having fatally hit an iceberg just before midnight.
Most of the liner's occupants died by drowning or hypothermia after being plunged into freezing cold waters in the North Atlantic where temperatures were only 28°F (-2°C).
Crucially, the number of the lifeboats aboard did not meet the ship's capacity, meaning only 710 of the 2,224 passengers and crew survived.
All of this is well-known as, such was the scale of the disaster, it has been firmly fixed in the public consciousness ever since it actually happened.
In 1997, a new generation were made aware of the tragic events when James Cameron directed a $200m film starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio in an unlikely tryst.
Now a 3D version of that movie has been released and is currently showing in cinemas but, of course, Cameron's epic was hardly the first time that the Titanic had made it onto the big screen.
Indeed, the 1958 film - A Night to Remember - is often cited as the better screenplay in tedious tit-for-tat internet discussions.
Even Joseph Goebbels commissioned a German version as part of the Nazi propaganda campaign in 1943. Naturally, on that occasion, J Bruce Ismay - the president of the company which built the ship - was portrayed as a power-mad Jewish businessman who ignored the warnings of a German First Officer.
And so, it has really come as no surprise then that the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic has been met with a barrage of coverage.
ITV has produced an expensive four-part costume drama, directed by Julian Fellowes, which concludes tonight having received a lukewarm response from reviewers.
Meanwhile, the BBC has strangely decided to show a three-part PBS production from the USA of Len Goodman out of his Strictly Come Dancing comfort zone.
Goodman, of course, is hardly a spring chicken but - born in 1944 - he is still a whole generation later than the unfortunate folks who were on RMS Titanic.
His presence is apparently justified by the fact that, for a short time in his youth, he was a welder at Harland and Wolff, the company which built a famous trio of White Star ships, including the Titanic.
But that still seems rather tenuous and, frankly, his celebrity status is no replacement for analysis by a proper historian.
Nevertheless, there have been other events which have seemed even more inappropriate.
A Twitter feed, @titanicrealtime, has spent the last few days providing a blow-by-blow account of the journey which intended to go from Southampton to New York City.
Tweets overnight included "the ocean is awash with screaming people and bodies – it is an unimaginable sight" and "those poor souls floating in the ice cold water, I want to pull them into the boat but others resist. Why?"
Rather inexplicably, BBC Radio 2 followed suit with a broadcast called Titanic: Minute by Minute... presented, in part, by Dermot O'Leary.
Perhaps the biggest dollop of 'disaster porn', though, has been provided by the Titanic Memorial Cruise.
This rather morbid way of commemorating the centenary has seen people pay thousands of pounds for the strange privilege of repeating the very same journey that the Titanic did 100 years ago.
Presumably, this time, the patrons expect to make it to the Big Apple but it begs the question what was wrong with simply attending a memorial service in Southampton, where the ship set sail from?
Or Belfast, where she was built? Or New York City where she was meant to arrive? Or even Lichfield from where the captain Edward John Smith heralded?
After all, historical events should still certainly be marked and analysed - even 100 years on, or especially 100 years on, to try and ensure that humankind does not repeat the same mistakes.
However, this curious obsession of re-living disasters as they happened really should stop. It was surely traumatic enough on the first occasion.
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