"This is a story of Britain." "But Britain as we very rarely see her." "From above." "If you really want to understand how our country works, then this is one way to get the big picture." "We're going to go on quite a journey - up and down this crowded, busy little island, and back in time tens and thousands of years to reveal the habits, the rhythms, the little secrets uncovered when you're able to look down." "Madness." "Absolute madness." "Arrgghh!" "We're completely surrounded by hang-gliders." "It's astonishing." "It's like swimming through a shoal of fish at the moment." "In this first episode, we're going to explore one day in the life of the British." "We're going to reveal the great migrations we make across the country." "Using data from satellites, we'll peel back the never-ending ballet of ships, planes, lorries and trains that keep us fed and working." "We're going to see how we live on the very lip of chaos and yet, mostly, keep our balance." "And we're going to expose the vast networks of power, water, phones and money normally hidden from view." "And we're going to meet the people who spend their lives in the air to keep everything just about working back down on the ground." "This is Britain From Above." "Britain, the hour before dawn." "60 million-plus souls slumbering as the night sky wheels overhead." "But these stars are not of the heavens." "This is us - scattered across our country." "Each of these sparks of light marks 200 men, women and children, each located according to the last National Census." "They are just pinpricks in the high mountains of Scotland and Wales - fewer than 20 people for every square mile." "Along the coastline there are ribbons of light." "Here the population builds to 1,000, 2,000 families every square mile." "And then there are the great constellations and galsxies." "Birmingham Manchester London." "Here, in the cities, we live crammed, piled on top of one other." "There are more than 20,000 people for every square mile." "For the moment, all seems at peace." "But not for long..." "Dawn is breaking over the east coast of Scotland... over the City of London over the farmlands of East Anglia." "And already we're on the move." "Millions of cows are heading to milking parlours." "Barges full of rubbish sailing down the Thames." "A few hardy swimmers are taking their first dip of the day." "And a lone jobbing journalist is trying to run off last night's bottle of red." "But already there are the first stirrings of something much greater." "Think of it as a national machine with its fingers in every part of this country." "And it's meant to keep us fed and watered, and warm and safe." "By 6.00am, vast power stations are spinning up their turbines in the Vale of York." "The first commuter trains are winding through the Sussex countryside." "Satellite tracking shows our skies filling with aircraft from every part of the world." "And out in the Channel, great container ships are making for our ports." "High above, the Dover coastguard's spotter plane's taking to the air." "At the controls are pilot Craig Brierley, and behind him sits spotter Bill Watson." "They're monitoring the busiest shipping lane in the world - the English Channel." "On a typical day, more than 400 ships pass through the straits off Dover." "With the biggest vessels weighing over 100,000 tonnes and taking three-and-a-half miles to come to a stop, there's a real risk of collision." "But all these ships are following a route laid out by the British coastguard - an invisible maritime motorway, designed to avert disaster on the high seas." "Any vessel over 300 tonnes is tracked, automatically, by satellite." "Here we can see the GPS traces of 24 hours' worth of shipping as it passes through the Channel." "Streams of southbound vessels pass up the English side, northbound ships hug the French." "And in between, countless ferries dodge across the straits, into Dover." "No other shipping lane is so busy that it has these "rules of the road"." "Bill and Craig's job is to swoop out of the sky and alert or identify any ship that might be breaking them." "Keep him in sights so I can set myself up nicely to run down his side." "And then both me and Bill will start scanning him for details." "Speed back to 90 knots." "And these rules are strictly enforced." "Slip out of the right lane and, courtesy of Bill and Craig, the coastguard could be sending you a traffic fine of thousands of pounds." "But however busy these waters might be in the first hours of the day, it's nothing compared to what's about to happen back on land." "We're about to witness a nationwide mass migration." "Over the next two hours, some 36 million people will be on the move - it's the morning rush hour." "There was a time when the British commute was just a single tide of humanity, converging from the suburbs into the city." "But now we explode in a multitude of directions." "We're heading for city centres more than ever." "But we're also flocking to out-of-town business parks and offices." "Ferrying our children to school, miles from home." "Between 7 am and 10am, almost a million of us squeeze ourselves onto trains." "Tens of thousands of buses muscle themselves onto our roads." "And 15 million private motor vehicles cram the streets." "And it's the same from one end of the country to the other." "London..." "Birmingham..." "Belfast..." "Manchester." "But wherever we head, the British rush hour has become a byword in misery." "The average road user will spend more than six months of their lifespan stuck in trafficjams." "One in ten of our scheduled rail services are late, delayed or cancelled." "Something I know all about." "I'm a commuter, and you spend the entire time thinking," ""Why's my train not arrived today?" ""Why is it late?" "Why does it have to be so busy?"" "And you think, "Why can't it be better?"" ""Why can't they have more trains, more railways, bigger trains?" Well, if you want to know the answer to that, one way is to sweep up and stare down." "I'm going to take to the air with John Shaw." "He's an expert in transport policy and, particularly, all things rush hour." "We're heading out over the Home Counties." "Below me is England's commuting heartland." "From up here, everything seems at peace, a patchwork of villages and towns, all linked to the capital by a web of winding steel." "If you're an individual commuter, you feel helpless quite often, frustrated, confused." "Just tell us about what's really going on and that extraordinary daily migration which is the rush hour." "JOHN:" "When you look down from above, it all looks so serene, relaxing and calm." "But actually these things are running at the edge of chaos during the rush hour." "We're running at 60, 90, 95% capacity." "And if one thing goes wrong, then one train's late, the next train's late, the next train's late." "The problem is that our railways were built for another age, another Britain." "Most of them were constructed more than 100 years ago, and they were an extraordinary achievement." "Exploding out from cities, knitting the nation together - the very first national railway system in the world." "But in the decades since they were built, the landscape's changed around them." "Looking down from above, you can see how suburbs and ever-expanding towns and roads have crowded around the lines, hemming them in and leaving no room to lay new track." "And, as John explains, we can't even make the trains we do have any wider, taller or longer." "We have in this country, for example, quite low bridges and quite narrow trains." "So whereas on the Continent they've got double-deck trains, it's very difficult, and expensive to do that here." "If we want to lengthen our trains, you have to lengthen the platforms." "And we've been tinkering at the edges, trying to adapt that Victorian legacy to 21st-century commuting patterns and demands." "If our railway system has been half-strangled by history, what about the streets?" "Because we're still trying to drive in our major cities - this is London - on a little network of old roads and alleyways which were put there for pedestrians or people on horseback, and yet we still have to move through them." "And, my friends, it is not easy and it rarely makes us happy." "By using satellite technology, we can look down and see how this entire network of city streets is being pushed to the edge of capacity." "We've got hold of the GPS traces of 380 London tsxis, recorded over the course of a single day." "In the dark hours before dawn, the streets subside to just a few flickering traces - glow worms taking the last of the night's revellers back home." "But then, from seven o'clock, we begin to see fleets of vehicles flock towards the centre, following the major arteries - east, west, north and south." "And when our tsxis hit the centre, the city begins to light up with flickering movement." "Major thoroughfares grow ever hotter with activity." "Then, as they become saturated, the tsxis start to spill out into the back streets, searching out any clear route they can find." "By mid-morning, all central London is ablaze with tsxis on the move." "And, of course, this is just one small fraction of the traffic flowing through the city." "Watching these streets, with a bird's-eye view of every critical junction, is a small team of experts at the London Traffic Control Centre." "They're responsible for trying to keep London moving, and they have a wonderful power - something ordinary mortals can only dream of." "Yes!" "They can turn the traffic lights green." "From this tiny office, they can instantly reprogram any one of almost 3,000 junctions, trying to keep road and foot traffic flowing in perfect balance, reacting instantly to even the smallest events out on the streets." "It's a constant battle for chief engineer Mark Beasley." "The biggest challenges are the unexpected incidents that occur." "A lorry that's shed its load." "It might be milk bottles fallen out into the road." "We've had that recently, where a milk float overturned." "For instance, this morning, we have a problem with a power failure on a particular set of traffic signals." "That congestion that occurs at that site will very much ripple back, so you can very quickly lose a whole area and a whole network, in fact." "So we may think we've exposed the workings of the great British rush hour." "But there's one further slice of madness to come, something we normally miss because it happens over our heads." "Every day, more than 7,500 aircraft crowd into Britain's skies, carrying more than half a million passengers from every corner of this little green planet." "These are the GPS traces of every single plane entering" "British airspace over 24 hours." "And they're all following their own secret motorway system up in the sky - strictly laid out routes that run north and south, up and down the country and out over Europe and the Atlantic." "And dotted around the country, there are stacking systems, roundabouts in the sky, where they circle, waiting to land at one of our seven major airports." "These skies are being monitored every second of the day." "This is one of the Royal Navy's airborne early warning helicopters." "Suspended from the back is a state-of-the-art radar system that looks out over the horizon, further than any air traffic radar system on the ground." "Inside, observer Chris Barber can tell precisely where every aircraft should or shouldn't be." "Up here, we're very privileged." "We can look for hundreds of miles and see a God's-eye view of what's going on in a large area." "The red are all the danger areas." "That's where civilian and military air traffic is not allowed to go, when they're active, because there may be some gun-firing exercises, naval training exercises." "There may be air-to-air military training with RAF or Navy jets." "There are gaps in the aircraft traces all over the UK, areas closed off to air traffic because far below there are secret military installations, or even high-security prisons." "And in a time when civilian aircraft can be suddenly turned into a tool of terrorism, Chris's radar is also able to spot any aircraft that's trying to hide, by not transmitting or "squawking"its position as it should be." "My interrogator's basically saying, "Who are you and what height you're at."" "And that comes back to me as a green dot, so I can see where they are." "If he's a bad guy, he won't want to squawk and tell us where he is, so we then have the primary radar paints, the white ones, which are the important ones to us." "And what I'd like to see is a green dot and a white dot superimposed, then I'm happy where he is." "Back on the ground, a semblance of peace is returning." "The rush hour is over." "We've got there, we've arrived at our offices, schools, shops and factories." "But just as the over-strained transport system draws a sigh of relief, the rest of the nation's infrastructure is roaring into life, preparing to supply us with the apparent essentials of modern living." "Dotted around the country are just a handful of vast facilities." "These are the fuel pumps, the gas tanks, the batteries of our national machine." "On the banks of the Mersey, Stanlow Refinery is loading its daily output of 11million litres of petrol into waiting tankers." "Bacton Gas Terminal in Norfolk is pumping out gas piped from as far afield as Siberia." "In Yorkshire, it's mid-morning and Drsx Power Station is running at 100% of its peak output." "This one power station can supply 7% of the nation's electricity - enough to power over six million homes." "Except there aren't six million homes anywhere near here." "Drsx's electricity is carried the length and breadth of the country on a maze of high-tension power cables." "It's aerial linesman Adam Crick's job to keep them running." "There's a huge amount of power lines." "It's like a spider's web of power lines." "The lines are turning left and right, and you're looking at the conductors all the while as they're coming past you, while the aircraft is moving, doing somersaults." "It's like a roller-coaster ride." "If I admit, I had to use a sick bag a number of times." "But you get used to it." "It pays the bills." "Adam's job can only be done from the air." "His helicopter's equipped with a thermal imaging camera mounted underneath its nose." "While the pilot flies the helicopter up front," "Adam sits in the back, using the camera to search out hot spots." "These are areas of unusually high temperature, which show up white on his screen, and they're the signs of a failing connection." "If the power line wasn't maintained, and the hot spots were left to their own accord, with the amount of load going through them, which is high, especially this time of year, the winter, they would fail." "They would melt." "Today, Adam and his pilot are on an inspection run over some low-level power lines." "And they're working just feet off the ground." "Just panning the camera." "We've got some hot spots here, in front." "OK, there's multiple hot spots." "Is that birds on the line?" "No, this is a hot spot on this one here." "If you take us in as close as you can." "I think we probably want to go to the right very slightly, minding for the trees." "This is Adam's most dangerous type of work." "He's at tree height, right next to a cable carrying 33,000 volts." "OK, tell me when you're happy, and take it as close as you can, please." "OK, just getting it in focus now." "Taking some pictures." "Once Adam and his pilot have discovered a hot spot like this, he calls in a repair team, and if the fault is severe enough, they can be on site in less than an hour." "It takes Adam six months to check his bit of the National Grid." "And when he's finished, he has to go back to the beginning and start all over again." "By the time the snaking power lines of the National Grid arrive at our towns and cities, they vanish underground to join another great national network that supplies us with one of the absolute essentials of life - water." "Although much of it lies underground, there are places where the sheer scale of our water system emerges glinting in the sunlight." "These are our great lakes and reservoirs - over 2,000 of them - capable of holding over 700 billion gallons of water." "Boreholes suck water from far beneath the ground." "Pumps feed from rivers up and down the nation." "They're all connected by an almost dazingly vast network of pipes, some under the ground, some over-ground." "Laid end to end, they would stretch round the world ten times." "On an average day, this system apparently carries enough water to fill 18 million bathtubs." "But amazingly, we can't just pipe our water around the country willy-nilly." "Its chemical balance varies so much from region to region that water which has travelled for more than 100 miles could end up being poisonous to the local environment." "And supply is, of course,just one half of the vast network of piping that stretches across Britain." "The other half has to deal with what we flush away and what's in it." "This is Beckton Sewage Works in east London, the largest sewage plant in Europe - over 300 acres, fenced off from curious eyes, the sheer scale only comprehensible from the air." "This one plant has to deal with the sewage and waste of all of north London - over three-and-a-half million people producing more than 12 million gallons of waste every hour." "These bubbling tanks of raw effluent are being slowly purified through a complex series of tanks and filters." "And afterjust one week, this water is so clear, it can be pumped straight out into the Thames." "It's one o'clock - lunch time." "Children spill into playgrounds and parks." "Lunch-time shoppers flood the streets." "In the City of London, the gleaming tower blocks empty for a brief moment." "Here the skyline shifts and grows with every passing month." "But in between the skyscrapers and the building sites lies a network of tiny alleyways that's centuries old." "And the guardian of this secret labyrinth is the City Planning Officer, Peter Rees." "Peter, when you look down from above, the City of London does look different." "It looks more complicated and crabbed and so on." "Why is that?" "Well, I suppose it's because the City has a 2,000-year history." "So the street plan goes back to...almost to Roman times?" "Well, indeed before that." "Speaking as a Welshman, of course there was a Celtic settlement, and a former City Planning Officer," "Boudicca, or Boadicea, who camped in the City, right where the Bank of England is today." "And, as a planner, are you aware of patterns that go back that far?" "Very much so." "There are still large parts of the City where the street grain - the streets, the alleyways - are based on pre-medieval patterns." "And what's cheering is that Peter has the muscle to overcome some of the world's most powerful companies in order to preserve his ancient, delicate spider's web." "For most of us, the City is an amazingly, kind of, modern place - all the great big skyscrapers." "How much of the old City, the ancient City, is really left?" "Andrew, welcome to the secret City!" "Let me take you on a tour of some of our alleyways." "Threaded through the streets of the City of London are countless tiny passages." "For any normal city planner, these would seem nothing but a waste of prime real estate." "But for Peter, they're the veins through which the lifeblood of London flows, because he knows what really makes a world-class business centre tick." "It's the social networks." "(BUZZ OF CONVERSATION)" "Gossip is actually what makes business." "It doesn't matter whether you're in an oasis in the Sahara or whether you're in the centre of the City of London, people come together to gossip, to exchange news, and it's that kind of information," "that kind of exchange of news, that is good for business." "So the global success of London in financial terms is not about the glass towers - or at least not entirely about the glass towers?" "It's to do with balance." "The City has 2,000 years of history and that history invigorates the future, because people can come away from their desk and the daily grind, into these sort of areas to relax at lunch time, to gossip and to relax again in the evening." "That's what makes the City tick." "It's the balance between the past and the future." "Gossip - the oil of all human society!" "Absolutely, Andrew." "But it's not just chatting in coffee houses and bars that keeps the national machine running." "Fifty years ago, this was still a country which was earning its living with industry and engineering." "The skylines of our towns and cities were still dominated by factory chimneys, industrial units and smoke and steam." "Now we're living, we are told, in the information economy." "Which means precisely what?" "What would the information economy look like if we could see it?" "This is our national telephone network as it comes to life on an average working day." "The activity of every exchange in the country is being tracked second by second." "By two o'clock, we're making almost a million calls a minute." "Every city is aflame with chatter." "Belfast..." "Glasgow Bristol." "And that's just calls made on land lines, because we're in the middle of our mobile revolution, sending 300,000 texts a minute." "And even these aren't the true foundations of our new information economy." "Most critical is data - pure information, carried over the internet." "Our major cities are now connected by fibre-optic backbones that carry e-mail, web pages, You Tube videos - a great river of digital ones and zeroes." "By mid-afternoon, British Telecom is carrying 223 million megabytes of data an hour." "That's half a million web pages every second." "And of course this isn't restricted to the UK." "Here's an image of how the major data pipelines in Britain interconnect with the rest of the world, firing data to every corner of the globe and gathering it back again." "This, we're told, is the foundation of our new economy." "2.30pm" " Liverpool." "This one van could be carrying anything up to a million pounds in cold, hard cash." "And there's literally hundreds like it on the roads of Britain, day and night." "They're part of a nationwide security network that matters as much to daily life as any internet or phone system, because this is the network that puts cash in our pockets." "They're stocking cashpoints and tills non-stop, 365 days a year." "Vans like these shift up to three-quarters of a billion pounds in tens, twenties and fifties every working day." "Hovering high above is Tim Ram." "He's employed by one of the biggest cash-moving companies in the UK as Head of Risk Management." "Which is a fantasticjob title - until you discover just how high the risks are." "If you go to an ATM and it's no longer working, you might consider it's either broken or run out of money." "The likelihood is, in parts of the UK, that it hasn't got any money in it cos the crew couldn't get there on their run that day because they were attacked at a previous site." "In fact, driving a van like this is considered one of the most dangerous jobs in Britain." "TIM RAM:" "You could be looking, on a bad week in the UK, at 15 attacks." "On a less bad week, you could be looking at maybe five or six, so the weeks vary." "It's partly seasonal." "Even criminals go on holiday occasionally." "Then they run out of money and come back." "But from above, through satellites, global positioning and aerial imagery, Tim is able to follow the movements of every one of his vehicles second by second." "Yes, they're tracked on a permanent basis." "We know exactly where that vehicle is at any point in time." "We know how long he stops for, we know where he's going, we know what his route is." "Any deviation of that route, we can identify it and tell the authorities very quickly exactly where they need to home in to." "But this is one set of GPS traces we can't show you, for what I hope are obvious reasons." "In fact, we can't even show you the depot this vehicle will return to at the end of its working day." "What we can show you is where the cash in our pockets ends up." "Mid-afternoon, and the sun is beating down on our nation's holiest of holies." "Brooding, powerful - the temples of modern Britain." "Except that these great monuments aren't built for worship, but for spending dosh." "These are shopping centres - and they are vast." "Manchester's Trafford Centre has parking spaces for more than 10,000 cars." "2 7 million people a year visit Bluewater in Essex." "And at Lakeside, Thurrock, there are 300 individual stores, designed to meet every conceivable need." "In fact, over the last 30 years, the floor space taken up by our shops has exploded." "And yet, that's just a tiny fraction of the space needed for our shopping economy." "Felixstowe container docks - the biggest port in Britain." "Almost 100 vessels a week berth here." "This quayside can hold 60,000 40-foot containers at any one time." "It's the first link in a national network that keeps us stocked with everything from aspirin to roller skates, toilet paper to tea bags." "Millions of cars are shipped in from abroad, thousands of them at any one time lined up to be ferried around the country." "In fact, there are so many ships full of stuff arriving on our shores, we've now created inland ports to store the overflow." "Here at Alconbury in East Anglia, 2,400 containers are stacked down the entire length of a disused airfield." "They're the secret storehouse of Martin Taylor of Wincanton - one of the biggest supply and distribution companies in Britain." "Martin is responsible for keeping us all in the essentials of daily life." "Whatever we want, whenever we want it." "We get some strange anomalies." "If we get a hot spell, suddenly the number of drinks consumed goes up dramatically and we can see the amount of product, say, for Britvic, almost double overnight." "Similarly, in the Easter period, although we had an Easter a few weeks ago that was very cold, if you get a very hot Easter, or a very hot May, everyone is into the DIY stores" "and suddenly we have to move out hundreds of thousands of barbecues, garden furniture, that type of thing." "Almost all our "stuff' is shipped to us by road." "There are more than 500,000 HGVs ploughing the motorways of Britain." "These satellite traces reveal the extent of this vast distribution network, saturating the road system and reaching almost every corner of the country." "But all of these trucks require a further network of warehouses and distribution centres to keep them on the move." "This is just one distribution warehouse for one major supermarket." "It's the size of 13 football pitches." "It keeps a large swathe of the North West supplied with fruit, vegetables, milk and bread." "Here hundreds of drivers, pickers and packers are engaged in a 24-hour race against the clock every day of the week." "Stock is shipped in from other vast stores." "In the central Heinz warehouse just up the road, robots flicker between 100ft-high towers of mayonnaise and ketchup, as pallets of baked beans are being off-loaded onto fleets of waiting trucks." "Every movement is timed to the minute." "MARTIN TAYLOR:" "It's very time critical, especially during the peak periods." "You cannot afford for vehicles to miss their 15- or 30-minute time slots." "You can't afford to get one or two hours behind, because that will start to give you the nightmare scenario where you back up in the warehouse and have to refuse entry for the next day's product." "ANDREW MARR:" "But when we drive past a line of lorries, we think of them just lumbering along, and want to pull out in our cars." "Actually, they are all on a highly stressed," " very critical schedule of their own." " That's true." "But of course, what we buy, we also throw away." "Every day over 50,000 rubbish trucks clatter through our streets collecting almost 85,000 tonnes of grunge." "These are the GPS traces ofjust a few of them " "Westminster's fleet of collection vehicles spilling out of their depot towards central London weaving and criss-crossing their way through the city streets and finally ferrying their loads to giant incinerators on the outskirts of the city." "And we're not just using trucks." "Barges like this ferry waste down the Thames from the centre of the city to a vast landfill site where the rubbish is ploughed back into the ground to decay and rot." "Here at Mucking Marsh in the Thames estuary, a square mile of land has been turned over to trash." "In fact, we've filled 109 square miles of our country with waste and we're adding 16 million tonnes every year." "Even so, we're at least beginning to learn how to recycle." "In a final great closing of the circle, the man who ships us thousands of tonnes of stuff from the other side of the world sends a lot of it back again." "MARTIN TAYLOR:" "Interestingly, what is going back is scrap - our old fridge, our old freezer, our old washing machine - and what we do is we collect those, take them up to Billingham, where we have two big recycling machines - crushers " "and eventually they are crushed into small particles of metal, foam, plastic, and our same container lorries pick up those same metal bits, bring them down in containers and they go back to China to start the process all over again." "Four o'clock in the afternoon, and beyond the endless daily dance of getting and spending, acquiring stuff and then chucking most of it away, there are other, more human, moments to punctuate the rhythm of the British day." "Children flood out of school gates and make their way home." "A cricket match unfolds at its own gentle pace." "Surfers flock onto the beach at Newquay." "And weekend trippers are cruising their way up our motorways." "But don't worry." "This being Britain, it's all about to go hideously wrong." "(HORNS BLARE)" "So you're bumbling along, relatively happily, and then you see all those red tail-lights ahead of you, you maybe hear a horn, and everything starts to slow down, grinds to a halt." "It's another trafficjam." "But for once, this isn't the usual rush-hour standstill where you just sit there steaming." "It's an unpredictable stop and start." "Fits of movement, then another flare of red lights and then, suddenly, you're off again and the motorway is strangely clear." "When you drive on, there are no accidents, no roadworks to explain the chaos." "So what has happened?" "Welcome to the world of the phantom trafficjam." "I'm joining Eddie Wilson, a man who spends his working life unpicking the mysteries of motorway traffic." "It's five o'clock on a Friday, and we're getting a bird's-eye view of one of the biggest regularjams on the entire UKmotorway network." "Eddie, if motorways are like human rivers of some kind, the great thing about this is we can look down on the river." "What kind of things are you looking for here?" "What we have here is the merge of the M5 and the M6 junction in Birmingham, and we have M5 traffic coming in from over there, from the south, and we have the M6 traffic coming in from the east." "And here there's just too much traffic being pumped into the pipe, and we see this kind of traffic pattern here every Friday." "Right, too many cars and lorries, not enough Tarmac." "But what about those strange jams where there's no accident, no police, there's no roadworks, it's a mystery?" "EDDIE:" "There doesn't necessarily have to be a cause such as an accident." "The problem is, because drivers' behaviour is not perfect, people get too close to the vehicle in front, then they have to correct, they touch the brakes, the guy behind touches the brakes, slows down a bit more," "and if you go 100 vehicles back up the column of traffic, somebody actually comes to a stop." "So all it takes is one person braking just a little too hard, and the next thing you know, a mile or two behind them, the whole motorway has ground to a halt." "But that's not the end of it." "Using computer modelling, Eddie and his fellow motorway gurus can allow us to see what happens once the motorway lanes have become clogged with stationary traffic." "Even though the stopped cars quickly start moving again, the jam itself doesn't vanish." "Instead, it takes on a life of its own - a wave of stationary vehicles that travels back down the motorway with no clear cause or reason." "And it's that wave you hit when you meet a phantom trafficjam." "It's evening over Britain." "Farmers are heading home from their fields." "Late-night shoppers head off to the stores." "A group of teenagers squeezes in one last game of football." "But ourjourney isn't quite over." "Looking down, you're just aware of how unbelievably crowded and busy and complicated this little island is." "We go through our daily lives - mostly down there, not up here - feeling frustrated, feeling a bit powerless." "What's remarkable is that the thing works at all." "It's 7pm and in homes up and down the country, cookers, heaters, television sets are being switched on." "At the National Grid Control Centre, national balancing engineer Simon Jeffcote is on duty." "Arrayed on the wall in front of him is HIS view of Britain from above." "The country's been tipped on its side and every high-power electricity connection from the far north of Scotland to Cornwall has been mapped out in loving detail." "But Simon is bracing himself for the most difficult moment of his day by watching EastEnders." "When the credits start to roll, he's going to have to deal with a massive surge in electrical demand - what's known as a TVpick-up." "We're expecting a pick-up of around about three gigawatts, which is 3,000 million watts, or equivalent to 1.5 -1.75 million kettles going on." "So we expect the demand to pick up over a period of about five minutes." "Power surges like this are unique to Britain." "No other country in the world switches on so many kettles in so short a time." "To cope with the strain," "Simon has had to put specialised power stations on standby as far away as Snowdonia and Scotland." "These hydroelectric plants can set thousands of tonnes of water plunging down the hillside at a moment's notice, generating huge bursts of power in a matter of seconds." "But Simon is also having to ask our neighbours across the Channel for a favour." "To assist us with the end of EastEnders, we have the French link picking up." "And they are picking up 600 megawatts at 100 megawatts a minute." "That's, again, a very rapid response." "Simon is slave to this flickering frequency indicator, which he has to keep as close as possible to 50Hz." "If there's not enough power in the National Grid, it drops off the scale." "Too much and it shoots off the other side." "And he has to judge his timing perfectly, even if the BBC isn't quite working to schedule." "We would be notified a time for the end of the programme and it hasn't actually finished at that time." "Whichmeans?" "(EASTENDERS THEME TUNE)" "Simon fires off instructions from his keyboard." "On the other side of the country, vast turbines rumble into life." "Dinorwig is up to 150, I've just instructed him up to 300 megawatts now." "Ffestiniog is up to 90 megawatts - its full output." "French piling in now." "Two minutes into the TVpick-up and it looks like there's going to be more than enough power to go round." "And then suddenly there's a problem." " What is it?" "Is it the French link?" " Yeah." "There's a trip on the additional supply from France." "The frequency has dropped dramatically." "Simon has just moments to cover the sudden shortfall." "He rapidly sends out instructions to get one more hydroelectric plant on-line." "Then, once more, the supply heads back into the safe zone." "It was an immediate decision." "As soon as the frequency dropped through 49.8, I had to react." "The delicate balance of our electricity supply has been restored." "For now." "And across the country, a million kettles keep on boiling." "Britain's day is drawing to a close." "By now, all that can be seen of Britain from above is illuminated by the power that Simon and his colleagues are squirting round the country." "Eight million streetlights have flared into life." "Office buildings blaze as our information economy trades on through the night." "Tsxis are still flickering their way through the city's landmarks." "Commuter trains stand in ranks waiting for the next morning's rush." "In supermarket warehouses, the morning supplies are already being loaded onto trucks." "In city centres, the next day's newspapers are being dropped off." "And out on the motorways, engineers are struggling through the night to keep critical junctions open." "Across the country, the rhythm has slowed, but the networks that sustain our nation - some shiny, slick and new, others creaking under the weight of history - are all still clicking, sighing, drawing breath," "before the dawn of a new day." "Next time on Britain From Above," "I'll be plummeting head first over the classic patchwork quilt of the British countryside." "We'll discover how some of the greenest and most natural-looking landscapes on these islands have in fact been shaped and moulded by human hands over the centuries." "We'll look at the battle between town and country, remote wilderness versus tourist hot spots, the conflict of the ancient and modern." "And on our website you can go behind the scenes of the series and find a whole new perspective on Britain From Above."