Hamza Jeetooa

Zomboat! Surprisingly clever, upbeat zombie apocalypse

Wacky six-part genre romp is replete with British humour and some of the most relatable crisis behaviour to grace end times.

TV review: Zomboat Series 1 Episode 4

When I reviewed the first episode of Zomboat I found myself slightly annoyed that it had been overhyped and was only an okay comedy horror show, and unfortunately three episodes on and nothing has really changed. It's still a likeable enough series but it continues to suffer from the same flaws that the first episode did, and has chucked in a couple more for good measure.

Zomboat! cast discuss escaping a zombie apocalypse

Actor Hamza Jeetooa has invented a new term in TV filming - the "reverse of shame". As he told the RTS Midlands audience at the premiere of new ITV2 comedy horror series Zomboat!, it happens when you're shooting on a narrow boat and make a mistake.

TV review: Zomboat!, ITV2

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.

Zomboat! (ITV2, and the screamer's hardly necessary: from the off it's palpable that all is being played for ironic laughs, and homages and tropes are in full flow) is a little slice of fun, on a fun channel. It's not half bad, actually, as soon as you can stop comparing it with Shaun of the Dead, whose footsteps it cheerfully and bloodily squelches through.

But it does so with a certain esprit, knockabout gamesters Nick Frost and Simon Pegg being here replaced by two young Brummie sisters of varying degrees of feist. There's the blond one (Cara Theobald), her Sunday morning rendered suddenly perilous by simple virtue of never having seen any of the films of George A Romero; and there's the geekier Leah Brotherhead, fan of the films and the shoot-em-ups, cautiously sizing up at every sinister crossroads the difference between killing zombies in video games (rolling-pin? Knife to the head?) and visceral real life.

Kat (Brotherhead) has the wizard wheeze that, to escape zombietown, they need only get on to the world's slowest narrowboat: the walking dead can't swim. (They can drunkenly limp, though: girls, I'd make it nippy through the many locks on the canal to London.) They're joined accidentally in the enterprise by two British Asian youngsters of immense promise: Hamza Jeetooa (Sunny) and Ryan McKen (Amar), though their characters are seemingly there early on just to give us a giggle about gym-bunnies and millennials. Some grand gags and knowing movie references: it's not big, it's not clever, and it really doesn't give a gleeful hoot.

TV review: Zomboat series 1 episode 1

Zomboat is a reasonably decent show, it's impressively acted and a series that does have a fair few funny lines, and though it didn't make me laugh out loud an enormous amount it caused me to smile a good few times.

How we made Zomboat!

"Every show has its challenges, but the challenges of Zomboat! were laid out in its title."