Collision - Anatomy of an accident

What do the following dead people have in common: Albert Camus, Jackson Pollock, James Dean, Jayne Mansfield, General George Patton and Princesses Grace and Diana? Diana's inclusion in the list should be the killer clue that this is a roll call of celebrities who departed this life in a car crash, although road traffic accidents are a common-enough experience for us civilians, too – and not just from rubber-necking motorway pile-ups. I have personally known two people who have died in their cars and I imagine that is a fairly average tally.

The universality of the experience and its life-shattering impact have made the car crash an attractive subject for screen writers, whether it's the medical emergency of the week on Casualty or the heady meeting of minds between J G Ballard and David Cronenberg in the 1997 movie Crash. And next week, a new ITV1 drama "event" (in other words, it's screening over five consecutive nights), Collision, joins a healthy sub-genre of screen dramas that have used auto accidents to explore the human stories of those mangled by them.

"I've always had an interest in motorways," says the Collision writer Anthony Horowitz. "I divide my life between London and Suffolk, and spend a lot of time on the A12, and it's always occurred to me that every journey you make has a story – and that all these different people hurtling around at 70mph in one-ton killing machines is in itself an interesting situation. The tiniest little incident can change your life forever."

In classic portmanteau fashion, Collision follows the stories of the different individuals who are going to come together in the pile-up, including a millionaire property dealer (played by Paul McGann), a piano teacher with a guilty secret (David Bamber) and the great Phil Davis as a man taking his mother-in-law (Sylvia Sims) out for a spin. The cast also includes Dean Lennox Kelly from Shameless, and Douglas Henshall and Kate Ashfield as the police officers investigating the accident.

"There was a film I'd seen as a boy which had a train crash – a sort of anthology film – and it told all the different stories involved in it," says Horowitz, referring to the 1949 Ealing drama Train of Events, starring Jack Warner and Peter Finch. "I've always had an interest in the question of how much you are in control of your own life. For example, if this conversation is one minute shorter than it might have been and you leave one minute earlier, your life might take a completely different turn."

Somewhat distracted by this thought, we fail to discuss the case of the author Albert Camus, who was killed in a car driven by Michel Gallimard, his publisher and close friend, in a small town in Burgundy in January 1960. Camus was famously found to be carrying an unused train ticket for the journey he was undertaking when he died. What if he had gone by rail instead? Or what if Dodi and Diana had decided to make an early night of it? "How do we recognise these crucial moments in our lives?" wonders Horowitz. "The answer is, of course, that we can't. You could say that we're all in a dance of death and we never know who we're going to be waltzing with next."



Source