One of the posters at Samizdata has a wonderfully cheeky riposte to the hilariously bad 'If...' series now airing on BBC2, which takes a series of 'problems' - power generation, rising inequality, obesity (not that the topics are in any way a tired retread of familiar statist crap) - and then posits a fictional scenario (always involving some kind of disaster because the state hasn't acted 'properly') mixed with talking heads:

As part of this conversation, the BBC asks for views of the world in 2020 and I thought that it would be rude not to oblige.

By 2020, we will no longer have to pay the licence fee to watch substandard populist rot that masquerades as quality TV, notably, the series of poor documentaries called If.

If Iran or Al Qaeda obtain weapons of mass destruction, then we can expect them to unleash a second Holocaust, in order to remove Israel from the Middle East. Half of Europe will revile this, half will be relieved. One or more countries will withdraw from the European Union due to its institutional inflexibility and inability to compete with the United States or the Far East.

There will be further wars in the Middle East involving the West (without a UN mandate) due to the threat of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in oil producing areas.

And this comment says it all:

I saw the first one, concerning the possible breakdown in the power supply system. In one sequence that will stay with me for some time, one of the talking heads commissioned, one presumes, to lend some sense of authority to the programme, said: "Well, you can't make power out of thin air". This was followed not five minutes later by a picture of an air turbine on a wind farm. Priceless.

Do watch the rest of the series (Wednesdays at 9pm, BBC2). They say the Beeb can't make comedies any more. Oh yes it can.