Blowing hot and cold: Nicola Stephenson and Tom Sizemore in Superstorm. Photograph: BBC
So Superstorm ended last night, with about as big a bang as star Tom Sizemore managed on his sex tape. So much for the BBC's "Science Not Fiction" trailers. In fact, with a complementary documentary on BBC2 that same night (The Science of Superstorms) and teacher notes available to download, someone clearly wanted us to believe there was more to all this than badly written baloney.
Yet the game had been given away in the first ten minutes of episode one. "Theories are embryonic at best...the technology isn't ready," mused Dan Abrams. "We're outside the realm of conventional thinking," added Sizemore's character George Katzenberg. "This is pure fantasy" interjected Reznic, adding "we're a long way from reality here" - just in case the others didn't grasp the concept of pure fantasy.
Overstating your scientific credentials has been around for decades but seems to have drawn courage from the environmental lobby and the success of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Last month we had the impressive Sunshine, which director Danny Boyle promoted by pontificating about "science faction" - as if any real scientist believes we have 50 years before the sun cools down.
But it's somehow fitting that the Beeb has raised the stakes again, having kick-started the cod-science craze back in 1999 with Walking with Dinosaurs, which dared to pass off Jurassic Park as natural history. WWD turned into a huge international success, spawning multiple sequels to the point it's surprising we haven't seen Ainsley Harriott Cooking with Dinosaurs. It all goes to explain how a hybrid TV phenomena like Superstorm can occur, based in New York rather than London because most of the sales will come from US cable and DVD. It's the only science broadcasters really understand. To hell with the storms, chase the money.
Of course, one irony is that the science fiction show that dispensed with real science entirely is the one that had the greatest predictive powers. Flying around on dilithium crystals may be as silly as it sounds, but that didn't stop Star Trek anticipating the invention of dermal regenerators, voice recognition and PDAs or sending Scotty to the stars on a wave of public adoration. These days we laugh at the costumes, not the theories.
Mind you, I laughed the whole way through Superstorm. That's got to be progress of sorts, right?
