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.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here