THE FALL, the film: thirteen and a half minutes, made from the three episodes of the series and their own recordings. Lily narrates; my cloned voice tells the story of the missile boat and closes the film.
THE FALL took three episodes and close to two hours to tell. It began with a kettle and ended in a control room in Spain, and in between it tried to say one thing: energy is never used up, only spread out, and what we pay for is the height it falls from.
Some of that is easier to see than to hear. So we made it into a film.
What you will see
It opens on an ordinary Monday, the 28th of April last year, a little after half past twelve. In more than twenty million kitchens across Spain and Portugal, the refrigerators hum. At 12:33 the power goes out, from Lisbon to the Pyrenees, all at once. Rafa Panadero, a radio journalist on his way into work, knows something serious has happened when he sees that every traffic light has stopped. When the engineers go looking for the part that failed, they cannot find one. Nothing was broken.
Part one is the height of the fall. One kilowatt-hour brings about ten litres of tap water to the boil, and if you follow its heat out of the kitchen, out of the house and into the street, it is all still there, only spread thin. Sadi Carnot saw in 1824 that work comes from heat falling from hot to cold, as water falls over a wheel. On the Earth, sunlight falls down a staircase: the sea, the air, rain on a hill, a river, a leaf, something that eats the leaf. We do not slow the fall. We put steps in it, and we live on the steps. Electricity is the top step, the one we build ourselves.
Part two is about staying in step. As a young engineer officer on HMS Ystad, a Swedish missile boat, I put a second generator online by hand: match the voltage, match the speed, watch the needle on the synchroscope, close the breaker. Get it wrong and you put the ship in the dark. Today every big generator from Lisbon to Istanbul turns to one beat, and the weight of their spinning rotors holds the grid for the first seconds after anything goes wrong. In the Nordic grid that weight would run the countries for about four seconds. Nothing stands behind it.
Part three is the twenty-seven seconds. An hour and a half before, on a recorded call, a man in Seville says: “I think we’re going to see a big zero.” Un cero gordo. Then the voltage climbs, the second balance, the one nobody can read off an oven clock. A transformer near Granada lets go at 12:32:57. Plants near Badajoz at 12:33:16. Five provinces at 12:33:17. The defences built to save the frequency take weight off the line and push the voltage higher still. At 12:33:24 the grid of Spain and Portugal collapses. Three seconds later the instruments read zero.
It was not harmless. Eight deaths were reported at the time. A study published in July estimated about 167 more deaths than expected in Spain over the next two days, mostly among the very old.
And it was not a broken machine. It was the fit between thousands of settings, each one chosen years earlier, for one device, on an ordinary day. A broken machine can be mended. An agreement has to be made again every time the world changes, by whoever is there to make it.
The film ends at my house, with the panels on the roof and the battery in the carport, and with the question the series ends on.
How it was made
The film is written as code. A program draws every frame from its moment in the soundtrack, so the camera can land on the spoken word: the breaker closes on “breaker”, and the lights of Spain go out on “once”. The ideas are drawn as engravings on cream; the machine and the Monday are light on black. One orange line runs through all of it: the staircase.
I built it with Claude Code, from the series’ scripts, research and recordings. Every number on screen has a source, from Red Eléctrica’s incident report to the Nordic grid operators’ figures for stored spin.
The series
* Part one: The Height of the Fall
* Part two: In Step
* Part three: Twenty-Seven Seconds
When the machine has millions of owners, who holds the balance?
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