Monday 5 May 2008

a hot lamb pattie
and a fish finger sandwich.
‘lost’ was on tv

The ‘Flood’ continued. Robert Carlyle – for no good reason – jumped off the Thames Barrier with his ex-wife and ended up in a pit, which rapidly filled with water, then crawled into a tunnel which led to Charing Cross Underground Station. It should be noted that Charing Cross Underground Station is a) underground, and b) very near the river. One would have thought that the last thing anyone would want to do would be to sit on a bench on platform 2 chatting about how their lives had gone wrong, but sit and chat they do.
Unsurprisingly, someone says ‘listen!’ and the sound of lots of rushing water begins to grow.
Either that or it was the sound of thousands of listeners either switching off or shouting ‘Get up the stairs, you mad t**ts!’.
In these sort of disasters it is also usual for someone to sacrifice himself for the good of humanity, and, as it happens, Sir Tom Courtenay steps up to the plate, wondering no doubt if his acting career has been washed away with the Vauxhall branch of McDonalds.
Someone will have to manually open the Thames barrier to allow the water to drain away – and they can only do it if they are locked in.... Mmmmm! OK, we’ll accept that, but the other option is for the army to just blow the barrier out of the water. Professor Morrison chooses to die and save the Thames barrier for the world, despite the fact that in the last episode he’d said that the barrier was in the wrong place anyway and needs to be knocked down and rebuilt upstream.
ITV must have paid these people an awful lot of money.
If that wasn’t bad enough, the musical score was the most irritating soundtrack in the world, alternating between a repetitive – and seemingly endless – dramatic string section riff which would have put even Philip Glass into a coma, and what seemed like the first few bars of ‘Pie Jesu’, again repeated endlessly during the sad emotional bits.
Nigel Planer, having spent four hours with his trademark gloomy face staring at a laptop screen, went out and quietly killed himself.
I suspect he’d been watching ‘Flood’ on ITV.

Sunday 4 May 2008

‘read this carefully.
i am going to kill you.
yes. that does mean you.’

(found haiku discovered on the wall of a cubicle in the men’s toilet in Shepherds Bush Precinct)

Oooh! New ITV drama! Not just drama but apocalyptic drama. I love my apocalyptic drama, especially if it’s stretched over four hours with special effects and big names. ‘Flood’ certainly had its big names, David Suchet, Robert Carlyle, Ralph Brown and Sir Tom Courtenay, not to mention Nigel Planer, stretching his acting skills by playing a mournful-faced loser (from the Met Office) for a change.
David Suchet, who is brilliant in everything, was a very credible Deputy Prime Minister who discovers that a gynormous storm has flooded part of Scotland and is moving down the English Channel.
The Met officers assure him that it’s unlikely it will move toward the South Coast, but of course, it does, with three hours notice, and threatens to drown London.
In these sort of disasters there is always a disgraced scientist whose theory was laughed out of the lab years before and who was actually right all the time.
The disgraced scientist in this case is Professor Morrison (Sir Tom Courtenay) who just happens to be the father of Robert Carlyle, heroic marine engineer. As is usual in apocalyptic dramas, the two are estranged, in this case because years ago their entire family was torn apart over an argument about the Thames Barrier (I kid you not).
At this point I began to think that things were getting a little silly.