If... the Oil Runs Out

If… the Oil Runs Out was the ‘peak oil’ programme in the BBC’s Climate Chaos strand. A largely unsuccessful attempt at bringing the issue into UK public consciousness.

As with the Attenborough documentary I wrote about previously scheduling was an issue here (23.20-00.20 Tuesday night, BBC2) you had to be pretty much a self selecting viewer to catch the programme – i.e. you are probably a viewer who is informed and interested in the subject (in which case, like me, you probably hoped that the programme would be more focussed on appealing to such viewers). There seems little likelihood that that this programme attracted the kind of random casual viewer who could usefully be apprised of the concept of peak oil and benefit from learning more about it.

A second factor working against this programme communicating the issue of peak oil to a wider audience was its incorporation in the ‘If…’ format. For those of you who haven’t seen one of these before, the basic deal is: ‘If…’ was a series of shows looking at what might happen “if” various different disastrous things happened, such as ‘If… a big fuck off asteroid hits the Earth’ or ‘If… a shitting big wave strikes’- you get the idea. All these programmes were presented in a drama-doc style, inter-cutting actual factual interviews with a dramatised presentation of the proposed outcomes of the particular ‘if’ examined. It has to be said that this is not a wildly successful format, especially in the case of a situation like the decline of a finite resource where ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ seems a more appropriate proposition (The programme also did not particularly address the concept of peak differing from the titled “runs out”). The ‘If…’ format is tainted with a simplistic, populist bad science reputation that ill serves an issue as important as the peaking of oil.

The approach of the format creates the third factor frustrating utility in the programme. The drama-doc style was both cloying and ineffective. From the UK perspective it was also frustrating that it took the form of some spurious transatlantic storyline that seemed designed solely to make it USA saleable (much as Brit movies feature a token yank in some attempt at US box office success). The programme was co-funded by Discovery, so I guess that explains some of this – but doesn’t the UK audience deserve (if they have to have drama-doc) dramatisation of what might happen in the UK, instead we had to watch an American couple deal with the situation in the USA.

Reviews of the programme give some indication of how successful it was in communicating the issue of peak oil.

1)The Daily Mail’s Peter Preston gave a schizophrenic response in ‘Are We Really Over a Barrel?’ (Wednesday May 31st, p.49) where he spends a few paragraphs disparaging the “puritans” of the green movement and the “Kyoto fanatics”, then takes issue with the whole idea that we’re in a difficult position energywise, before getting into a good slagging of the programme itself – “a cack-handed attempt to produce a drama out of the oil crisis”. In the middle of all this he finds time to praise Sheikh Yamani and quote his pretty scary vision of the future without further comment. His review ends with “So down with the Cassandras, I say. I’m off for a drive around the block”. It seems that public attitudes may still have a way to go. Does anybody remember these days, that Cassandra was right but ignored? It’s all painfully poetic.

2)The Guardian guide featured the programme in its ‘Watch This’ sidebar, but called it an “annoying drama-documentary” and, like me, thinks that “the subject doesn’t benefit from being dressed up as a soap opera”. It also finds fault with the programmes research stating “one caption informs us that “all the world’s biggest oil reserves are in the Middle East” – actually, the second-largest oil reserves on Earth are beneath Canada’. I’d like to know what expert research Andrew Mueller put into the issue for his review. The idea that Canada has large ‘oil’ reserves is a questionable one, given that they are not in liquid form but locked in bitumen, an issue the Guardian itself raised in 'The next big thing or a risky gamble: Shell looks to turn sand into oil' (June 2nd 2006). This little aside is yet more evidence of how much we need a proper investigative, scientific programme on this issue.

3)I will leave you by quoting in full the review of the programme I received direct from Keith Hackwood – demonstrating his typically acute analysis:

"did you watch that bbc 'if' thing the other night? what a waste of space that was (apart from seeing sandra dickinson looking like my nan) - fatuous 'drama' bollocks, why have Matt Simmons on and then not use him - not have any of his punchy soundbites? the whole thing was just an edited meek drivel of weak idea-less drip drip, extremely conservative in every way (the figures they used, the implications they side-stepped - like violence and collapse of social order, like agricultural despair, for fuck's sake - even after the trucker got laid off and the transport network seized up in this joke programme there were people still shopping at wal-mart! It made me angry and disappointed - a waste of my licence fee on a shitty treatment of a real issue that was somehow left dangling like a bad cracker joke with no punchline - frankly, pathetic."