I saw another apocalyptic destruction of London over the weekend – the TV mini-series, Flood.
The only thing that kept me going was when my friend Victoria appeared carrying flowers from one side of the room to the other but (evidently) going nowhere very fast at all. You see, although the movie focuses on a fictional overwhelming of the London Thames Barrier by a high tide-cum-storm surge, it was partly filmed in South Africa. Which isn’t actually the reason it is so awful; that’d mostly be the fault of the plot/script. Thomas Sutcliffe cannot contain his derision in the UK Independent.
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, Joanne Whalley’s daughters appeared to have been able to hail themselves a taxi, something that can be tricky even in light drizzle.