Kevin Sim’s film about the tsunami that whiplashed across Asia almost a year ago, Tsunami: Seven Hours on Boxing Day (BBC One), was like a Discovery Channel documentary made by Harold Pinter: a calmness stained with a rumbling sense of foreboding and impending doom.

All those dazzling colours; all that glorious scenery; it was like flicking through the pages of an issue of National Geographic — only, if you adjusted your eyes to the light, and squinted harder at the images that swelled as Sim’s camera drew nearer to its prey, you realised that what looked like a small wave was a trick of perspective, that it was actually as tall as a house; and that what looked like swirls of twigs on the beach were the wrecks of homes and hotels.

Faced with an ocean of images, and a sea of grief, Sim confected a lyrical film about a disaster that killed an estimated 227,754 people by shrinking this tragedy to a more human scale; by recounting the day through the eyes of a handful of those who survived it.

“I thought doomsday had arrived,” says young Rahmet in Banda Aceh, the only one of his mother’s children to survive the flood. Palaniappan, a Sri Lankan fisherman with a face that looks as if it has not smiled since last December — never found cause to — recalls how “beneath the catamarans we found two women. One was my wife . . . In the same place I found my daughter, too. I took their bodies to the police station and cremated them together. Then I went to lie on the beach, telling myself that if a tsunami were to hit, I too would die”.

A man in southern Sri Lanka who has never found his son after the tsunami blames himself. As a Buddhist, he puts it down to karma. He must have done something wrong in his past. Losing his son was the price he had to pay. The church and the mosque, they, too, have explanations.

The native Onge of the Andaman Islands also have an explanation: “We remembered what our ancestors had taught us, that land and sea always fight over boundaries . . . The earth rests on a gigantic tree . . . When spirits shake the tree we feel it as earthquakes. On the day of the tsunami, the spirits tilted the tree, so the water went away from the edge of the land . . . And bad spirits would push the sea back into the forest. Everyone had to run away from the water . . . Spirits would push forward to create a place where land and sea could live together. We waited until the land and sea could figure it out, where they wanted to draw the new boundary.”

Before you snigger, all the Onge survived the tsunami. Who’s to say that isn’t exactly how it happened? Has anyone else a theory for such random havoc that makes any more sense?

With memories of the tsunami shivering audiences on another channel, it maybe wasn’t the choicest moment to hear Cherie Blair and some of her predecessors, in Married to the Prime Minister (Channel 4), grumbling about how conditions in No 10’s private quarters were less than ideal, and how little the prime minister’s spouse gets by way of assistance, secretarial or domestic. “We don’t have any help,” Cherie says, taking her leave early from a 10 Downing Street charity reception, “so if the Prime Minister’s going to be fed, it’s up to me to make sure that he’s fed.”

The serendipity of television scheduling is hardly Cherie’s fault; though, of course, many think that much else is. “She has,” said Anthony Howard, who perhaps knows as much about such matters as anyone, “absolutely mishandled herself as Prime Minister’s wife.” The journalist and one-time Tory spin doctor Amanda Platell chipped in: “She has flogged that family from the moment she sniffed No 10. She uses her position as the Prime Minister’s wife to make money.”

It’s true that shopgirls may have changed their opinion of her recently, and that many find her money obsessed. But she came across as rather engaging. She chatted to predecessors — Clarissa Eden, Mary Wilson, Norma Major — but it was left to others to speak for the late Denis Thatcher. Lord Bell recalled Denis’s invaluable habit of knowing how to calm his wife, when she was getting overheated while discussing an issue with colleagues. Denis would purr, “Steady pet, steady pet: friend”. Or, if she was getting overtired, “Late now, late now: bed”.

Denis Thatcher probably referred to No 10’s private living quarters as a kennel.

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