I watched “The Day Britain Stopped” last night. A “documentary-style drama” set in the future describing the events of a particular day in December 2003, when Britain comes to a standstill, and death and destruction ensues. It all starts fairly innocuously – but then a sequence of what would, individually, be serious, but relatively minor, events combine to create something much worse. A train strike pushes more traffic onto the roads; a couple of accidents gridlock the M25 leading to the (unprecedented) closure of the motorway; air traffic controllers can’t get to work to replace the staff currently on their shifts. Then someone makes a mistake at NATS in West Drayton, and there’s a mid-air collision between a passenger plane taking off at Heathrow, and a cargo plane landing.

Despite the quality of the “acting” from the talking heads telling us their experiences during the day, it was actually quite a believable scenario. On the whole, I’m not a huge fan of this kind of disaster TV. It’s incredibly sensationalist – the sort of thing that you expect to see on Channel 5 after some real disaster somewhere else in the world with a tagline like “It Could Happen Here!”, or on one of those documentary channels you get on Sky.

This being the BBC, however, it was still lowest-common denominator tabloid TV, but it was very well done. To make the drama seem more like a documentary, it was interspersed with footage supposedly from the news reports of that day, each of which featured real news anchors (Jon Snow, Kirsty Wark, some people from Sky News, a plethora of regional BBC presenters) and looked pretty authentic. Even though I knew I was watching a drama, there was still something quite chilling about watching a newsflash where Channel 4’s Jon Snow tells you that he’s just getting reports of two planes colliding over Hounslow. [And much potential for my parents to switch on at the wrong moment, unaware that this was a work of fiction, and misunderstand, War Of The Worlds style.]

They kept saying it as well. Hounslow crash this. Hounslow crash that. [I mean, why does it have to be “The Hounslow Crash”, not “The Heathrow Crash”?] Here’s a picture of the severed BA tail fin on the ground with a BBC News 24 logo on screen and the words “HOUNSLOW PLANE CRASH” in big letters across the bottom.

Scary. But not quite as scary as the fact shown onscreen as the “documentary” ended, about a report published 10 years ago, the conclusions of which are not endorsed by NATS. The report “calculated there would be one collision following a missed approach at Heathrow, on average, every 20 years”. The scary part? That bit of the documentary is actually true.