Frances Grant: Tsunami's second wave

As the Indian Ocean tsunami recedes from the news headlines, in comes the inevitable second wave — the first documentaries trying to put some perspective on the disaster that unfolded on Boxing Day.

TV One had first shot with a doco screened on Britain's Channel 4, The Wave that Shook the World. Its flagship current affairs programme Sunday will run a report on the aftermath this week, and Prime weighed in on Tuesday with Tsunami: The Day the Wave Struck, another British effort.

The two which have screened so far have differed in emphasis and style, but both have served to reinforce the incomprehensible magnitude of the natural catastrophe that killed more than 200,000 people and the difficulty of giving it some sense of scale — whether in the human toll or the destruction of property and shore.

The Wave that Shook the World took a broader, more scientific approach, looking at the cause of the tsunami, explaining why the waves had such tremendous force and tracking the event chronologically at it hit first the Indonesian province of Aceh, then the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Thailand, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and India.

It focused on the frustration and sadness of the scientists at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre in Hawaii, who could predict the disaster but had no way of alerting the countries in its path. One of the most poignant summaries came from one of these scientists, wracked with regret — "If only we'd done something in advance, we could have done something to prepare the region for that terrible tragedy".

Anyone who watched Prime's Tsunami: The Day the Wave Struck might have been left with the impression that only British tourists were affected. This was a mostly parochial collection of survivors' tales from the resort areas.

But despite its narrow scope, the programme ran the gamut of emotions, from the miracle of finding a child, lost and presumed dead, to the despair of losing a brother, the terrible disappointment of false leads on the internet and the dreadful finality of identifying "body 348".

There was considerable crossover between the two. Both used the by now familiar footage of the debris pouring through the streets of Banda Aceh, so tightly packed that it is impossible to see the water propelling it, and of the wave crashing into resorts, pouring into swimming pools and inundating ground-level restaurants and rooms at lightning speed.

The scarcity of footage from such places is no doubt testament to the destructive power of the wave, the element of surprise and the deceptive unremarkability of the waves — one of the most telling shots was of people standing in fascination on the beaches oblivious to the force behind the walls of water streaming towards them.

There was crossover, too, in the survivor tales. Both programmes featured a British tourist who was one of the few to escape the packed Sri Lankan coastal train swept away by the waves.

Neither had a lot new to offer, but that is to be expected from such fast turnaround programmes focused on describing the events of the day. As The Wave That Shook the World warned, "29 days after disaster, the world is still struggling to come to terms with it". Their real function was to keep the cause alive and donations pouring in.

It is obvious that there are many more stories still to come — the longer term effects, the rebuilding, the aid effort and the information gap about how the waves affected Myanmar.