What to watch
Tsunami: Impact
CHANNEL 5, 9PM
Airing across the next three nights (subsequent instalments are subtitled, with no hyperbole, Destruction and Devastation), this cannily structured documentary balances human interest and hard science to understand the causes and effects of the Boxing Day Tsunami that killed more than a quarter of a million people in 2004 as it hit the coasts of Indonesia and Thailand.
Dr Xand van Tulleken and Raksha Dave are our guides to the catastrophe through its earliest stages, as two tectonic plates 19 miles beneath the Indian Ocean, after millions of years of increasing pressure, finally ruptured. The footage taken before the tsunami itself, some of it filmed by Van Tulleken’s interviewees, is staggering enough. Documentarian Dendy Montgomery recalls that “the land was a kind of porridge” while the initial earthquake rumbled on, his film starkly illustrating the reality; later, as the ocean is sucked out to the horizon in three minutes, the seriousness of the situation dawns on the assembled tourists. Dave, meanwhile, takes a seat in
Europe’s largest tsunami simulator. It is an emotionally gripping and sensitive evocation
of a natural disaster, the shock waves from which are still being felt by many to this day. Gabriel Tate it is their children whose innate conservatism threatens their happiness.