AS an aficionado of the disaster movie, I am confident of my abilities to cope in the eventuality of an alien invasion, an inferno in a high-rise building, a tsunami striking our shores, the Condor ferry capsizing in mid-channel or a meteor impact.

This doomsday form of entertainment has been with us since the early days of the silver screen and long before Charlton Heston, Bruce Willis and Will Smith came on the scene to play the role of all-saving heroes.

One of the earliest examples of the genre was an English production made in 1901. Titled ‘Fire!’, this silent movie portrayed a burning house and the firemen who quenched the flames and rescued the inhabitants from certain death.

Eighty-five years before Leonardo di Caprio met Kate Winslet on the prow of the Titanic to the sound of Celine Dion trilling out the compulsory ballad, there were two films, ‘Night and Ice’ (1912) and ‘Atlantis’ (1913), which followed the liner’s doomed maiden voyage to provide cinema-goers with an insight into the tragedy. The disaster movie has evolved from there, reaching its zenith in the 1970s when cinemagoers couldn’t get enough of fires, earthquakes and tragedies on the high seas or in the skies.

Long before the advance of the technological wizardry that led to a revival of the genre in the 1990s, film directors were letting their imaginations run wild. The first cinematic tsunami to devastate New York did so in 1933, the same year as King Kong ran amok on Broadway before meeting its end at the top of the Empire State Building.

The plots of disaster movies are predictable. There is an impending disaster – a shipwreck, plane crash, volcanic eruption, earthquake, tsunami, alien invasion, swarm of killer bees, asteroid collisions, etc – and a cast of stars. The central plot is underpinned by a complex counterpoint of sub-plotlines. These focus on the attempts of the main characters to avert the disaster.

Typical examples of this can be found in the final reels of the 1974 blockbusters ‘Earthquake’ (husband leaves wife, saves his mistress and her son, only to die with wife in flooded sewer system of Los Angeles) and ‘The Towering Inferno’ (exhausted fire chief lectures devastated architect on fire safety in high-rise buildings).

My all-time favourite is ‘Independence Day’ (1996), in which a motley crew of old aviators, a daredevil fighter pilot and a computer geek, all led by the US President, use good old Morse code, a missile or two and an atomic bomb to save the world from destruction at the tendrils of some very nasty aliens.

Why on earth do we find it entertaining to see mankind under threat and our existence on the line? It’s simple: we get a thrill from being scared. The disaster movie genre evolved in the final decade of the 20th century and the early 21st century into storylines that have taken inspiration from recent disasters such as volcanic eruptions (‘Dante’s Peak’) and tornados (‘Twister’) or from repeated scientific warnings of climate change (‘The Day After Tomorrow’), meteor strikes (‘Deep Impact’) and global pandemics (‘28 Days Later’).

Last week scientists and Prince Charles competed for the headlines as the news media, bored with the credit crunch and exposing swindlers to more public derision, turned their attention back to global warming and rising sea levels.

The prospect of rising sea levels is something that islands, low-lying countries and coastal regions should be concerned about. As the Arctic and Antarctic ice shelves continue to crumble, we can no longer ignore the prospect that in the not-so-distant future this small Island will get smaller. Large areas of Jersey’s south and east coasts will be lost, for no amount of sea defences will cope with a predicted sea level rise of anything up to a metre and a half. Even those past masters at keeping the sea at bay, the Dutch, are resigned to one day losing their centuries-old battle to prevent the Netherlands being deluged by the North Sea.

WHILE the world’s experts in climate change were entreating politicians worldwide to wake up and face the prospect of living out a real disaster movie scenario, what were our own beloved States Members doing? If not furiously typing their latest blog entries without thinking of the hurt their ramblings might cause, or pinging off vitriolic and insulting e-mails to each other, they were hurling foul-mouthed insults across the floor of the House.
Impassioned debate is part and parcel of politics, and, when articulated eruditely and with mastery of the language, it becomes part of folklore. When conducted with humour, as in Australia’s parliamentary system, it is cutting-edge political comedy at its very best.

Unfortunately, Charlie Chuckle’s Laughter Factory in blighted by a coterie of inmates whose agendas are more focused on character assassination and personal squabbles than addressing the serious issues of the day. There is a time and a place for settling their differences, and the place is not the floor of the House. As elected Members of the States, they are paid to represent us. They should be putting their Blackberrys to far better use than exchanging animosities.

Jersey’s future is threatened by climate change and rising sea levels, yet the biggest disaster our Island faces is the present political system, in particular those among its ranks who should be putting their wages – the people’s money – to better use.