After the tsunami
Simon Hoggart
There was much pre-publicity around Tsunami — The Aftermath (BBC1, Tuesday) implying that the second anniversary of the disaster was a little early to turn it into drama, and that the film would be distressing and demeaning for the victims’ families. I could see the point, though what struck me most was that with more than a quarter of a million people dead, there were enough tragic stories available without having to invent more. It was as if the producers had thought, well, there is plenty of grief and anguish out there, but it’s not quite the grief and anguish we’re looking for. Let’s bring in some scriptwriters to give us tailor-made grief and anguish, neatly trimmed to fit into our format and make the best use of our expensive cast.
And yet the whole thing was surprisingly moving and on the whole worked well. They used a cunning device for the precredits. A boatload of tourists had left their luxury resort in Phuket, Thailand, to go on a diving trip. Though they noticed the sea behaving strangely they hadn’t been hit by, or even seen, the tsunami. So we watched them return to the smashed hotel, the grave for several of their loved ones, as horrified and bewildered as survivors of a nuclear war. The gradual realisation of what had happened gave a dramatic focus to the opening that the tidal wave itself — one moment nobody feared a thing, the next minute their lives were destroyed — could not have provided.
It was, given its length, inevitably rather slow at times (TV dramas are so much longer than feature films these days) and the makers had not woven together the dozen or so strands an equivalent American film would have used. So there were basically only five stories: white British family lose husband and possibly (we’ll know next week) a son as well. Black British couple lose their daughter. British envoy is harassed by the British survivors. Cynical British reporter rediscovers his humanity. Thai youth’s village is ruined and evil property speculators arrive to cash in. As it happens, the Thais didn’t get much of a look-in except as corpses, who, we are told, earned much less than Europeans in the same roles, which sounds disgusting but which presumably represented supply and demand in Thailand. So there were an awful lot of people looking wild-eyed, or running after trucks shouting, ‘She’s a little girl, only six years old, please, has anyone seen her?’ But then you think, it must have been very much like this, why are we complaining if it doesn’t move the plot along? Or, wouldn’t it have worked better as a documentary? Did we need, for example, to have the reporter fall into a swimming pool full of bobbing corpses? (The reporter was played by Tim Roth as a gung-ho maniac. This might be reasonable. He reminded me of the BBC’s Keith Graves, who once, in Belfast, became the only reporter I have ever seen pick up a policeman by the lapels and shake him.) In the end I thought the film overcame these problems. It was affecting without being sentimental. No swelling strings marked reunions, no Jaws-style thudding accompanied the perils. The plot lines did not seem contrived. The moment where the boy learns that his father is dead was played exactly right — strong enough to make you feel the crumpling blow of grief, short enough to avoid being intrusive. The black couple think they’ve found their daughter on a website of survivors, but at the hospital discover it’s another child who looks like theirs. The wife calmly steals this baby, and the scene where she plays with her on her knee was nearly heartbreaking.
There were two richly entertaining Channel 4 documentaries. 638 Ways To Kill Castro (Tuesday) trotted through the alleged number of assassination attempts on the Cuban dictator by the Americans, 197 under Ronald Reagan alone, nearly one a fortnight. Many were ludicrous: the poisoned diving suit, the poisoned cigar, the poisoned face cream and the boobytrapped mollusc, which was too small for its bomb. Various failed assassins were interviewed; none of them seemed too troubled by their own incompetence, since most were living in some luxury in Florida. The spookiest moment came when the sainted Edward R. Murrow sucked up to Castro, or at least his son Fidelito, on TV. ‘That’s a very good-looking puppy you have there!’ Ed Murrow also turned up on the wonderful Churchill’s Girl (Channel 4, Thursday) having been one of La Grande Horizontale’s innumerable lovers. These were recounted with shiny-eyed and unnerving relish by her son, the younger Winston Churchill. She had been married to Randolph, but the old man encouraged her wartime affair with Averell Harriman, then US ambassador to Britain, whose pillow talk he needed to know. Her conquests were listed admiringly rather as you might trot through Tiger Woods’s golf triumphs. But she must have been the most successful courtesan in history, with Bill Clinton sending Air Force One over to bring her coffin back from Paris, where, as US ambassador, she died. How fitting that she was ushered into eternity as she had lived, surrounded by pomp, power and wealth, still flat on her back.
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