The Day Britain Stopped is a dramatic pseudo-documentary produced by Wall to Wall Media for the BBC. It depicts a fictional disaster on December 19, 2003, in which a train strike is the first in a chain of events that lead to a fatal meltdown of Britain's transport system. Directed by Gabriel Range, who wrote the script with producer Simon Finch,[1] the film first aired on Tuesday, May 13, 2003, on BBC Two.
On 19 December, an accident on the M25 motorway leads to closure of the motorway in both directions. Within minutes, the resulting traffic congestion blocks the M25 at its junction with the M23. Attempts at relieving the gridlock are hampered by a lack of coordination between police services overseeing different sections of the motorway. Traffic that managed to work its way through the diversion route past the original accident suffers a further setback when a chemical tanker lorry jackknifes on the M25 near Heathrow Airport, causing a pile-up and further tailbacks, resulting in a second closure on the M25 and heavy delays on all the major arterial roads leading to London. Traffic attempts to drive through Central London, without much success. The first fatality is a patient whose gridlocked ambulance runs out of necessary medicine.
Meanwhile, as British airspace runs over capacity to cope with the Christmas traffic, heavy traffic delays force air traffic controllers to work double and triple shifts. Jerry Newell, a pilot, is forced to walk to Heathrow in order to reach his flight to Toulouse. A friendly football match between England and Turkey at Old Trafford in Manchester is cancelled for low attendance, with thousands stranded on the M6 and M40, effectively rendering Manchester and Birmingham unreachable. The message is delivered by a stunned Gary Lineker on Match of the Day.
Julian Galt, his wife and two children are driving to Heathrow for a Christmas holiday in Bilbao. They are held up on the M25 after the tanker crash. Numerous people try to escape the motorway in their cars or on foot, but are turned back by Thames Valley Police. As night falls, hypothermia sets in among many of the stranded travellers. Julian's wife notices that Heathrow is less than a mile away, and convinces Julian to lead the family there; they sneak past immobilised cars and police officers on motorbikes to get off the motorway, then walk through farm fields in the darkness to reach a minor road and flag down a passing minibus. Julian tells his family that he will return to the car and catch the next flight to Bilbao in the morning. Subsequently the authorities implement the fictional top-secret Operation Gridlock, ordering everyone trapped on the M25 to leave their cars and performing triage in tent cities on nearby fields.
In Heathrow's tower, air-traffic controller Nicola Evans volunteered to work late when her replacement did not arrive. Overworked, she mistakenly sends an Aer Lingus jet to taxi onto a runway where a Czech Airlines cargo plane is about to land. Conflicting instructions are given by the other controllers. After agonising over her choices, Evans issues a go-around instruction to the Czech jet, which avoids the Aer Lingus plane but collides with the departing British Airways flight to Bilbao. All on board are killed; burning wreckage falls across much of Hounslow and the surrounding area, causing extensive damage and fires. Emergency services attempting to reach the scene have to resort to minor roads because of the widespread congestion. Heathrow's fire services are sent out to assist, but this requires the airport to close, with incoming flights being diverted elsewhere, and all flights out of all UK airports are grounded after UK airspace is shut down.
Several hours after pilot Jerry Newell left her car to walk to the airport, his wife Jane gets home to Shepperton and sees news of the air crash on the television. After repeated phone calls, she discovers that the flight involved in the disaster was to Bilbao. However, she then receives a phone call from British Airways, telling her that Jerry's flight to Toulouse was cancelled, and he had instead captained the flight to Bilbao and is dead. Julian's family are also all dead, having reached the airport in time to board the delayed flight to Bilbao.[2]
Nicola Evans and two other air traffic controllers are dismissed from their jobs and eventually tried on multiple manslaughter charges for their negligence. The charges are dropped after the prosecution case collapses following revelations of larger issues in Heathrow's air-traffic control and a previous near miss (also fictitious). The final death toll of the air crash is 87: 64 passengers and crew, and 23 people on the ground. There were also five deaths from hypothermia on the motorways, and eight other deaths.
Director Gabriel Range explains how he and the production team went about realistically recreating the disaster:
During September 11, there were some incredibly powerful telephone interviews from eyewitnesses right at the centre of the disaster on both TV and radio. They are the simplest way for a rolling news channel to keep their audience up to date – but they offer an incredible immediacy. [...] For the aftermath of the collision, we focused on just a few streets, placing a specially constructed fuselage at the end of a narrow terraced street. Using a combination of home video, fire service video and news footage, we were able to recreate the chaos that would follow such a disaster. But the key to creating an impression of scale was the combination of our own footage with carefully chosen archive and computer-generated images.[3]
Reception
Radio Times called the film: "Scarily realistic ... so plausibly done that it should really have a warning flash in the corner of the screen saying 'fiction' in big red letters. ... It works as a smart riveting drama and also as a warning of the power of the financial markets".[4] A reviewer in The Guardian wrote that it was " an excellent and horrible film ... Indeed, if there was anything that betrayed the fictional nature of The Day Britain Stopped, it was its craftedness and lack of sensationalism."[5]
In response to the programme's original broadcast, the following statement was issued by National Air Traffic Services:
National Air Traffic Services believes that this programme not only fails to portray standard operational procedures accurately, but in doing so, paints an unfair and misleading picture of UK air traffic operations. In particular, there is no mention that the two aircraft involved in this fictitious incident would have been fitted with on-board collision avoidance systems which, combined with air traffic control's Conflict Alert system, would have prevented the 'accident'. Furthermore, the programme inaccurately portrays Heathrow's standard go-around procedures and the way air traffic controllers at Heathrow communicate with each other and with the West Drayton unit. The programme takes insufficient account of the traffic flow management procedures and ground movement radar systems, and inaccurately portrays the context in which airspace sectors are combined. This programme presents itself as dramatised documentary. However, it is not only based on a highly unlikely scenario, but deliberately ignores – or misrepresents – almost every standard safety system or procedure currently in use. NATA keeps these procedures under constant review and, as a consequence, the UK has maintained its exemplary air safety record despite rising levels of traffic. In our view, this programme is highly inaccurate and needlessly alarmist.[6]
