feeling listless

TV Rachel Dorman emailed regarding 'The Day Britain Stopped', thanking me for the link and pointing me towards and excellent thing I hadn't perviously been aware of:

"I read your post about The Day Britain Stopped on MetaFilter - thanks for posting that, I was facinated by the program and wanted to say a few words myself, but MeFi isn't accepting any new users at the moment and I'm not yet a member, it's quite frustrating. What nobody's mentioned yet in the comments is a program called Alternative Three, which was aired in '77 (i think) and although I haven't watched it yet, I know there's a (somewhat poor quality) download available online for it. I'm bringing this up because, like The Day Britain Stopped, it was a docu-drama and... ok, I can't really find other similarities! I understand the motive for each of the programs was
quite different, Alternative Three was a bit far-fetched, but it's entriguing all the same, especially as, at the time, a lot of people believed that the issues covered were real, and there was a huge uproar. Before my time though, so I wouldn't really know! This is where you can watch the film: http://www.thule.org/alt3.html although I'm warning you, the site's pretty ugly. This site: http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/alt3.html tells a bit more about Alternative Three, and is easier on the eyes...

Alternate Three is a great thing, if disturbingly similar to 'Look Around You'. I loved the new film actually (see previous post) but it gets a very mixed review at Off The Telly:

"There simply wasn't a human "thread" running through the whole thing. Initial stories of people affected by the road chaos gave way during the second half to the luckless air traffic controllers on duty that night. The woman initially held responsible for the crash emerged as a main character, although due to the nature of the story she couldn't be introduced until the second half for fear of telegraphing the plot. Likewise the officer overseeing the flow of traffic on the M25 stepped back into the wings after his part of the story was done. Continuity was all over the place."

I agree to be a perfect replication of the documentary genre the scapegoat would have appeared in that form throughout the piece because her place in the history of the thing would already be known at the start. So it is a slightly scewed version of how a real documentary might appear, but for me it was still quite effective.