More than 60 million people watched the raising of the Mary Rose in 1982 and I was one of them. Blue Peter had been wanging on about it for months, and given that the only other television at the time was depressing dispatches from a war in somewhere called the Falklands, the raising and homecoming of the Millennium Falcon of Tudor warships was about as exciting a good news story got for a six-year-old. 

I remember, though, feeling slightly guilty even then – because overall my reaction to that yellow metal cage emerging from the water cradling what looked like a giant rotten banana was a ripple of disappointment. I wasn’t underwhelmed or overwhelmed so much as whelmed. 

It was, I now realise, a useful lesson in hype and the dangers thereof. The idea of finally seeing the Mary Rose: epic. The reality: less so. Nevertheless, you don’t forget your first whelming in a hurry, so Raising the Mary Rose: The Lost Tapes (Channel 4) was a teasing title for me. What might those lost tapes contain? Perhaps the giant rotten banana wasn’t the Mary Rose at all, but a bit of hackwork from the team that brought you the moon landings and the Zapruder film. 

In any case, the promise was that the tapes would “shine a completely new light on the whole Mary Rose project”. Unfortunately, this turned out to also be empty hype. I suspect the tapes, such as they were, existed somewhere on the boundary between “lost” and “justifiably forgotten”, because they merely revealed that throughout the whole project the Mary Rose Trust team (the archaeologists) and the Royal Engineers (the military) didn’t see eye to eye. 

The programme consisted largely of footage of the main players in the salvage operation being filmed watching the archive footage, like a sort of salty sea-dog Gogglebox. They responded with insights such as, “Wow, I’ve never seen this.” I wouldn’t for a minute want to suggest that the history of the Mary Rose, nor the gaunt hull itself that was lifted from the sea bed, nor the operation to do that lifting, was boring. 

If that’s your thing then you will have already visited the excellent Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth. But the whole lost tapes set-up, which was the reason given for the programme’s existence at all, was a red herring. It proved only that some “unseen” archive footage is, in fact, unseen for a reason.