British media pundits have been lamenting for the last few years the ER Syndrome: American TV regularly produces high-class shows -- ER, Boomtown, and The West Wing. British TV, by contrast, seems ever more preoccupied with game shows, reality TV, and soap operas. Ergo: quality British TV drama is dead.

Their theory ignores the fact that there are many more TV channels in the US (the cable revolution hasn't really taken hold in the UK) so there are many more good shows for UK TV buyers to cherry-pick from. Conversely, there is also far more dross; game shows, reality TV, and soaps are as much a staple of US TV as in the UK. But British viewers and critics don't see the trash, they only see the many fine shows turned out by channels such as HBO.

On 13th May, the BBC showed The Day Britain Stopped, and in the process showed that the death of British drama has been greatly exaggerated. This is a fine piece of social extrapolation in the tradition of 1940s Astounding Science Fiction. The title of the classic Robert A. Heinlein novel of 1940 (from the collection Revolt in 2100) perfectly sums up the premise: "If This Goes On," what will happen?

A documentary tracks, via eye-witness reports and news headline footage, one day on Britain's road, rail, and air networks, on December 19th 2003. The narrative gains both authority and spaciousness by narrating the events retrospectively, a further year onward, rather than using the claustrophobic immediacy of the real-time reporting of (for example) Gulf War Two.

A 24-hour train and London Underground strike is called for the Friday before Christmas 2003. Normally, on the day of a strike, many commuters simply take the day off. But the week in question is traditionally the busiest of the year, as families visit London to do their Christmas shopping, and retailers pressure hauliers to deliver every retail unit possible for the Christmas run up.

Britain's roads are the busiest in Europe, and are so congested that in places the traffic capacity is reached, or even exceeded. Any system running at over 80% capacity, whether highways, production, or IT, is vulnerable to catastrophic failure.

So, a twin crash on the London orbital motorway, the M25, leaves the motorway closed in both directions. The police divert traffic onto relief roads -- then find that contractors have scheduled roadworks without telling the local council. In an attempt to divert traffic onto another alternate route, two neighbouring counties' police funnel opposite streams of traffic down a small country road. The chaos spreads outwards, like ripples from a stone landing in water.

Hour by hour throughout the day, events unfold with the precision and authority of a forensic examination. Minute by minute, the tension ratchets, as another eye-witness is interviewed, their testimony quietly, calmly delivered; only an occasional quivering lip betrays the emotions kept under tight check. The film makes us feel that if any one of ten or twenty small circumstances could have been avoided, the disaster would never have happened: a common feeling when watching disaster documentaries, that the chain of circumstances is so remote that it should never happen -- but also that it has.

The Day Britain Stopped has four great strengths.

The first is an almost pathological attention to detail. Each incident is so carefully crafted, so seamlessly integrated into the larger narrative, that the feeling of actual events being reported never wavers. An example of the meticulous research that was carried out in the making of this programme can be found at the BBC News site, under the headline Official plan for catastrophic gridlock.

The second is that the BBC managed to involve so many of their newscasters, presenters and personalities -- as well as so many from competing channels -- in fake newscasts and TV programmes.

Third, the writing is sharp; by means of news cameras, the closed-circuit TV cameras so prevalent nowadays, and even through a 12-year-old with a camcorder, on holiday with his family, we see ample "live footage." The characterization is acute: a family holiday; a housewife taking her soccer-mad daughter to the international match; the wife driving her pilot husband to the airport; the over-eager motorcycle cop shouting at people to stay in their cars, even as an old man is found dying of hypothermia in his vehicle.

Finally, the actors are superb. Apart from real-life reporters and personalities, all the parts are played by jobbing actors. Two especially stand out: in one particularly heart-rending scene, we see the moment of epiphany for a previously hard-faced witness. We watch via ccTV as the woman realizes the enormity of what she has done. There is no music. No sound. As the disaster unfolds, she stands aghast, her hands to her mouth, swaying backwards and forwards. The second is the housewife who recalls leaving too late for her husband's flight. Irate, he gets out of the car, slamming the door. She looks at the camera, and says, with the perfect amount of restrained wobble in her voice, "I never saw him alive again."

I've broken the golden rule about not giving the plot away. But it really doesn't matter. The whole point of this programme is that we know what's going to happen. We don't know when, or to how many, but that's what makes it stand out -- the long, slow descent to chaos.

There is a tendency amongst the literati, who measure SF by Terry Pratchett and Star Wars, to claim this as a fake documentary. In fact, although there are no spaceships, no ray guns, it's still good old Science Fiction, projecting the immediate future through the lens of social science and civil engineering.

After the programme, I wrote to both the Commercial and Scheduling departments of the BBC to find out whether there were any plans to export it, or to release on video. On both counts I was disappointed. Those of you who wish to watch it will need broadband to access the streaming video, which is a poor substitute.

Alternatively, contact PBS and your local station about picking up the programme, or encourage the BBC to release it commercially. This fine piece of work deserves better than to sit gathering dust on the archive shelves.

Colin Harvey's previous credits include several appearances in Aphelion webzine and Peridot Books. He is a regular columnist for This Way Up webzine. You can email him at feedback2ch@yahoo.co.uk. His previous contribution to Strange Horizons is available in our archive.