I’ll be honest with you. My hopes weren’t high for new six-part drama After the Flood. ITV drama is a hit-and-miss affair – increasingly the former, but not yet often enough that you can approach an evening’s viewing with unassailable confidence in the investment you are about to make – and the publicity made this one sound like a standard police procedural, with added water.
My hopes do not noticeably rise in the opening scenes, which does indeed contain a lot of added water as a river bursts its banks and floods the nearby town. The local police leap into action. “Let’s do all we can to help,” says their sergeant (Nicholas Gleaves), which makes you fear for the script and the townspeople’s chances of survival. Soon PCs Joanna Marshall (Sophie Rundle) and Deepa Das (Tripti Tripuraneni) find themselves losing the slightly bathetic struggle to save an infant from being carried away by the waters (you shouldn’t try these things without a Hollywood budget; the waters are never quite dramatic enough, the baby always too rubbery). They are metaphorically saved, and the baby, literally, when a passing stranger dives in and rescues it before being carried away himself. As the days wear on, he is presumed by Jo to have drowned.
