The Business published my dismissal of a recent BBC docu-drama on world oil running short: The BBC scrapes the bottom of the barrel
The main characters in this miniature drama-documentary are Americans. The unspoken message, unsubtly applied, appears to be that it’s the Yanks who are to blame. An overweight and badly-dressed couple, housewife Janie and her truck-driver husband, John, are shown trying to adapt as prices escalate from $85 to $160 dollars a barrel, and a society based on cheap oil comes under stress. First there are queues at petrol stations and then outright shortages. Food prices rise. John loses his job. With the SUV unaffordable, the couple eventually have to resort to wheeling their groceries home in a shopping trolley.
John is prone to all sorts of anti-social individualism. Besides driving a big, fuel-hungry 4x4, he is shown stealing from his employers, hoarding diesel, unwilling to offer lifts to neighbours and driving like a maniac. Eventually, he gets his comeuppance, being left bloodied and bruised after getting into a fist fight on a garage forecourt – an allegory for the Iraq war?
Their daughter, the pushy Jess, works as an oil company executive and lives in London, with her English husband Nick, who, presumably like Prime Minister Tony Blair, is bulldozed into submission by his American partner. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, she despoils the Alaskan wilderness on behalf of her multinational employer. However, her search for “the world’s last giant oilfield” ultimately proves to be fruitless. The program also shows Venezuela’s governing left-wing and rabidly anti-US strongman Hugo Chavez still in power in 2016 – the one prediction in the program with which I feel comfortable.
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