Television - Andrew Billen on a timely drama of racist assault and germ warfare

Into these dark days, Channel 4 decided a little rain must fall - well, anthrax, actually. As if we needed to be awakened to our vulnerability to terrorism, Gas Attack (8 October) visited chemical warfare upon a community of Kurdish asylum-seekers in Glasgow. But this film drama was not made yesterday; it was shot last year and had been in the planning for a year before that. One is obliged, therefore, not to curse its opportunism, but to praise its prophetic powers. This summer, there has been racial violence; its victims have included asylum-seekers in Glasgow; since 11 September, great clouds of anthrax have blown into our imaginations. As I watched the preview tape, the US health secretary, Tommy Thompson, was briefing the press at the White House about a case of anthrax poisoning in Florida. He had "no reason" to believe it was the result of bioterrorism.

Gas Attack brought together the spectres of racial violence and chemical warfare. It was the BBC's War Game (banned in 1965) or Threads (shown in 1984) updated for our times, an apocalyptic fantasy done up to look like a documentary. The characters, played by unfamiliar actors - and, in some cases, not by actors at all - were introduced with captions ("Rabeena Dhondy, Asylum Support Unit worker"), a device that at least saved the writer's time. In some instances, authenticity was achieved by close-to-life casting: the grim, bearded (and uncaptioned) epidemiologist reluctant to consider the possibility of anthrax when the euphemisms of flu or TB were available actually was a Glaswegian epidemiologist. Hand-held camera-work was augmented by news footage, CCTV clips and still more primitive "amateur" video shots taken by the terrorist himself. All in all, the fictional gas attack looked a lot more "real" than the high-production-value destruction of the World Trade Center.

Presumably inspired by the BSE cover-up, Rowan Joffe, the writer, concentrated on the victims and the bureaucratic response to the crisis, rather than on the terrorist. His inner plot concerned the growing suspicions of Rabeena (played by Robina Qureshi) and the unwillingness of her boss, Bill Grigson (Laurie Ventry), to accept what she was saying. She was Asian, young, female and idealistic. He was white, middle-aged, male and cynical, and said things like: "You earn your living from asylum-seekers and all the Oxfam dish towels in the world will not change that." QED. But in actual fact, this conventional conspiracy thriller device - (usually) baddy boss gives hero 48 hours to prove case - was less interesting than hearing the environmental health officers and hospital administrators droning on about how to contain the epidemic within current budgets. Under Kenny Glenaan's direction, you could smell the fear amid the tea and biscuits. Joffe's hunch was clearly that the professionals, ground down by the parsimony of state welfare, are completely unprepared to cope with a terrorist outrage.

I think he was being sincere, not sensationalist. It is a terrible thing to say, but if he had really wanted to scare the maximum number of pants off the maximum number of viewers, he would have had anthrax kill Sunny Delight families, not Kurds. By following two refugees, however - Sherko (Sherko Zen-Aloush) and his daughter Resa (Benae Hassan) - he allowed us to be moved not only by the illness that befell them, but by what brought them to Glasgow in the first place. As Sherko said: "This is everything I came here to escape . . . Saddam Hussein gassed the city while we were away. Five thousand Kurds were killed in three minutes."

The film was good social medicine. Was it good drama? In the end, its bleakness, the absence of beauty and humour amid the doomy, electronic feedback music all worked against its humanity, I thought. A terrorist deadline approached, but there was little tension. The news flash at the end reporting that the suspect, whose lair had been raided, was "still at large and considered to be highly dangerous" drummed into us the message that annihilation was only a home-brewing kit and a modified fire extinguisher away, but it also left the film with a gaping rear end. You wanted a second part in which the characters developed and the police investigators won. But Joffe, whose father, Roland, made cheery films such as The Killing Fields, was not interested in giving us what we wanted: namely, hope.

So let me extract some optimism out of Gas Attack. First, terrible though urban terrorism is, it does not compare with the nuclear annihilation predicted by The War Game. Second, the ubiquity of CCTV cameras, which gave the film a Big Brotherish-feel, makes the world a safer place: without miles of security videotape, the bomb factory in the film would never have been found. Third, the profilers at the MoD concluded that anthrax was not a likely terrorist weapon. "It's highly unlikely that any terrorist organisation would use weapons of mass destruction," said the head copper, explaining that he was looking for a lone nutter. "Terrorism generally consists of small strikes and maximum publicity. No serious political organisation, especially state-sponsored, would want a massive death toll on their hands."

Take comfort, then: 11 September was a one-off.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard

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