Foyled By The Shitstorm

I should have sat down to watch Foyle’s War last night but the lure of the bonkers Superstorm on BBC1 was too strong. (At least I didn’t succumb to a second helping of Grey’s Anatomy, so I should get some points for that).

With aeroplanes flying into swirling cloud masses and academics blathering “silly science,” it edged dangerously towards the SciFi Channel’s increasingly loopy miniseries The Triangle, which starred Sam Neill, a bunch of other actors, and Catherine Bell’s magnificent breasts trying to discover bonkers goings-on in The Bermuda Triangle.

In situations like this you need to go so totally out there that there’s absolutely no chance of ever finding a way back. The science part is always the boring bit, even when it’s sexed up with Jennifer Aniston. The scientists brought together to downsize the super-sized super storms, didn’t have enough personal demons gnawing away at them to help make it interesting.

Part one ended with the first team casualty. Bizarrely it wasn’t the most utterly annoying American character I’ve ever seen. He was even worse than people I’ve met in Cleveland, or the waiters in Chicago’s Ed Debevic’s on N. Wells. Every time I flicked back I was astonished to find that the rest of the gang hadn’t circled around him and repeatedly beaten his face flat with baseball bats.

Caught in short bursts, it reminded me of the series of BBC docu-dramas that began in 2004 with If... The Lights Go Out, predicting what would happen if the UK’s National Grid went on the blink. It was followed by a roundtable discussion to make the whole premise appear as FACT!

Thought provoking at first, the topics gradually became more and more barmy, finishing up with If...The Generations Fall Out. That may have ended with Malcolm McDowell above The Quad with a Bren gun, but I had stopped watching by then. Superstorm had it’s own special, The Science of Superstorm, following hot on its heels which presumably explained the real attempts to curtail extreme weather. I gave it a wide berth.