There are movies featuring Roman galleys, marauding Viking longships, tall Spanish galleons. There are romantic accounts of famous voyages: those of Columbus and his three caravels, of the Pilgrim Fathers in the Mayflower and, most exciting of all, of the Hispaniola to Treasure Island. But it is not until we come to representations of the Napoleonic - or maybe we should say Nelsonian - era that we find titles which might legitimately be included in Navy News Cinema.

Despite an understandable impulse to go on about Lady Hamilton, these films succeed on the whole in conveying the brutality and all round nastiness of a seaman's lot at that time. But it seems no film maker has yet hit off the peculiar horror of a sea battle from those days when the phrase 'loose cannon on deck' was more than just a metaphor. The author James Dugan expresses the scene most succinctly: "The compulsion of commanders was to bring the big wooden vessels physically together, forming a compact butcher's shop. The grappling of two matched warships was like a collision of over-crowded poor-houses, whose lousy, half-starved and choking inmates fired cannon point blank through the windows at each other." (From 'The Great Mutiny', Mayflower Paperbacks, 1970). Whether one would actually wish to spectate at such a shambles is another matter.