The Cruise ship hitting ITV next week

Princess Cruises have announced that starting next Friday (11th July) in between Coronation Street will be their behind the scenes documentary about life on board the Royal Princess, and they have obviously thought long and hard about the name and came up with an original one for the programme – The Cruise Ship. This will be a 4 part documentary on board the ship HRH the Duchess of Cambridge named and launched in Southampton on the 13th June 2013.

Since the naming ceremony the Royal Princess has travelled 120,000 miles and carried over 150,000 guests, has set sail on 44 cruises, visited 39 ports of call in 20 countries throughout the Mediterranean and Caribbean

So what can we expect to see on the Cruise ship?  General Manager Dirk battling an overflowing laundry problem, whilst new girl, spa worker Kelly, has to cope with leaving home for the first time and getting used to life on ship, Cruise Director Sam has stiff competition from her power hungry Deputy, Dan. In a desperate attempt to become Cruise Director himself, he decides to create a Game Show to win the applause of his boss – but will his gamble pay off?  New girl Kelly is still finding life at sea a struggle but finds comfort in the ship’s mother hen Liz – all sounds riveting and edge of your seat viewing.

I am pleased to see at the moment there is no mention of any vicars or choirmasters of being the stars of the programme and basically being on a free holiday sailing round the world – as was previously shown last year on Fred Olsen’s tv show – The Cruise -Life at sea. However that show did help Fred Olsen by bringing in £1 million in advance bookings for World voyages.

Are Princess hoping for the same type of success? Is this a clever marketing ploy to help Princess fill their ships? Or will this end up looking as cheesy as the Fred Olsen and not showing Princess in the right light? I know I will be tuning in next Friday to see the first episode, and having never sailed on them before myself I will be looking to see if they really are the Consummate host they portray themselves here in the UK.