Is the love affair with flying sharks finally over?

Is the love affair with flying sharks finally over?

By Tamara Winicott-Preedy

It was 11am on a Wednesday morning. As per usual Sera and I were enjoying a well-deserved cocktail brunch. We had decided to try a new place called Condensative which is just down the road from our office in Shoreditch. Cosmo recently branded it the most humid bar in East London.

As neither one us enjoys an over-abundance of moisture, and since the bar staff ignored our requests to turn off the humidifiers, we chose to sit at a table outside where it was cooler. Even there a waitress would appear approximately every five minutes and drench us both with a hand-operated plant mister.

We were idly chatting about a Darlia gig we had attended the previous evening which we had both filmed on our iPads. After about five minutes my arms got tired from holding mine above my head and I talked Graham into taking-over for the remainder of the show.

Anyway we were joking and laughing when suddenly Sera got all serious. I know when Sera is serious because she pauses the conversation and looks me straight in the eye. I was hoping that she was going to tell me that she'd slept with Graham as I'm getting a bit tired of him. I don't want to be the one to do the dumping because he's a part of our social circle and it would make waves.

More's the pity, it turned out that Sera's problem was nothing to do with Graham:

“Tam do you realise that this time next year we wont be drinking margaritas out of jam jars?”

“I don't see why we wouldn't be doing that. Drinking margaritas is practically my entire job description,” I replied archly.

Sera reached across the table and grasped both of my hands by the fingers. She held onto them so tightly that it hurt a bit.

“But don't you see ,Tam? Jam jars are on their way out. Gladstones & Mabel says that in a few months we'll all be drinking mixed drinks out of reconditioned boilers from Victorian steam locomotives. And you know very well that I am terribly allergic to anything from the 1800s. I'll end up drinking on my own at Muciform, or I'll have to talk to Oliver and his horrible stockbroker friends.”

Sera's dilemma reminded me of something I had overheard one of my interns reading from a magazine to my four-year-old boy - Nathaniel - during story time.

It concerned a film called Sharknado which is about a tornado that sucks up a school of sharks and causes havoc.

The flyaway success of the movie led to budding shark actors from all over the United States travelling to New York to audition for the part of one of the flying sharks in the sequel, which I believe is called Sharknado 2. Apparently the queue for the auditions stretched for five blocks.

All across America now there are colleges where instructors run courses teaching sharks how to fly, but the success rate is low. The man who does all the casting for shark movies said: “The truth is most sharks can fly like most L.A. actors can do a convincing British accent,” by which I assume he meant “not many”.

Not all of the flying sharks wanted to appear in Sharknado. Some wanted roles in highbrow productions like the Doctor Who Christmas special from a few years ago which also had flying sharks in it.

The problem is that there weren't any highbrow films or TV shows being made that required shark actors. Plus people were beginning to get a bit bored with the novelty of Sharknados which are going the way of jam jars as drinking vessels.

Some of the shark actors couldn't afford the fare home to whatever part of the United States they had travelled from and so had turned to drugs and prostitution.

Anyway the upshot of all this is that Sera is back on cocaine and has to go into rehab, otherwise she'll have to go to prison. Since I am one of her known triggers we won't be seeing each other for a while .

Ciao!

Tam