Disaster Film Olympiad: The Day The Earth Caught Fire

There are two things of which simply no good can ever possibly come: nuclear weapons and the international dateline. When they combine, the overall effect is inevitably catastrophic for all in its path. Unfortunately, these were the precise confluence of circumstances that were to assail the hard-working staff at the offices of The Daily Express in 1961, on a day... THE EARTH CAUGHT FIRE!

For years, man has yearned to destroy the Sun...

Typical tabloid hyperbole, that. The Earth did not literally catch fire, but it was nevertheless sickening for something pretty serious. The Day The Earth Caught Fire is an entertaining and considered Cold War fable that warns that the dangers of nuclear weapons - or not checking your calendar - stretch far beyond the obvious. The United States and the Soviet Union, now both building the spiffiest, most powerful hydrogen bombs that modern technology can muster, somehow contrive to each test them simultaneously on opposite ends of the globe without having first checked to see how time zones work. The overall effect throws the Earth off of its normal orbit and into an inevitable collision course with the Sun.

This annoys everybody. The new jaunty tilt of our celestial home causes havoc with the seasons, as drought, heatwaves, storms and floods beset countries quite unprepared to deal with the consequences. The action centres on the newspaper offices of central London, where to call the weather all to cock would barely do the situation justice. The temperature soars, causing a catastrophic drought, ruinously damaging thunderstorms and freak fogs. To be honest, it's pretty similar to what the weather is like in the 21st Century, although it is best to put that thought to the back of your mind since the upshot of all this is: we're doomed. The hardworking Daily Express staffers - motivated by the possibility of a worldwide scoop and powered only by cynicism, lukewarm Coca Cola and a bar tab that looks like Jeremy Hunt's parliamentary expenses claim - do their best to get to the bottom of the story, even though it turns their newspaper into a shrill, weather-obsessed, catastrophe rag. Which obviously could never happen.

It is an unusual disaster film, but it doesn't suffer at all for it: the main characters are reactive, rather than active; resigned rather than rallying. The film neatly captures the constrictive inevitability of a society that has contrived to destroy itself as we all feared it would. There are no heroes, just people being people. Some bad, some mad, but mostly good-hearted. Of course, a film is still always only a film, so a few compromises have to be made: of course our leading man Peter Stenning would take this opportunity to begin a torrid romantic entanglement with Jeannie Craig, a secretary from the Met Office. And naturally he will end up defending her honour from a bunch of feral beatnik water terrorists by engaging in fisticuffs in her apartment. These are things that happen in every film, no matter what the genre or the stakes.

On the whole, however, it is an absorbing and entertaining way to spend 90 minutes. Well, entertaining when one considers the oddly prescient nature of the subject matter: as I watched the film the sky outside was purple and the hail was falling upwards. Particularly pleasing is its ambiguous ending, as the dual forces of science and irony combine to decide the only way to save Earth from a certain fiery demise is to right its place in the heavens with... more atomic blasts. What will happen? The church bell ringers will be putting in for double overtime, if nothing else. It's hard enough ringing bells in normal temperatures and when adequately hydrated. More important still is that I have successfully managed to write the first ever retrospective review of The Day The Earth Caught Fire that doesn't mention it features a pre-super duper super stardom Michael Caine, playing a copper.

Daily Express journalist Peter Stenning (Edward Judd) in The Day The Earth Caught Fire: what would Princess Diana do?

More worthy of note even than the revelation that Michael Caine has to eat food and pay his gas bill are the special effects. Considering the technological limitations of the time they stand up very well indeed. Particularly stunning are the vistas of London as a sun-bleached, dried out and abandoned husk - all made by the matte painting mastery of Les Bowie. Film making has become less of an art since computers came along, in many ways. Sigh.

The Day The Earth Caught Fire gets a smouldering EIGHT out of 10 Disaster Points.

It can't happen here: on the power of disaster movies

Bees! Terrorists! Floods! SARS! Monsters! The elderly! Life is a dangerous place to be but what makes it preferable to the alternative is disaster movies.

Disaster is one of those film genres which can be distinguished thus: there has never been a disaster film, there are only disaster movies. But each is such a finely crafted opera of hysteria and catastrophe that not even Sight and Sound magazine could complain. Normally, cinema works on a very strict moral code. Bad things never befall good people and children and people with dogs. But in the disaster movie, all bets are off. Fred Astaire can be burned alive in a tower block, Steve Gutenberg's hair can fall out and Olivia De Havilland can be stung to death by bees. Nothing you do can save you from the wrathful vengeance of nature, or greed, or the worst excesses of humanity, or bees. In some of my favourite disaster movies, no-one is left alive at all and the Earth left to adjust to this cataclysmic event as best it can, but how it goes about doing so is not addressed. It's a sobering prospect for anyone familiar with the basic tenets of narrative structure, with Steve Gutenberg or the behavioural patterns of bees.

Disaster movies are interesting, too, because there's no guarantee that the events that take place can't ultimately conspire to smite your ass. Most days we all get up and try and stave off indigestion, death and bees long enough to make it to bedtime: it's all very humdrum and routine. But some days there are people who find themselves on fire, or in the wrong place at the wrong time during a terrorist attack or a natural disaster, or as collateral during the final climactic battle in the war between atomic bees and space wasps. There's no guarantees that, just by watching a film where a monstrous pre-historic sloth rampages through downtown Pittsburgh, you have achieved any kind of immunity.

So, I suppose there are two main reasons to relish disaster movies. Firstly, you never feel more alive than you do when you're watching someone else have their face chewed off by a doberman or falling out of a cable car in forlorn pursuit of their last Rolo. But secondly, it's a useful place to pick up tips. Do you know where you'd go during a zombie plague, tsunami or beetastrophe? That's right: upstairs. And I learnt all of that from watching disaster movies. Being someone who finds it difficult to learn any new skill without doing, disaster movies are as close as I can get without there being a snake biting my glans at 30,000 feet.

Today, then, I'm going to look at the main types of disaster movie and share some of the key lessons that they have taught me. You might want to print this post out later and then paste it to the wall of your inner sanctuary. Next to the bucket for shitting in.

MAN-MADE

Human beings are a bunch of idiots. They are greedy, self-serving and beholden to contrary ideologies. Even when they try to be helpful, they drop a load of water onto sodium metal and accidentally destroy half of Denver. The majority of man-made disaster films revolve around these topics, usually involving transportation or buildings. Terrorism is also a popular subject, although after September 11th 2001, American film producers decided that it was actually quite a serious subject after all and started to use it more sparingly.

Atomic Train: Rob Lowe saves the world, then doesn't

And how does one go about making any situation worse? Put an atomic bomb in it! A prime example here is the monumental TV movie Atomic Train, which touches on most of the classic man-made disaster film staples: greed, corruption, cutting corners, transportation gone awry, human relationship problems being put into sharp perspective and atomic bombs. Bees, mercifully, were absent but even so most of Denver copped one right in the flue, despite the best efforts of Rob Lowe.

So what can we learn from man-made disaster movies? Well, first, regulations exist for a reason. You may save yourselves a few thousand dollars in fees but if you sneak a decommissioned Soviet nuke onto a locomotive disguised as chemicals, half of Denver will be blown up. Secondly, things can always be worse in your life, so even if you are stuck in a disastrous marriage or demeaning career, just suck it up you loser. You'll be looking back to these days with enormous fondness once the atom bees arrive.

BIOLOGICAL

Biological includes animals, monsters and their perky but microscopic cousins, diseases. Some disaster movies successfully combine both: Outbreak, for instance, features a gruesome pandemic sparked by a manky monkey which leaves even Renee Russo unable to keep her insides from coming outside. Bees and birds and other swarming things also feature heavily, although we are still awaiting a disaster movie featuring a particularly malicious shoal of fish.

Biological disaster movies have also given the world the most important and best (i.e worst) disaster movie ever made: The Swarm, in which a deluge of African killer bees lay siege to an all-star cast, leading to some magnificently hysterical acting from Michael Caine, hallucinatory huge bees haunting everyone's nightmares and the large-scale destruction of Houston.

JIM LOVELL: Houston, we have a problem.
NASA MISSION CONTROL: Is it bees? Because frankly we've got a problem and it's bees.

The Swarm: believe it or not, this film is EVEN BETTER than this looks

What we can learn from biological disaster movies is that human beings are all idiots. Human concerns are all to blame for massing bees, rage-filled birds or drug-resistant strains of monkey rot. No good can come of it and all we can do is give thanks to the people who do their best to save us from ourselves, then rail against their voice being ignored but then do their best to save us all anyway. Or stay on shift even though people are hocking up bits of their lung on your shoe, as in Plague City: SARS in Toronto.

NATURAL

Natural disaster films are always popular: earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires and tidal waves can all really ruin your day and fling your cows about the joint. These are particularly beloved of anyone making really apocalyptic disaster films, such as 2012 or The Day After Tomorrow.

The Day After Tomorrow: the dreariest apocalypse ever imagined by man

But even notwithstanding the fact that human beings are largely powerless to contain the fury of nature anyway, these films like to really rub it in by blaming us anyway. Environmentalism is usually the leading boot that gets stuck in when we're down and on fire, but greed and corruption can also be covered - often with a karmic alignment bent. So if there's anything you can learn from natural disaster movies it is that you should always recycle, turn your TV off and not just leave it on standby and don't touch up kids.

SCIENCE-FICTION

Science fiction is something of a misnomer here, as these films actually deal with science FACT. However, the incidents of cosmic madness that these films depict unfolding are almost exclusively so cataclysmic that they haven't happened yet, or at least not for a sufficiently long time that humans have evolved sufficiently to make films about it with kick-ass special effects.

Deep Impact: possibly Morgan Freeman's fault

One particular device popular here is to make the President of the United States black. It gives films an other-worldly feel. It teaches us all that, while this can happen, it's statistically rare enough that it would be deeply counter-productive to invest too much emotional energy in worrying about it in your day-to-day life. However, then the damn fool Americans elected Barack Obama, which had the duel effects of effectively halving Morgan Freeman's earning power and also emphasising the fact that all bets are off.

What we can learn from these films is that when your number's up, you've had it. So keep smiling, carry an umbrella and come election day, always vote for middle class white males.

Now please, don't have nightmares. I almost invariably will, but there's no need for you to as well.

Wimblemund 2012: day 6

Lukas Rosol (CZ) bt. Rafael Nadal (E) 6-7(9), 6-4, 6-4, 2-6, 6-4
Novak Djokovic (RS) bt. Radek Stepanek (CZ) 4-6, 6-2, 6-2, 6-2
Roger Federer (CH) bt. Julien Benneteau 4-6, 6-7(3), 6-2, 7-6(6), 6-1

It's beginning to look like one of those years at Wimbledon. Top seeds and big names are tumbling out all over the place. Could it even prove to be Andy Murray's tournament in 2012? Well, let's hold our horses, here. It may be one of those years, but a Murray triumph would pretty much demand it being one of those years. Normally those years (and, indeed those years) come about because of inclement weather and the attendant delays and interruptions, but that's not really been the case at all so far this Wimbledon. So who knows? 

Perhaps it is due to the very absence of weather. I have a theory that the big names suffer when the Centre Court roof goes on. They're very used to that arena and the change in the atmospheric conditions, the noise and the echo is much more likely to be alien to them than to an opponent with less experience of show courts.

It's no real excuse, though, as the conditions are the same for everyone. Even if one side of the net were to be liberally peppered with dog turds and landmines, you'd still change ends (possibly whilst hopping) every two games. Nevertheless, I'd not be surprised to see Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer shinning up the side of Centre at midnight tonight with a toolbelt full of spanners. Even the increasingly imperturbable Novak Djokovic dropped a set under the old pie crust - the equivalent, in a normal standard professional tennis player, of having lost every set in the entire world.

But blaming technology and progress is all too easy to do. I believe that the root of Roger Federer's problems yesterday evening were writ large at the end of the second set tie break, when the great Swiss immediately left the court. Playing tennis whilst busting for a slash is always hugely inadvisable, especially at a tournament where all-white clothing is stipulated by the rules. It was a rookie mistake, and one which nearly cost him.

My solution is chamber pots under the players' chairs. Or the chairs to be replaced with commodes, if they're going to be precious about it.

And where was the Family Box gatekeeper in all of this? We must be told.

On hurricanes

I've never been to America but I feel a certain kinship with Americans whenever there's hurricanes about. They just had one! Her name was Irene. You probably read about it. Unless you're reading this from America's east coast, when you probably didn't read about it because the power went down and all the newspapers blew away. But you almost certainly had other sources of information, such as a cow going past your bedroom window sideways.

The reason for my feelings of kinship are simple: before I was 10 years old I'd experienced two hurricanes. As far as I knew, this sort of thing happened all the time. Between Autumn 1987 and January 1990 I thought houses didn't necessarily have to have tiles on their roof, that cars parked with their wheels in the air and that owls tied themselves to branches with safety harnesses.

Actually, it's fair to say that, 21 years on, hurricanes are a relatively rare occurrence in the United Kingdom. In fact, the 1987 storm (sadly, the UK doesn't have sufficient hurricanes to give them names) was the first hurricane in the UK since the earth was a flaming ball of molten rock and the land was ruled by fish with legs and delusions of grandeur.

This lack of hurricanes has served to conflate the history of both storms - 16th October 1987 and 25th January 1990 - into one set of memories and hurricane-lore. So, to be clear, 1987 was the one where Michael Fish went on the telly and told everyone there wasn't going to be a hurricane and the one which blew down all the oaks in Sevenoaks. The 1990 one was the one where Gordon Kaye from 'Allo 'Allo almost met his maker when a branch twatted the car he was driving. Because unlike the 1987 storm, which was overnight, the 1990 one took place during the daytime (the morning, mostly). This made it much more deadly, as more people were out in it. It was also much less destructive, however, largely on account of how everything that blew over in 1987 hadn't been put back up yet. Because in Britain, we like to take our time over that sort of shit.

I have very clear memories of the 1987 hurricane. I was 7 and we lived in Woodingdean. Woodingdean is just outside Brighton, but for mail purposes is within it. It's on top of a hill and rather exposed. This was abundantly clear on 17th October 1987, shortly after my mother was forced to apologise to my 4-year old brother and myself for telling us to shut up, it's just a bit of wind. Everything had fallen over. The only stuff that hadn't fallen over was the stuff which was meant to be on the ground, and that was all now in the air. Our house bore up awfully well. We lost a few tiles and our garden fence is probably still in Ringmer. A lot of people were not so lucky. There were a lot of houses in Woodingdean with no roof or windows and an insurance man stood outside with a steaming great big erection. My school was completely destroyed. I had the next month off until someone remembered that there was an old school building next door which we could use until our school was rebuilt. Drat.

When it was rebuilt, it was opened by the Duchess of Gloucester. Just in time for the 1990 storm, in fact. This time, only the roof blew off. I was in the classroom when it did. It was pretty noisy and after that they decided it was probably best to send us home, from a safety point of view. Whichever Little Piggy had rebuilt our school had obviously used bricks this time, though, because we only had one day off this time. I don't know what happened to our classroom roof. When we learned about Gordon Kaye, I hoped it hadn't been our roof that had hit him. Edith would never have forgiven us. Luckily (although not for Gordon Kaye) it wasn't. I suspect our roof is now in Bevendean somewhere where it is proudly guarded by a dairy cow.

The clarity of these memories is pretty remarkable, considering how long ago they were. There's nothing like 120mph winds to really leave a mark on the mind. And everything else, in fact. People like me, who knew Brighton before 1987, can still point out bits and bobs that changed forever. I imagine people from all over the south of England can say the same about wherever it is that they come from. It's nice to be involved in a little part of your nation's history, I suppose. And even nicer if you can sit here over 20 years later being glib about it, rather than being dead.

I would not like there to be any more hurricanes anywhere. They are dangerous.

My idea advent calendar, day 22

December 22nd: Ice clearance

A topical idea today. The UK was visited by some wintry weather at the weekend, and it seems like a lot of council authorities have been somewhat lax in their gritting duties, particularly on lesser roads and especially on pavements. My idea is for the Grit Belt. Basically a bum bag worn on your midriff, it would contain 10-20kg of road salt and a series of holes for a steady stream of gritting in front of your feet as you walk. People unable or unwilling to use the Grit Belt could also try my Tealight Wellies, which have a candle vertically mounted to the toe of the boot, to drive off the ice with its warmth.

My idea advent calendar, day 18

December 18th: Hot water hats

Thanks for the inspiration for today's idea go to internet goliath Shhexy Corin, who yesterday tweeted that "hot water bottles are the future". She is quite right. Of all the old-school things which still work better than anything modern science has devised, there's a good chance the hot water bottle stands at the top of the heap, along with the potato and the old-fashioned design of citrus fruit juicer. We should celebrate them more often, especially during the winter, of course. Also good in the winter, hats. Humans lose a lot of body heat through their head, because our large brains require a lot of juice, so a good hat is crucial to staying warm when it is cold outside. My idea is to make a hot water bottle hat. This will also have the knock-on effect of strengthening the nation's neck muscles.

On reactions to snow

It hath snowed. As I tip-tap-type this drivel, there is 2 (two) inches (eeenches) of the white flumpy stuff laying on the ground. Which is, of course, its preferred place to lay. Oh, and yes, I did measure it specially.

Reaction to snow number 1:

Our subject here is a 10-month old female Selkirk Rex pedigree cat. This subject had never seen snow before. The reaction was a blend of wide-eyed wonderment coupled with terror. It was very cute. I would give it an 8 (eight) on the cuteness scale. And I am a tough critic.

Reaction to snow number 2:

Our subject here is a 2-year old human female. She was very excited. Dizzily so, considering that there was but a centimetre or so dusting the ground. I anticipate that she is, at this stage, going completely mental.

Reaction to snow number 3:

Our subject, a 14-year old male moggie cat, black from head to toe and, as such, with the tendency to see snow as the very antithesis of his being, looked out the window at 3.30 a.m. and thought "Oh, fuck". Never before has a domestic feline managed to convey a thought so clearly. It made me laugh, despite the fact he had woken me up at 3.30 a.m. The subject subsequently woke me up at 4.30 a.m. to reiterate his displeasure. This hardly made me laugh at all.

Reaction to snow number 4:

Our subject this time is a 29-year old human female. It must be noted that this subject originates from a part of the world where snow is more commonplace than it is in the coastal area of Sussex. Which could be a description of Egypt, but in this case it is not. Also for consideration is the fact that I had informed the subject that her chances of being snowed-in today were laughably minimal. The subject displayed pleasure at the snow in a text message at about 8.20 a.m. this morning. The other knowledge gained - that I know three-fifths of bugger all - may well have been filed away for later reference.

Reaction to snow number 5:

Our subject, a 28-year old human male, was seen making plans to run about in the snow like a simpleton with a big grin on his massive, massive face. However, he had to write a blog post first.