The BBC takes us on a fright-night tour of death and disaster
IAN BELL
May 12 2005
Heatwave BBC1, 8.30pm
In 2003, 15,000 French people died during a bout of brutally clement summer weather. Hospitals were overwhelmed, corpses were being stored in meat-lockers, politicians were dodging the music and the nation was in shock. It's not as if the French are unused to sunshine, after all. What went wrong?
Unlike the British, the French don't go daft whenever rain happens to stop. When the mercury rises too high shutters are closed and curtains drawn. In the south, people nap after lunch rather than broil in the open. They respect the heat.
Fifteen thousand died, for all that, most of them elderly. When the weather eventually broke, typical French insouciance gave way to typically French recriminations. The issue was that no-one, least of all the government or the emergency services, had seemed to notice thousands dying simply because of a heatwave.
As a documentary subject, the 2003 carnage is a good, topical fable in the age of climate change. Critics could allege, after all, that the French authorities had no excuses. Greece had suffered many casualties previously because of "freak" summer weather. In Chicago, in 1995, hundreds had died during five days of severe temperatures. The French story is worth telling.
The makers of Heatwave decided otherwise. A catastrophe many times more serious than 9/11, and somehow more serious because it was essentially mundane, clearly wasn't good enough. They needed an angle to justify 90 minutes of television. Hang on, you could almost hear them think, what if we said the disaster could happen here?
The film, generally very watchable, thus made itself doubly annoying. The general thesis of global warming aside, it did not explain why Britain might be scorched, but neither did it confess that it was simply transposing the experience of France in 2003 to these islands in 2006. The experiences of the fictional characters it employed were obviously taken from the sufferings of the French, but that was not mentioned. This was a disaster movie disguised as a fictive documentary when real deaths in a real country are, for my money, quite eloquent enough. The message wasn't hard to grasp. As one invented expert said: "Heatwaves have killed more people in the United States than all other natural disasters combined." When you add the fact that a glimpse of sunshine does something strange to the British, you have the makings of a decent public health warning.
It is tiresome, nevertheless, to see a few simple, if brutal, facts being stretched into a 90-minute film. It is also wearisome to watch documentary techniques being subverted for the sake of dramatic effect. When trains were being halted in the London Underground amid killing heat, someone thought it deftly post-modern to flash the word "reconstruction" on the screen. A clever if glib gesture, but the fact remains that the word is all that these days separates truth from fantasy in the average modern documentary.
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