If...The Oil Runs Out (BBC2) - The If... series makes a drama out of a crisis but the latest demonstrated that fact and fiction make uneasy bedfellows.

The result was as hopeless as trying to mix oil and water, an appropriate enough phrase as the subject was the escalating global oil crisis.

The year is 2016 and the world is plunged into crisis as the age of oil comes to an end. The warning signs have been ignored, so few are prepared for the drastic changes in lifestyle demanded by a lack of oil. The race is on to the ends of the Earth in a desperate search for black oil.

So far so good in this real life disaster movie. The statistics were frightening. America's oil production peaked in 1971, Britain's in 1999. All the world's biggest known oil reserves are in the Middle East and naming those countries (Saudi Arabia, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Iran) helped put world affairs - and conflict - into perspective.

Americans are addicted to oil, like a heroin user to drugs, and they're running out of the black stuff.

If... insisted on putting a fictional scenario together with interviews and issues that were real. The soapy sub-plot about a woman trying to have a baby and lead an oil-drilling team in Alaska was poorly written and unnecessary.

So was the drama involving her American parents adjusting to life without a car and dad getting beaten up in a nasty outbreak of road rage at the petrol station.

I dreaded each time we left the experts to return to dreadful Jess and her domestic problems. More interesting was worrying how the world, notably America, would adjust to having no oil.

Literally going to the ends of the Earth to find the last oil well means untouched areas of natural beauty and its wildlife are at risk as man gets more desperate to fill up his car.

The oil that's left is very politically difficult to get to, making it a massive challenge for the energy industry and consuming country's governments. It's not so much that oil is running out but that the oil market can't expand to meet increased demand.

Shortages are created when demand exceeds supply, creating hoarding which creates more shortages. It's easy to get sucked into this vicious spiral. Dreary Jess and her fictional problems undermined the shock value of the real situation.

We should have been considering how people and communities, built and operated around oil, would have to change to meet an oil-less society, not being asked to care about Jess taking a pregnancy test in the middle of drilling a wildcat well.

More important were those warning that if we don't prepare for the end of the oil age, we're in for a very hard time. To ram home the point, the end caption told that "while you have been watching this film the world has consumed 3,550,000 barrels of oil".