It Takes a Flood . . .
ITV
★★★★☆
What We Do in the Shadows
BBC2
★★★☆☆
Keen observers of the news will be aware there’s a climate-change conference happening. Or perhaps you’ve just been watching primetime telly, where there have been roughly 45 programmes on the theme lately (or so it feels). The latest, It Takes a Flood . . ., initially looked like being one of those orgies of extreme-elemental footage we sometimes get — shows with such titles as Wildest Weather Unleashed and so on — featuring as it did visions of British roads as white-water rafting rides and houses collapsing amid biblical deluges.
You don’t get an Oscar-winning director doing that kind of thing, though, and Kevin Macdonald’s film was a more emotive and alarming wake-up call altogether. Given the weekend’s floods, it also arrived with the timing of a particularly unerring weather forecast. Over the opening apocalyptic clips came a comment from a man in Hawick, southern Scotland, that would more accurately define the hour: “Until these things happen in reality to you, you’ll never understand how it feels inside.”
The accounts offered at least some idea as they brought home the personal cost of flash floods, which are at best frightening but just as often ruinous. The images of a Somerset home being overtaken by a roiling torrent showed how quickly you can be left helpless in protecting your house. We later saw an exhausted farmer, on one hour’s sleep, trying to rescue animals that are worth £500,000, the same amount by which he’s in debt. A man in Snaith, East Yorkshire, saw his house underwater and said: “You see a property that you live in flooded, it’s everything you ever had in your life, and it’s gone.”
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This was weather almost as a horror film. Even trendy Notting Hill is being inundated, as we saw in the footage of a man wading through sewage-infused water in Portobello Road last summer. If your reaction was “there but for the grace of God . . .”, consider that it may be you next. We were told that one in six homes in Britain is now at risk of flooding. The programme tried its best to leave us with an encouraging note, showing the kindness of strangers amid such adversity, but you were more likely to have switched off with an urge to review your home insurance policy immediately.
Flipping between BBC2 and Channel 4 you had a Natasia Demetriou double-header, the excellent comic actress offering her dim Sophie in Stath Lets Flats and her deadpan bloodsucker Nadja in the returning mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows. These are two of the most silly-yet-smart comedies on the box, although I can’t help but feel a bit of over-familiarity creeping in with the basic Shadows joke — the dilemmas of a household of bickering vampires. In fact the character I most want to watch this for now is the non-vampire: Guillermo the dogsbody (or “vampire familiar”, played by Harvey Guillén), who remains sweetly, amusingly sanguine about his lot, even though he lives in a dungeon and is treated little better than a rat with rabies.
There are still some devilishly amusing moments, though. Finally promoted to bodyguard, Guillermo was subjected to the dangerous practice of “vampiric hypnosis”, with Nadja and Laszlo (Matt Berry) warning how this might lead to “weak brain or thoughtless sallies”, and even “purple screaming Henries, or worse still, half-man half-madness”. After It Takes a Flood . . ., this gothic nonsense felt like sweet relief.
