Television - Andrew Billen on a scarily plausible "documentary" that foresees transport chaos

You have to hand it to the BBC: it is not allowing politics a quiet death. At 9am on Saturday morning, a spectacularly crumpled and hunched Rod Liddle, accompanied by Kate Silverton (who in gender-typical contrast looked not only as if she had come fresh from a beauty salon but as if she usually worked in one), strolled on to an all-white set and attempted to interest a live audience in Zimbabwe.

I know of literally no one who would want to watch this programme at this hour, but perhaps there are some bleary-eyed folk coming home from raves who will find themselves fascinated as they chew on their bacon sandwiches. Even the bleariest, though, will notice that BBC2's Weekend does not look right. But then, how was serious political debate presented as if it were a form of stand-up - all this from a set presumably rejected by Boys and Girls - ever going to look right? It looked different. Perhaps the thinking is that "different" is enough for now.

The Day Britain Stopped (9pm, BBC2, 13 May) was different, too, but, in contrast to Weekend, highly effective. But whether it was effective as a way of discussing the nation's transport problems, as agitprop, or simply dramatically, I'm really not sure.

Simon Finch and Gabriel Range's gripping film was a drama-documentary that did not use the techniques of drama to tell a true story, but the techniques of documentary to relate something that has not happened, or not happened yet. Using faked interviews with key players, recreated news footage, as well as bogus CCTV and home video film, it cast 20/20 hindsight on Britain's worst ever day of transport crisis: 19 December 2003.

This dystopian day begins with Aslef, the railway union, staging a one-day strike in protest at safety standards, following a rail tragedy at Edinburgh Waverley. This forces even more cars on to roads which are already crowded because of an international match at Old Trafford and because people are heading for the airports on this, the last Friday before Christmas. At lunchtime a lorry crashes on the M25. Traffic is diverted but half an hour later a chemical tanker, racing to make up time, jackknifes and closes another chunk of the M25. By what should be rush hour, the M25 is a noose suffocating London's traffic. By 10pm, drivers have been trapped in their cars for hours, five have died from hypothermia, and the police belatedly lead the survivors out to temporary accommodation in fields around the motorway.

Sounds bad, but the film keeps watching the skies. Among the millions who can't get to where they need to be are the air traffic controllers at West Drayton, in Middlesex. The centre is so short-staffed that those who have made it play their nightmarish games of three-dimensional chess with twice as many pieces on each of their boards. Exhausted and working beyond the end of her shift, one of them makes a mistake queuing an aircraft in to land. As the plane aborts its descent, it crashes into another taking off for Bilbao. The explosion over Hounslow kills all on board and 23 on the ground.

It was harrowing to watch but, like all disaster movies, exciting. It looked scarily real. The rolling news channels seemed absolutely authentic. The acting was fabulously naturalistic and the dialogue was excellent, too, full of slightly unexpected cliches and jargon such as "the separation was degraded" and "if you walk away from an accident you've got a result". By the end I wondered why, if this is what current affairs produces when it hires from Equity, the rest of TV drama is so hammy and artificial.

Yet the realism made one even more curious about the reality. Does Operation Gridlock, the emergency plan to get drivers to abandon their vehicles in favour of Cup-a-Soup on the verge, exist? And what about Daniel Boyd, the aviation safety Cassandra who said he had prepared a critical report on landing procedures for the National Air Traffic Services Ltd (Nats)? Well, Surrey's emergency services do have an Operation Gridlock up their sleeve, and although Boyd was a made-up character, independent advisers to Nats have apparently identified shortcomings in the "missed approaches" procedures at Heathrow. I know this only because I bothered to look at related articles on the BBC's website.

The moral of the programme was delivered through a transport minister who resigned in despair. He said that because transport needed so much extra funding and change would take so long, grasping the nettle was politically anathema: "We had it coming because unlike other European countries we don't put reasonable amounts of public funds into transport." Blame not, then, Aslef or chaos theory, but the politicians.

If the BBC's increasingly hectic efforts to interest us in politics are an attempt to ingratiate itself with the government in the run-up to charter renewal, The Day Britain Stopped was a funny way to go about it. Only Peter Watkins's 1965 drama-doc The War Game, about a nuclear attack on ill-prepared Britain, was better designed to spread alarm and despondency, and leave politicians looking like gutless schmucks. And in the case of The War Game, the normally fearless director general Sir Hugh Greene took the precaution of banning it from being shown.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

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