Low water mark

The weekend's TV reviewed: Flood; The South Bank Show; Peep Show

Oh, the humanity! It's never the desk jockeys and back-room administrators who suffer when a disaster strikes. It's the poor sods on the front line, who have to put into action what may well have seemed like a good idea on paper but turns out to be lethal in reality. Take Flood, for example, ITV1's compellingly awful mini-series about the inundation of London. The writers, Justin Bodle and Matthew Cope, remain relatively sheltered from public opprobrium, their names featuring only in a brief on-screen credit, along with the director and producers. And the ITV executive who actually green-lit the project enjoys total anonymity as far as the viewers are concerned. But the poor actors find themselves with nowhere to hide, exposed to the full ferocity of the storm for hours, tumbled along in a maelstrom of implausible plotting and breath-stopping dialogue. They're the ones that are going to need the trauma counselling when the water finally recedes.

Flood didn’t waste much time. Within seconds, a group of boffins had peered at a machine monitoring the size of North Sea waves and gasped, “What? It’s got to be a mistake!” We then cut to Wick in Scotland where a tsunami brushed aside a tidal-measurement facility before rampaging inland to drown someone's granny and force her daughter up into the attic, the first of the glut of estranged and imperilled relatives that the drama had lined up for us. Next came reports that the same storm-surge had flattened Arbroath. But of course this was never going to be a proper disaster movie until the storm headed for London – which it soon did. Waiting there were a cast of characters whose eerie familiarity suggested that the programme’s desire to ape the disaster movies of the past went much deeper than merely portraying total catastrophe.

In this, it was only obedient to the usual disaster-movie rules, which insist that while the heroes battle against fire, flood and volcanic eruption, they must also hump around with them large amounts of emotional baggage. Robert Carlyle, unlucky enough to have landed the central part of a hydraulics engineer, played Rob, the strangely driven head of the reassuringly named Defiant Engineering. He would later be transformed into an action hero but in the meantime was called to the Thames Barrier, where he duly had to face some personal issues as well as aquatic ones. For a start, the Barrier’s manager was his ex-wife, Sam (Jessalyn Gilsig), whose office was full of roses from her new beau. She is Canadian, because Canada put up some of the money. Also present was Rob's troubled father Leonard (Tom Courtenay), here filling the traditional role of The Man Who Knew This Would Happen All Along. Leonard, you see, was a professor long obsessed with the idea that the Thames Barrier was in the wrong place: an obsession which, in some unspecified way, had caused his wife to die of a broken heart. Now, as the water swept over the Barrier towards central London, all the people (including Rob) who’d written him off as a crank were forced to rethink – and in many cases to utter the phrase “Morrison was right!” in a stunned voice. 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.

So,ingeniously, the villain in Flood is neither human trafficker nor Dalek but the Met Office, headed up by a sour-faced Nigel Planer who exudes cowardice and incompetence and a whiff of Michael Fish. Fish, of course, was the man who reportedly predicted in 1987 that there was no way on earth that Britain was about to be carved up by storms. His actual words were, “Apparently, a woman rang the BBC and said she heard there was a hurricane on the way; well, if you're watching, don't worry, there isn't.” And here's Planer (as Keith Hopkins) telling us that there's no way that London is about to be completely submerged underwater. “We're on top of everything,” he tells the Deputy PM (David Suchet). Because we already hate him for being a crummy weather forecaster, we know that Planer will not foresee that the storm will dramatically alter its course and hit the South East of England later this afternoon.

For now, he hangs on, magically transported from his HQ in Devon to Cobra division in Whitehall, where Commissioner Nash of Scotland Yard (Joanne Whalley) is in charge, armed with an expression of such intriguing foul-temperedness that it makes you wonder why nobody has yet rescued her from niche-film obscurity. She is masterminding the evacuation of London – and, given that it mostly happened off-screen, making sure we understand the size of the operation. (“No population movement on this scale in this time frame has ever been attempted before,” she explains.) Naturally, she too had personal issues, what with her two teenage daughters being out on the town somewhere. You will be reassured to hear that David Suchet is also in attendance, the prime minister being shrewdly absent in Sydney. Suchet, when not talking in exclamation marks, is biting lumps out of Planer. "I need a damn good explanation of why we had no warning! What the hell have you people been doing?" Planer's naturally downhearted look, first trialled as Neil in The Young Ones, still serves him very well.

Meanwhile at Southend, to an agitated accompaniment from the London Philharmonic, the tidal wave arrives. Needless to say, the flood itself allowed the computer-generated imagery to go into overdrive, which it did reasonably well. Still, 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. In the bowels of the Northern Line, fat, old Bill and teenage Zak (David Hood and Tom Hardy), a couple of tube workers, are standing in for the common people. We all like Bill and Zak and hope for the best. On top of the Thames Barrier, Rob and Samantha hold hands and leap together into the swollen river. They are now wetter than they ever expected to be or even thought possible. Not one word of this was mentioned in drama school. Nobody said: "By the way, how's your breast stroke?" Carlyle’s transformation into action hero, and Gilsig's into damsel in distress, are both under way, as the two swim towards the Dome.

Back to Cobra operations where Suchet stomps around the room playing a man whose sole duty appears to be to ask simple-minded questions so underlings can feed statistics and information into the drama. "Sorry... storm surge?!" he barked irascibly, and a shamefaced woman from the Met Office powers up a laptop conveniently loaded with a CGI graphic of several billion tons of water barrelling towards Southend. Suchet is understandably cross that he hadn't had more warning that the capital might be wiped off the map, being informed of the city's imminent destruction with only three hours' grace. He is also typically decisive. Suddenly aware that an ageing, supposedly deluded Courtenay is the man to Wake Britain Up, he bellows: "No man on the planet knows more about storm surges! We Need That Man Here!"

Courtenay, who demonstrated his intelligence by refusing to jump with Carlyle and Gilsig, is picked up by helicopter at Suchet's insistence. Courtenay is destined to save the film and London single handed. He is 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."

Thankfully, physics seem to be a flexible affair in these things. "We need to relocate now!" snapped Whalley, as a tidal wave travelling at 50 miles per hour sailed past Tower Bridge towards her ops room. Six minutes later, they appeared to have a fully functioning crisis-control centre up and running somewhere else, the tsunami having graciously pulled up in the Pool of London for a while to allow everyone to make the move. And though the storm surge was powerful enough to flick juggernauts aside like bits of popcorn, it was also sufficiently placid to allow Robert Carlyle to go duck-diving in the Thames to look for a lifeboat.

Absolutely nothing made sense: in one shot, the city streets were gripped by mass panic and gridlock, in the next, Whalley's daughters appeared to have been able to hail themselves a taxi, something that can be tricky even in light drizzle. So many whys. Why is the head of the US Federal Reserve German? Why, when London is being evacuated, are Whalley's progeny able to persuade the seemingly oblivious driver to head straight into town? Why does Robert Carlyle's assistant, Anna, speak with a transatlantic accent and a lip-synch problem? (My research reveals that in, real life, Anna is Italian. Was she dubbed? If so, why was she was cast?) Why does the Prime Minister never call? Isn't he worried?

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. If you live beside the Thames and found yourself in these circumstances, you would 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.

Impressively, Flood kept the fidelity to the genre (or, if you prefer, these clichés) coming right to the end. Yesterday’s final scene featured Sam raising her arms and bellowing “Rob!” as he disappeared beneath the waves. Which, to be honest, might have been more of a cliff-hanger if the trailer for tonight’s concluding episode hadn’t shown him alive and well – presumably because, from what we saw, he could hold his breath for longer than it takes to evacuate a London hospital. ITV would like us to think that this is a made-for-television two-parter but Flood has a chequered history. It was released as a feature film last year but only one cinema had the guts to show it after Britain was unexpectedly... flooded. Flood went straight to DVD and broadcast on American TV - where it was panned.

And you couldn't fail but enjoy the irony: here was a disaster movie gone disastrously wrong. Every few seconds something disastrous would come out of an actor's mouth (“What kind of wave would do that?” “Look, if we stay here we're going to die”). This flood was worse than New Orleans, said Whalley. What she meant was better. The cast wrestled admirably with the far-fetched plot and every now and then a silver lining would emerge from the thunder clouds - David Hood, an unknown who played the older Tube worker, stood out, as did Tom Hardy playing his hapless mate. They were beneficiaries of one of those arbitrary miracles that sometimes occur in natural disasters. For some reason, the pair were given lines that actually sounded like something a human being might utter, and as a consequence were able to deliver a performance that they'll be able to look back on without wanting to pluck out their eyes. The rest of them went under, and the only blame that attached to them is that they didn't run like hell for high ground when they saw the damn thing coming.

For once, there had been some thought put into the Bank Holiday television schedule. Peep Show was back and Melvyn Bragg was smarming up to Liza Minnelli in The South Bank Show (ITV1, Sunday). She told a great story about the only time she appeared on stage with her mother, Judy Garland. We saw footage of the plump 18-year-old belting out a song. The crowd goes crazy but, in the wings, her mother struggles to contain her jealousy: “My mother did not come back on stage,” Minnelli says. “Judy Garland came back on stage.”

Bragg failed to ask what it felt like when Minnelli's ex-husband, David Gest, publicly accused her of giving him herpes on their wedding night. But there was Chlamydia on the first of a new series of Peep Show (Channel 4, Friday), which returned on Friday evening to further explore the almost limitless sleaziness – moral, physical and intellectual – of Jeremy and Mark. The show opened soon after where the last one had left off. Having jilted his wife of several minutes, Mark (David Mitchell) was drinking the wedding bubbly and wondering if “anybody’s ever been this unhappy while drinking champagne”. Still, he did perk up a little when Jez (Robert Webb) arranged a double date – even though it was to the theatre. (“They use proper actors these days: Americans and people off the telly,” Jez reassured him.) Luckily, Mark’s woman was impressed by his Friends of the British Museum magazine. (“This magazine’s sexual dynamite,” he reflected.)

From there, it was Peep Show business as usual, with Mark trying to pass off his fearfulness as moral principle, Jez having no principles at all and almost every line proving quotably great. The play turned out to be Othello, which prompted Jeremy to walk out in disgust and then express a rapture that I don't think I've ever seen acknowledged in print or on air before, that of the theatrical escapee. "I wasn't even meant to be out till 11 and it's not even nine! I've time- travelled! I've made time!" Scabrous slapstick and base motives are the core of the comedy, but that kind of leftfield detail is what gilds it. Admittedly, the plot did get a bit bogged down in the second half. Even so, now that both Have I Got News for You and Peep Show have returned, Friday nights are back the way they should be.