Contagion! The viral hit that’ll have you reaching for the hand sanitiser

In the biggest science experiment of its kind, the BBC show is both a cheery piece of Reithian edutainment and a grave portent of our impending doom

“The next deadly outbreak could happen at any time,” rumbles the voiceover in Contagion! The BBC Four Pandemic (Thursday, 9pm, BBC Four), a show that calculates the speed at which the next killer virus will rampage across the globe. A new pandemic is, we are told, not a case of if but when. The UK government now has flu at the top of its risk register, above obesity, war and Jacob Rees-Mogg. In a world already brimming with misery and despair, Contagion! is clear that we’re all going to hell in a handcart. Such is its certainty, it might as well have called itself Face It, Chumps, We’re Screwed.

Still, it seems a shame that BBC Four has passed up the opportunity to ramp up the terror levels in the manner of a 1970s public information film and show us ghoulish footage of figures in gas masks picking over piles of festering corpses. Or it could have followed in the footsteps of Steven Soderbergh’s disaster movie Contagion, in which, along with scenes of mass panic, we get to watch Gwyneth Paltrow’s patient zero get the top of her head sawn off in the name of science.

Continue reading... March 17, 2018 at 04:29PM