On TV

Is This the Worst Weather Ever? (ITV1)

IN the last 20 years, 26 million Africans have died of Aids. Another 26 million are HIV positive, including one in five Zambians. Most expect to die before they are 38. These were the bare facts behind Dispatches: Living with Aids. But the reality was much more horrific.

Film-maker Sorious Samura, whose previous work includes Living with Refugees, a video diary of life in a refugee camp, spent a month working as an orderly in Lewanika Hospital in Mongu in eastern Zambia. The result must have been as close to hell as it is possible to find on earth.

There was a chronic shortage of food and drugs, and when drugs did become available, the doctors distributed them on a first-come first-served basis, in the knowledge that they could help just a fraction of their patients.

Sanitary conditions were abysmal. There was frequently no running water, and while one family washed the dead body of their loved one in the mortuary wash room, another family waited to get in. The mortuary freezer regularly broke down.

A 14-year-old boy, an orphan who lost both his parents to Aids, was brought in, but was so small and weak Samura mistook him for an eight-year-old. A blood transfusion transformed him into an alert teenager laughing with his 16-year-old sister, but only served as a reminder of how most patients are unable to take advantage of this treatment.

Samura did not flinch from looking at the causes of this epidemic: reluctance to change sexual behaviour, and a mistrust of condoms. An Aids awareness event in a nightclub fell on deaf ears, with clubbers more interested in getting drunk and having sex. A church pastor preached against using condoms, urging abstinence instead, leaving a horrified Samura saying: "This policy is nothing short of murder."

Most depressing of all was Joshua, a young man who reasoned that because he was already HIV positive there was no reason to use a condom. He preferred "flesh to flesh". How would he feel if someone who was HIV positive had sex with his sister? Joshua pondered for a moment before answering: "Nothing".

It was a culture where respect for life, both their own and other people's, had been stripped away, where there was only despair and grief, and if the hospital could have been in a war zone, the war was clearly being lost. It was hard to argue with Samura's conclusion that: "This place if f*cked."

Is This the Worst Weather Ever? was the first of a four part series presented by Craig Doyle looking at extreme weather conditions. Last night took in the destructive power of hurricanes, with floods, tornadoes and heatwaves lined up for later in the week.

It was really a chance to show some spectacular footage of hurricanes in action, and the devastation left behind, a kind of When Animals Attack for weather watchers. The inclusion of the 1987 Great Storm which hit the south of England, technically not a hurricane, almost made you feel sorry for Michael Fish, once again forced to defend his infamous remark that a hurricane wasn't on the way, and there were tantalisingly brief interviews with two storm chasers - who go to great lengths to put themselves in danger - who could surely merit a documentary of their own.