Newsnight Review discussed the BBC2 drama-documentary The Day Britain Stopped.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

IAN RANKIN:
It's very gripping. The way it works in brilliantly the chaos theory, the idea of a butterfly flapping its wings and half way across the world there's a storm. Because what happens is a series of small incidences which in themselves wouldn't mean anything lead to this gradual because you have a crash you get gridlock, because you get gridlock, you get no air traffic controllers, because you get no air traffic controllers you get a mid-air collision. That works brilliantly. An hour and a half film about gridlock not terribly interesting, so it has to lead up to the plane crash, where it gets gripping.

MARK LAWSON:
It took me in totally. I was thinking at the beginning this traffic jam was quite bad, what's all the fuss about but it has terrible consequences. Natasha, they use this documentary form to get impact and authority. Do they achieve that?

NATASHA WALTER:
I thought technically it was an amazing feat. We haven't mentioned the way it weaves in real people, John Humphrys and John Snow, people with cameos, a wonderful mock bit of Tony Blair that seems almost real. I think that if you tuned in by accident, you really would think that something had happened. It is that real. But although it's impressive technically, I don't know if I tuned in by accident I would have stuck with it. I found it incredibly uncomfortable to watch, maybe that is a tribute to it. You know right from the beginning you are waiting for this disaster to happen. You feel you are in a uncomfortable experience. Although I think the makers felt they were making a rationale political point, I felt it really was a programme that just fed our irrational fears of big disaster, that something happening that is nasty in the sky. Although I was impressed I didn't really like it.

TOM PAULIN:
I'm so dozy, I thought it was about something that happened. Then I realised no, I realised the Transport Minister was in the future. Sort of Will Hutton figure, very brilliantly played. I thought it was fantastic. It really was terrific active television with this tremendous journalistic sense of what it's like living now in chaos theory, that it's something we are all interested in. We all know everything is going too fast, it's dysfunctional infrastructure that is there. Very, very moving. Several moments had me lacerated. And all shot in the most impressively ugly CCTV fashion.

IAN RANKIN:
To me it was a throwback to those great '60s mock-documentaries that Peter Yates would make, The War Game and stuff. So uncomfortable that the authorities wouldn't let us see them.

NATASHA WALTER:
You wish then they had made the bigger political point. It seemed to be making the political point, just what the politician made, we need more money into the transport infrastructure.

TOM PAULIN:
No it was also about privatisation, wasn't it?

NATASHA WALKER:
I wanted them to make it more savage, why are we the society that needs to move.

MARK LAWSON:
Isn't the argument against it, where there have been previous ones about a smallpox epidemic and nuclear war, those are genuine single risks. This assumes an incredible domino effect which is probably unlikely.

TOM PAULIN:
If you read chaos theory, as Ian pointed out, it is about that and how you find patterns within chaos. Surely this was concentrating on overworked, overstressed public service workers of whom there weren't enough, all doing their jobs as well as they could, but saying that privatisation has gone so far, it's begotten inefficiency and anxiety.

NATASHA WALKER:
I didn't feel that coming out as strongly.

IAN RANKIN:
There was a bigger theme behind it you had to scratch to see, this a country that is almost at breaking point. Everything's almost at breaking point. The people in the civilisation...

TOM PAULIN:
Unlike Europe, where transport seems to work efficiently.

NATASHA WALKER:
We are in a safe society in terms of transport still. You know, air travel is still a very safe way to travel. In that way I felt they were pushing into our irrational fears.