Zomboat!, ITV2
“This is going to be tough for you because you’ve not seen a single George A Romero film,” moaned paprika-haired gamer Kat (Leah Brotherhead) to sister Jo (Downton Abbey’s Cara Theobold) at the start of Zomboat!, which dropped a zombie apocalypse on Birmingham of all places and then set our heroines the task of escaping it. On a Sunday morning. On a canal boat called Dorothy.
They were headed towards London because Kat had a friend living on Eel Pie Island. She’d already been proved right about zombies not being able to handle stairs and was banking on water proving a similar impediment. It is, she reasoned, “a famously under-utilized anti-zombie measure”.
Along with the Romero gag and her observation that the shuffling monsters chasing the pair “move like Walking Dead zombies not 28 Days Later zombies” the comment suggested Adam Miller’s zombie apocalypse sit-com is going be more of an homage to Shaun Of The Dead than Dawn Of The Dead. Kat, with her encyclopaedic knowledge of all-things zombie and a skillset of kill moves honed on Call Of Duty, will see to that. By the time the sisters boarded the canal boat they’d also smashed in the window of a clothes shop and kitted themselves out in a variety of leather fetish gear. Expect some Matrix references before they reach Coventry.
Perhaps it was the Midlands accents but there was a touch of Caitlin Moran’s Raised By Wolves to the Jo/Kat relationship. If you know the show, picture Kat as Aretha and Jo as Germaine. But wait, there’s more. Enter Amar (Ryan McKen) and Sunny (Hamza Jeetooa), two dozy Londoners visiting England’s second city for a stag do and now stranded there. Somehow they found their way onto Dorothy after a close escape at the train station, though as episode one ended the sisters were unaware of their presence. The start of a beautiful friendship? Unlikely. We also saw Jo's ex, who ever so slightly miffed that the sisters had pinched his canal boat.
The six-parter looked cheap but then that’s very much in the spirit of the zombie movie, which is to filmic DIY what putting up a shelf is to the real thing. All you need is a dozen shambling extras and a street cleared temporarily of gawpers and if you’ve a half decent script you can let your characters do the rest. Miller’s script is more than half decent and with Plebs (another cheap looking show) now returned for a fifth series, ITV2’s comedy roster is looking a lot healthier than Birmingham’s plague-afflicted undead.
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