When we moved house, we were offered a new Sky Plus box. The upside to this was that our old box was a bit iffy and normally to replace a box it costs muchos £££.  The downside was that all the shows which we had recorded but had not yet watched were lost. Add to that the chaos that followed our house move / baby arrival and we have missed a lot of TV.  Now that we seem to be getting at least a couple of hours in the evening while Evelina has her last nap of the day or after she has gone down for the night, we have started getting our Sky Planner filled up again.  Tonight, in addition to a lot of old QI on Dave, we watched the last in the series of Stormchasers on Discovery HD.

Stormchasers is basically a documentary show about several teams of storm chasers who hare around the flat states of the US looking for tornadoes.  This is a show about the weather but with some added Dramatic Music and creative job titles (did you know that there is such a thing as an Extreme Meteorologist?), they have made weather sexy. Well, kind of.  Even with my high threshold of geekery, I found myself cringing slightly at the dorkiness of the guys on this show.  However, I do like despite the very real danger and urgency that they all still have impeccable manners. There is A LOT of talking up of the drama: use of words like hardcore and incessant flapping on the part of one team member in particular, Reed, along with the previously mentioned Dramatic Music, all make for a bit of headache of excitement.  I also  found it quite off-putting that Reed looks like a less good-looking Michael Weatherly.

That said, there is no denying that the footage they do manage to get of these fearsome twisters is remarkable.  Sure, you have to put up with three or four teasers before they show you money shots but generally it is worth it.

The last in the series saved the biggest twister for last and it was quite compelling and exciting with the teams all converging on a massive tornado in Minnesota back in June 2010.  After some terrifying footage, the show ended on a sober note when they realised that the twister had ripped through the town of Wadena, with deadly consequences and causing a massive amount of damage.  One of the teams was in the town itself when the tornado hit.