From BBC drama The Rapture on the climate crisis to Apple’s Criminal Record on the rise of the far right, culture often sees what politics fails to
In the BBC’s new apocalypse drama, The Rapture, the UK is engulfed in a terrifying heatwave. I watched a preview of the programme in May, while preparing to interview the lead actor Ruth Madeley. I thought at the time: “This will be much more frightening when it chimes with the real life weather, bad luck for them that it’s not coming out for a couple of months.” But, by the time of meeting Madeley the following month, we were already in the middle of a heatwave that would lead to the highest ever recorded June temperature in the UK. The whole encounter made the show feel even more prophetic. She was in a central London hotel, air-conditioned inside, but all the door handles and surrounding street furniture – benches segmented by metal arm rests, to make life just that little bit harder for homeless people – had got way too hot. It was like playing The Floor is Lava, except instead of “floor”, “everything”. It surely can’t hit the screens at a more apposite time than this, I thought, failing to predict that by late July we’d be in heatwave number three, and France would be on fire.
The Daily Mail’s reviewer was upset that Christianity was portrayed “as a bastion of anti-science nutjobs and fundamentalists” in the show, wondering rhetorically whether the BBC would ever create such a drama about a “Muslim imam”. Peculiar thing to get upset about, I thought, since the religion is really more of a symptom of, or even a garnish to, the central atmosphere of engulfing heat. It’s like complaining that cats get a bad rap in the 1974 film The Towering Inferno (yes, there is a cat in it).
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