Burn Up
BBC2
The planet’s in crisis! The ice-caps are melting! The oil industry’s like, really, really bad!
In Burn Up, a new two-part mini-series eco drama, that’s pretty much what we learn, along with other IMPORTANT INSIGHTS like: Don’t trust the Americans. Don’t trust the Brits. And really, really, don’t trust the pesky Chinese.
Rupert Penry Jones (nice English man from Spooks) stars as a nice English man who somehow finds himself promoted to head honcho of some oil company when his father in law decides he’s had enough of getting his hands dirty. For someone who’s obviously been working in the oil industry for a bit, he’s pretty naive about how the whole oil thing is going down. He hires nice wind-farm lover Neve “Scream” Campbell to make it look like his company gives a shit about investing in sustainables (but they don’t really, mwah ha-ha), then seems surprised when he starts to work out that actually she’s the one making sense (around the same time he notices she’s quite hot) and all his nice corporate buddies, like shady Uncle Mack (Bradley Whitford from the West Wing) are actually the real loonies running around the planet, digging stuff up, destroying those nice polar bears and casually killing anyone who gets in their way.
Marc Warren seems to be having quite a good time as an ambiguous British diplomat moving and shaking behind the scenes, scoring points off the Americans and generally being a bit shady. But other than that, it’s all pretty cartoony, one of those message-dramas where they’re so busy cramming lots of IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THE END OF THE WORLD that they forget to write a believable drama.
It’s hard to accept that anyone at the top of the oil food chain could really be so uninformed about anything to with the reality of the situation. But more importantly, are we really supposed to buy the idea of a post-Kyoto eco summit where all the delegates are schmoozing in the same after-hours disco, bopping and drinking while images of ice-caps melting are projected on the walls? Hey international delegates! Worn out by all that complicated chat about production caps and carbon trading? I know! Let’s all wind down by going to a rave sponsored by Greenpeace! And as for the final big dramatic bit (I’d say this was a SPOILER, or even a spOILer, but really it’s not giving away much to let you know that this predictable drama ends in a chase) - are we really supposed to believe you can just sneak into Calgary stadium in the middle of the night for some clandestine meetings on the steps just because it makes for a scenic location? What? Security’s so lax in a major city where they’ve got thousands of diplomats and eco-protesters running around that you can break into such a public space? Could you break into Wembley like this on a normal day, let alone one when your city is under international scrutiny? The O2? Koko’s got better security! It’s totally ridiculous.
Obviously it’s good to see that fiction isn’t operating in a bubble, that people are trying to draw our attention to the plight of the penguins etc etc. But this doesn’t really help. Maybe the planet would be better off if we turned off our TVs for the four-odd hours it takes to watch Burn Up...
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