Pants...

I watched the incredible ITV drama Flood tonight. It's awful, mainly because it is ludicrous. The most believable part of the whole thing is the catastrophic flooding of London. There isn't one convincing relationship or motivating force in the rest of the show.

There is the classic disaster movie Old Fool Who Had Been Warning About This For Years. No-one was taking any notice of him until it became dramatically necessary for them to do so but when that time arrived suddenly everything Old Fool said was gospel.

COBRA, the Whitehall committee charged with sorting out catastrophes, decides that evacuating London in three hours is a better plan than telling everyone to go upstairs into those high London buildings we keep seeing on the news.

Robert Carlyle keeps diving into the torrent for a heroic paddle about and suspiciously keeps telling his lady friend in a flimsy silk blouse that they cannot stay here and must get into the water again...

Joanne Whalley is running Cobra without access to either Sky News, BBC News 24 or even Capital Radio. You can tell she is getting a grip of the situation when she demands some video coverage of the mayhem.

The CGI pictures of London getting swallowed up by floodwater are pretty good but I would have thought the iconic scenes of the Whitehouse getting destroyed in Independence Day or even Parliament going up in V for Vendetta should have taught film makers to savour the destruction of our seats of Government. Tower Bridge gets a good hammering but really they could have tried harder.

The thing is, Flood is so bad that you find yourself trying to work out what could have caused it. Did all the money go on the special effects and the actors? Did they start with footage of London being destroyed and then try to work a story around it? Did anyone watch it before they pressed the button marked 'Broadcast'?