After five succesful seasons the Brittas Empire was gilded with the BBC equivalent of a Roman chaplet of laurels: the Christmas Special. The well established procedure for British sitcom Christmas Specials was to take the existing characters and situations and intensify them by placing them in an extreme context. The 1994 Brittas special honoured this tradition by the unlikely artifice of having the entire staff confined within Whitbury New Town leisure centre by a epochal snowstorm of Arctic magnitude that sweeps the south of England.
However, the special also innovated by having some scenes showing the fate of the characters thirty years hence on New Year's Eve of 2019. Even though the special aired on 27th December 1994 it was actually set before the events of the first season in December 1989.
Now that 2019 has been and gone it possible to assess how well the writers and producers of the show imagined life in 2019. The fact is, that from the small amount of material available, they got it amazingly right. The Brittas Empire Christmas Special turned out to be the most accurate depiction of life in the early 21st century in any work of Sci Fi in any medium. Predictions in Sci Fi and notoriously difficult. We only have to look at how the other storied example of life 2019, Blade Runner, to appreciate how good the Brittas vision was.
Three examples of where the 1994 special got it exactly right:
Ubiquity of electric vehicles. Most of the characters drive electric cars and the one who doesn't is chided for it by his partner. One the cars is a 1st generation Panther Solo which was an excellent choice as it looked futuristic in the 90s and was obscure enough that very few people would recognise it. In a demonstration of budgetary limitations placed on the creators it has electic vehicle sounds dubbed over it but the Ford CVH 1.6 engine that was in the Solo was still belching smoke and condensate on what was obviously a very cold day.
Acceptance of LGBTQ+ Relationships in public life. One of the characters is a cabinet minister in a tory government who is openly in a same sex relationship. This would have been unthinkable in 1994 when the disgraceful shadow of Clause 28 still loomed over the tory party.
Universal availability of navigation systems. In 1994 people would navigate on long road journeys by buying a piece of software that would provide text only directions which they would then print and shuffle through on the steering wheel while doing 90mph on the M18. In 1994 special an inquiry about how long it will take to get somewhere is met with the response, "the car's computer says 45 minutes." This is an eerily good prediction of the universal presence of GPS based navigation systems.
One example where the 1994 special gets it badly wrong:
The Prime Minister in 2019 is Sebastian Coe. From the persepctive of 1994 this probably seemed like a worthy predicition as the Olympian was, at that time, a tory MP considered to have a bright future in politics. If the writers had dared to posit that The Daily Telegraph's loathsome, mendacious and unscrupulous European correspondent would the be the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom it would have been summarily rejected as a notion more ludicrous than the week long Arctic blizzard.
