Throwing light on the Dark Ages

It's strange what catches your eye when you're lining the cat's litter tray with old newspapers. I've just come across a yellowing obituary by Freddie Raphael for Stella Richman, who (as all those who care about the history of television will know) was in charge of drama at ATV back in the Sixties, when she gave the young Raphael his first break in TV.

Lew Grade was her boss, and he gave her free rein to commission any playwright she liked, and to broadcast any play, the solitary stipulation being that it should not have a disastrous effect on ratings; so why is it that not even the publicly-funded BBC can nowadays give dramatists the same artistic freedom that an unashamedly commercial station could offer 40 years ago?

Perhaps the answer lies at the very end of Raphael's touching tribute (now doused in cat urine, I fear), where he noted that "until very recently, she continued as an adviser to television drama departments, but she shook her head, privately, at the formulaic material which executives require of today's young writers, and at the latter's willingness to supply it."

Fortunately, there are still some writers and producers with the integrity, imagination and cunning to smuggle good drama onto the screen, often disguised as documentary. That was certainly the case with last night's If ... the Lights Go Out (BBC2), whose frighteningly plausible portrayal of a modern urban nightmare was reminiscent of Peter Watkins's iconic 1965 film, The War Game.

Set in the winter of 2010, Ben Fox's drama-doc blended a fictional scenario with real-life interviews to show how easily the whole of London and the South-East could suffer a massive power failure, and the catastrophic consequences that would inevitably ensue.

"We're hooked on electricity like a drug," observed one expert near the beginning, and what followed was a chilling depiction of just how unpleasant several days of enforced cold turkey might be for us all (the turkey being cold, of course, because the microwave would no longer function).

Sitting snugly by my electric fire, bathed in the warm glow from my television screen, I watched engrossed as my country rapidly collapsed-around me, within the space of a single hour. By 2010, it seems, the free market will be providing us with cheap electricity but very little spare capacity, and several of our existing power stations will have been mothballed (so any electricity they do produce will smell of camphor).

With North Sea gas virtually exhausted, many of our remaining generators will be fuelled by imported gas, so when fictional Chechen terrorists launched an attack on a Russian pipeline, the lights soon started going out all over East Anglia. Not that they'd notice in Norfolk, I suppose. The locals would probably just assume that they were blinking even more slowly than usual, and anyway, they prefer dancing to the speeches of Winston Churchill, played on 78rpm wind-up gramophones.

Mixing national energy policy with individual human dramas, the storyline oscillated between the indecisions of the Energy Minister as London plunged into darkness, and the cold reality of urban life without electricity.

While a female Government adviser was cynically suggesting that the disaster provided an ideal opportunity "to take greater legislative powers over the electricity companies" (why did the phrase "good day to bury bad news" pass through my mind at that point?), an old woman was silently expiring in her tower block apartment, where there was now no heat, light, water, or functioning elevator.