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Burn Up

Neve Campbell and Rupert Penry-Jones in Burn Up
  • Posted at 11:25am
  • 30 July 2008
  • by AlisonGraham-RT

Listening to writer Simon Beaufoy telling a Radio 4 arts programme that his global-warming drama Burn Up (23/25 July BBC2) was as rock-solidly realistic and as super-fantastic as it's possible to get (I paraphrase Mr B here), I decided I'd better watch it again. Obviously, I'd missed something when I sat down with the preview DVD and decided that watching Burn Up was like being harangued by earnest sixth-formers about how the world is going to end right now and it's all my fault.

But it turns out that I hadn't missed anything after all. Burn Up still made me want to go out, start my car engine and leave it idling for the rest of my life, just out of spite. It was one long, turgid lecture, a tepid conspiracy thriller (and, what with dismal The Last Enemy and Midnight Man, haven't we had enough of those this year?), this time about global warming.

Yes, global warming, or climate change, if you prefer, is the great big new enemy in TV dramas. Forget serial killers - they're so yesterday - it's greenhouse gases that will get you first.

Of course, this is all terribly important stuff - everyone tells us that often enough - but does it make for good drama? Well, no, actually, because such dramas can't really go beyond characters exchanging interesting facts about oil and carbon dioxide, which in Burn Up was as deadly as you thought it might be. Or saying such things as "We are back to the Ice Age" in voices that were sonorous with doom. Oooh, I'm scared.

The cast did their best, but it was a struggle, with Rupert Penry-Jones and Neve Campbell both looking blank and lost in their respective roles as an (eventually disillusioned) oil-company boss and a "renewables" expert. Renewables - mmmm, very sexy. And yes, of course, they got down to a bit of global warming of their own under a blanket in the middle of Greenland, or it could have Iceland, I forget.

The world might be melting, polar bears might be pitching tents on beaches, but there's always time for Rupert Penry-Jones to bare his bum.

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