Ok, finally got round to watching Blackout part 1. It's available on C4 on demand. It was well done and demonstrated that it's the little things that often trip us up. The biggests problems are the result of multiple failures that snowball. This episode was based on members of the public.

One group was a teen and her brother who have a crash when there are no lights and the brother ends up in a coma. The length of the power failure results in his eventual demise due to being the last in the queue for batteries for his life support. For anyone thinking the hospital chaos in this is unlikely, I hate to say it but it's not much better when things are running smoothly.

The next group was a woman with a young child trying to get to her mother who is a diabetic. She ends up taking a lift with a tagged offender.

The third group was a family with a semi survivalist Dad. They end up having their stuff nicked and the father loots to feed the family. This was one of the weirdest sub plots as the Dad drains the radiators for water even before the tap water runs out.

The fourth group is two blokes who get stuck in a lift, escape, then steal a car and finally blow up a tanker trying to get petrol.

Although they condensed a lot of things happening to only a few groups of people, most of the events seemed plausible. Unlike a US block buster there was no hero to save the day or intercuts with harassed government types. Next week's episode might see the viewpoint of the emergency services.