A mockumentary first aired by BBC2 in 2003, focusing on the possible breakdown of Britain's transport system, and how tragedy can ensue in a long chain of events from the fallout of a single incident.
The story starts from early December, when a strike is called by the railway unions due to an accident at Waverley Station in Edinburgh. The rest of the film focuses on how the subsequent events manifest on a particular day (19 December). The rail strike forces more cargo and people onto the roads than usual, with the Christmas rush not helping matters. Then an accident takes place on the M25 motorway outside of London, with traffic rapidly backing up. Due to other mismanagements within the traffic and police authorities, what was supposed to be a moderate annoyance for motorists results in the dominoes starting to tip, extending the traffic jam to the whole of London and eventually grinding the whole of Britain to a halt.
The events unfold in chronological order as seen from various people involved, including a monitoring officer for one of the motorways, several people stranded in the traffic jams, and a politician from the transport ministry. Additional drama is supplied by mock news reports describing the unfolding events (e.g., Sky News, Channel 4 News, France's TF1), along with real-life footage (from a train crash site, a speech by then-Prime Minister Tony Blair, and various archive films of British traffic congestion) and cameo appearances by various well-known British personalities.
Tropes used for this work:
- 20 Minutes into the Future: First aired on 13 May 2003, the story is set in December of that year, placed 18 months after the 2002 Potters Bar accident.
- Artistic License – Sports: One of the reasons why the traffic gets so bad is an international friendly between England and Turkey at Old Trafford. However, international friendlies do not take place during the Christmas period (when even Premier League sides are known to play up to four times in ten days), and the two sides would not play a friendly so soon after facing each other in the qualifiers for Euro 2004. Also, at that time international fixtures weren't played on Friday nights outside of major tournaments (which, the 2022 World Cup aside, are never played in December).
- Bittersweet Ending: On the bitter side, the failures of Britain's transport network are revealed; 20 December sees the aftermath of the plane collision over London and the nation needing to clear hundreds of thousands of abandoned cars off the motorways, which will undoubtedly take weeks. Many people also tragically died thanks to the nationwide gridlock and the crash, including children. However, the death toll still remains remarkably low given the scale of the disaster, and the overworked air traffic controllers are cleared of manslaughter charges.
- Death from Above: Following the mid-air collision, pieces of the destroyed aircraft and burning aviation fuel rain down across the neighbouring district of Hounslow, setting great swathes of the area ablaze.
- Disaster Dominoes: The whole premise of the show demonstrates how a failing infrastructure, along with poor political leadership in planning/maintaining said infrastructure can cause the following scenario: A seemingly usual traffic jam can severely disrupt the operations of numerous people that keeps a nation going, and results in an overworked air traffic controller triggering a midair crash by human error.
- Finagle's Law: Whatever can happen to make the situation worse will happen. This is arguably the point, in order to demonstrate that what may seem like a minor issue that isn't worth addressing can, under the right circumstances, snowball into complete disaster.
- Hope Spot: One poor woman, the wife of a pilot for British Airways, spends hours trying to contact the authorities to learn whether her husband was on the plane that crashed, and learns that his flight was a completely different one... only to receive a call moments afterwards informing her that he had transferred onto the one that crashed after all.
- Mockumentary: The whole premise of the show.
- Mundanger: The whole point shows how failing infrastructure, poor politics, and poor planning can severely cripple a nation.
- My God, What Have I Done?: The overworked air traffic controller feels this way when she accidentally guides two planes onto the same runway and they collide in mid-air.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Following a train accident in Edinburgh, the trade unions RMT and ASLEF announce their intentions to hold a strike that puts the railways out of action over safety concerns. However, as well meaning as this action might have been, it results in setting a chain of events in motion that directly leads to the deaths of 87 people and the injury of many others. Subverted a bit, as one interviewee points out that the strike only added 5% more drivers on the road; everything else was a knock-on effect of a system already running at capacity.
- Oh, Crap!: After two planes collide over Heathrow, air traffic control has all flights diverted away from the airport. The junior transport minister, who'd been in Edinburgh all day, notices his secretary has this reaction and worries they don't have enough fuel to make it to the next airport over. It's the first time the minister realizes just how serious the situation is.
- Outliving One's Offspring: Several of the interviewees lost children in the disaster.
- Poor Communication Kills: Since many utilities are privatized, the companies in charge of them usually don't communicate when work is being done on things such as water mains. This becomes a serious problem when the police try to keep traffic flowing on the M25, only to come across road work they had no idea about. They try to divert the traffic to an alternate route to Kent, only to run into traffic coming out of Kent that also had to be diverted, which they chose to do to the M25.
- Post-Apocalyptic Traffic Jam: While it's not the apocalypse, the roads leading into London end up looking like this by 20 December, with almost a million abandoned cars clogging the M25.
- Recycled Soundtrack: The film's soundtrack includes excerpts from the scores to The Shawshank Redemption, Heat, Requiem for a Dream, 28 Days Later, and The Sum of All Fears.
- Ripped from the Headlines: The catalyst for the rail strike was a train wreck caused by sloppy maintenance and cost-cutting by the new private consortium that had taken over after rail privatisation, much like the one at Hatfield
a few years earlier. The 2002 Potters Bar accident, also the result of poor maintenance, is also mentioned as being one of the events that led up to RMT and ASLEF initiating the strikes that set everything in motion. - The Scapegoat: The overworked air traffic controller who was monitoring the planes that eventually crashed seems to be being set up to take the fall. Subverted, however, when an air-crash investigator notes the resemblance between this case and an earlier incident which allows the defence to clearly demonstrate unaddressed systemic failures and faults.
- Sensor Suspense: The plane crash is first shown on a radar screen.
- Shoot the Shaggy Dog: The Galt family (barring the father), being stranded on the M25 motorway on their way to Heathrow Airport, decides at the last moment to walk the last one kilometre to Heathrow Airport. Those who chose to leave reach the airport an hour after the scheduled flight departure, only to find that the plane was delayed as well, so they ultimately make their flight. Cue Airplane crashes, everybody dies.
- Sleazy Politician: The Transport Minister has shades of this at first, hoping blame will fall on the unions for the chaos of 19 December and that people will turn to his party as a result. The collision at Heathrow gets him to rethink that perspective and even accepts his part of the blame for the whole thing.
- Title Drop: A newscaster mentions that the public has started referring to the day's events as "the day Britain stopped."
- Twisted Christmas: By the morning of 20 December, we have a disaster consisting of:
- A daughter who died en route to hospital (from an accident on the M25), due to the ambulance being stuck in traffic.
- 87 deaths from a two-plane collision over London, and
- Numerous motorists who ended up being stranded overnight, with 8 people dying from hypothermia.
- And the above is just the events that happened on the particular day in Britain. It's probably not unreasonable to think that the disruptions lasted beyond Christmas and even beyond New Years Day.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Many motorists, after making it out of traffic they'd been stuck in for hours, speed away as fast as they can, especially those who have deadlines they need to meet, but many of them end up crashing and clogging up free-flowing arteries. One particular example is a tanker driver who speeds up to meet his client, only for his truck to jackknife and crash, spilling chemicals everywhere and forcing the M25 to be closed.
