Pop Vultures

Taking a break this week from your regularly-scheduled reality-show hilarity, I’ve been watching the BBC’s new big budget drama Burn Up, an extravaganza of well-known actors, tight scripting and global filming locations, all about everybody’s favourite hot topic - climate change.

This two-part drama tells the story of Tom McConnell, a handsome young executive of Arrow Oil, who seems to have only just realised that global warming is this whole big thing and that perhaps he should do something about it. Taking the role of Tom’s good angel is Holly, played by Neve Campbell (better known as ‘that one from Party of Five‘), the head of Arrow’s renewable energy department. The devil on Tom’s other shoulder is Mack, played by Bradley Whitford (Josh!) in his trademark know-it-all, wise-cracking style. Mack is an oil lobbyist and shady fixer for Arrow, who is not above ordering the assassination of geologists who are out to prove the oil industry might have something to do with permafrost melting.

And so the drama unfolds. Arrow is the target of a law suit from a group of Inuits who blame the company for the disintegration of their lands; Oxford scientists sound off about impending doom to anybody who will listen; and Mack dismisses the whole global warming debate as ‘an inconvenient poop’ (hah, see what he did there?) and encourages Tom to blame the whole thing on sun spot activity. But then, an Inuit protester sets herself on fire in front of Tom, and he accidentally sleeps with Holly while (implausibly) attending the Inuit’s funeral, and the whole thing descends into farce.

What started out as a promising drama about a controversial, emotive and complex topic quickly becomes a convoluted and wholly unconvincing story involving government assassins, spies, international blackmail and marital infidelity. Even while giving us all this, the BBC still manages to fall back on its favourite trope - blaming it all on the Americans. The ‘get the USA to sign up to Kyoto or the world will end’ point was made repeatedly throughout, so everybody watching from their nice cosy British homes could relax and stop feeling so guilty about driving to work - it’s all the fault of the Yanks anyway, thank goodness.

I really wanted to like Burn Up. I love Bradley Whitford, for starters (I even watched Studio 60 all the way through to the bitter end), and the BBC is usually excellent at producing gritty and thought-provoking dramas about difficult and disturbing topics. I expected this show to be a triumph, but it was a shambles - a soap opera on a global scale which somehow managed to use an unnecessarily convoluted plot to lamentably simplify a very complex issue. Clearly I should stick to reality shows - there’s much less room for disappointment.

If you too love Bradley Whitford beyond all reason, or you’re not American and want to know why that means you don’t have to worry about global warming at all, then you should catch Burn Up on the BBC’s iPlayer. Or wait for it to be repeated on a television near you, as it no doubt very soon will be.