Oil Disaster: The Rig That Blew up, Thursday 8pm, Five
Posted by Stewart Turner
Oil Disaster: The Rig That Blew Up was never going to win any awards for its less-than-imaginative title, and true to Five’s form, this hastily cobbled together documentary about one of the planet’s worst ever ecological disasters was less than brilliant.
If you tuned in expecting an in-depth assessment of the ecological impact of the explosion of Deepwater Horizon, or a look at the subsequent political fallout and President Obama’s Brit-bashing in the weeks following, you’d have been seriously disappointed.
For this is Five, a channel which sticks Ice Road Truckers on at primetime and seems to be courting a target audience of blokes who get their kicks watching massive bits of machinery been driven around by Americans with handlebar moustaches. It takes all sorts.
Oil Disaster focussed primarily on those first few nights after the BP-owned rig suffered a massive blowout with 126 people on board, and the efforts of the emergency services and specialists who worked tirelessly in an effort save those on board and vainly fought to prevent the thing from collapsing into the ocean.
The narration in particular was rather ham-fisted. “Chris leaves his room – walking into a deep sea rigger’s worst nightmare” boomed the voiceover at one point, somewhat stating the obvious. The dedication and the bravery of the experts who fought to prevent the disaster was beyond doubt – but they’d have been better served by a film which didn’t so obviously salivate at the prospect of showing some big American trucks and huge slabs of lifting equipment.
The timescales involved presumably meant the makers of this documentary had to turn the whole thing round pretty quickly, and by god it showed. The last few minutes were frankly bizarre, with the whole environmental catastrophe and hapless BP boss Tony Hayward’s grilling by US senators shoehorned into the tiny bit of space they had before the credits rolled. Such a tragic incident surely merits better.
If you tuned in expecting an in-depth assessment of the ecological impact of the explosion of Deepwater Horizon, or a look at the subsequent political fallout and President Obama’s Brit-bashing in the weeks following, you’d have been seriously disappointed.
For this is Five, a channel which sticks Ice Road Truckers on at primetime and seems to be courting a target audience of blokes who get their kicks watching massive bits of machinery been driven around by Americans with handlebar moustaches. It takes all sorts.
Oil Disaster focussed primarily on those first few nights after the BP-owned rig suffered a massive blowout with 126 people on board, and the efforts of the emergency services and specialists who worked tirelessly in an effort save those on board and vainly fought to prevent the thing from collapsing into the ocean.
The narration in particular was rather ham-fisted. “Chris leaves his room – walking into a deep sea rigger’s worst nightmare” boomed the voiceover at one point, somewhat stating the obvious. The dedication and the bravery of the experts who fought to prevent the disaster was beyond doubt – but they’d have been better served by a film which didn’t so obviously salivate at the prospect of showing some big American trucks and huge slabs of lifting equipment.
The timescales involved presumably meant the makers of this documentary had to turn the whole thing round pretty quickly, and by god it showed. The last few minutes were frankly bizarre, with the whole environmental catastrophe and hapless BP boss Tony Hayward’s grilling by US senators shoehorned into the tiny bit of space they had before the credits rolled. Such a tragic incident surely merits better.
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