I loved this review!
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The weekend's TV London is flooded, the royals have fled - but don't worry, David Suchet is in charge
Nancy Banks-Smith
The Guardian, Monday May 5 2008
When you feel lazy, there is a lot to be said for tosh, and tosh was available by the bucketful in Flood (ITV1, Sunday). You will enjoy every hour of it. It does go on a bit.
It reminded me very much of James Thurber's The Day the Dam Broke, in which the entire population of Columbus, Ohio, took flight when the dam broke (apart from Thurber's grandfather, who decided to stand and fight, and had to be stunned with an ironing board). It was like the London marathon, with added panic.
In Flood, the Thames Barrier is overwhelmed by a storm surge, which arrives in a computerised tidal wave and drowns central London. The disaffected citizenry, in the true spirit of Thurber, rush around carrying umbrellas.
You will be reassured to hear that David Suchet is in charge, the prime minister being shrewdly absent in Sydney. Suchet, when not talking in exclamation marks, is biting lumps out of Nigel Planer, the man from the Met, who has failed to forsee this eventuality. "I need a damn good explanation of why we had no warning! What the hell have you people been doing?" God forbid I should mention Michael Fish at this juncture. Planer's naturally downhearted look, first trialled as Neil in The Young Ones, still serves him very well.
Tom Courtenay, however, saw it all coming. Suchet is typically decisive. "No man on the planet knows more about storm surges! We Need That Man Here!" Courtenay, who saves the film and London single handed, plays an absent-minded professor, slightly vague, almost vacant, but, on his own subject, precision itself. As he tells Suchet: "The danger areas include the Docklands Light Railway, 68 underground stations, 30 mainline stations, three world heritage sites, eight power stations, dozens of museums and art galleries and, of course, Whitehall." His daughter-in-law, the lovely Samantha (Jessalyn Gilsig), runs the Thames Barrier. She is Canadian, because Canada put up some of the money. His son, Rob (Robert Carlyle), is the head of the reassuringly named Defiant Engineering.
They are all estranged from each other but the flood should fix that. That's what biblical floods (and towering infernos and crashing aircraft) are for.
Meanwhile at Southend, to an agitated accompaniment from the London Philharmonic, the tidal wave arrives. The real thing beats the computerised image every time. A real sea rises like a whale shaking its hair, but a computerised tidal wave looks like a slightly worried wrinkle on the river. A real car punched into the air by a broken water main was much more impressive than computerised cars being washed off Tower Bridge.
"By the way, how's your breast stroke?" Courtenay, who demonstrated his intelligence by refusing to jump, is picked up by helicopter at Suchet's insistence.By now south-east London has been abandoned in favour of the south-west. "We must prioritise," said the police commissioner briskly. There's a woman who obviously lives in Kew not Lewisham. The royal family are airlifted to Balmoral. You really would expect them to know better by now. The Queen is well aware that it is her job to stand on Buckingham Palace balcony in a Burberry, waving to encourage her surviving subjects, who are hanging on to the Victoria Memorial for dear life.
Which brings me to the vexed question. Up or out? In my opinion there was absolutely no need to bus everybody out to Barnet. If there is one thing we have a superfluity of in London, it is tower blocks, skyscrapers and gherkins. These qualify nicely as high ground. A good chunk of the population could be safely accommodated in Canary Wharf alone. I live beside the Thames and, in these circumstances, I'd go to bed with a packet of ginger biscuits and a quiet mind.
Something the river teaches you is that all things pass. However huge the cruiser, however weary the exhausted oarsmen, however rowdy the partygoers on their pleasure boats, these things will pass because the river is always in motion. Tides come and, inevitably, tides go.
However, it wouldn't be much of a film if everyone went to bed. Or it would be a different sort of film altogether.