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I vaguely remember watching this when it aired on British TV, sometime in the mid/late '90s. It was a feature-length one-off drama, possibly a pilot for a series that never happened. Can't remember the channel but we never had Sky so it must have been BBC/ITV/C4.

It was about police in London (or at least a big city in the UK, so almost certainly London), in a gritty near-future where things were high-tech (for the '90s), society was more violent, acid rain & pollution, that sort of thing. Basically a fairly standard cyberpunk-influenced near-future setting.

The plot involved a hostage situation, it comes out that the perpetrator had taken his family on holiday to the US and they caught some disease they should have been immunised against - he'd tried to save money with falsified immunisation certificates. Pretty sure the disease was something 'old-fashioned' like TB that had come back in a new strain.

Does this ring a bell with anyone? I've occasionally thought of it in the intervening years but never been able to track down what it was. Every time I've searched I just come up with things like Bugs, Space Precinct, etc. and I know it wasn't any of those.

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    I remember this as well. It was the first tv show I remember where people used bluetooth headsets for their mobile phones. A big part of it was immigration from eastern Europe. Pretty sure it was a BBC production.
    – Jon B
    Commented May 26 at 21:10
  • these are all the British SF shows I can think of from that period... Cold Lazarus, Ultraviolet, The Last Train but none of them match...
    – skyjack
    Commented May 27 at 4:42
  • @JonB I'm pretty sure the one you have in mind starred Trevor Eve, but I can't remember the title and his IMDb filmography doesn't help.
    – user134664
    Commented May 28 at 16:04
  • @JonB Aha! It's the Screen Two episode Black Easter. But IIRC the hostage situation was a relatively minor side-plot in that, so I'm not convinced enough it's what OP's looking for to make that an answer.
    – user134664
    Commented May 28 at 16:17

2 Answers 2

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This sounds like Police 2020, a pilot broadcast on ITV in 1997. It seems to meet most of the criteria in your question.

  • A feature length one-off show.
  • Broadcast on UK terrestrial TV in the late 1990s.
  • Set in the (then) near future.
  • Set in a UK city (Manchester from memory).
  • Plot features a hostage crisis, and a recent TB outbreak.

From the Wikipedia description:

Police 2020 is a one-off television pilot, first broadcast in 1997, that was set to be the first episode of an ongoing British crime drama series. Set in the near future, the pilot starred Liam Cunningham as DCI Billy O'Connell, the head of a police nightshift force, who is tasked with tackling an armed suspect, Eddie Longshaw (Keith Barron), who takes a group of Russian immigrants hostage in an elevator after blaming the immigrant population for an outbreak of tuberculosis that took the lives of most of his family.

The full film is currently available on YouTube:

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  • Yes, this is the show I was thinking of, thanks.
    – WillingUnable
    Commented May 28 at 21:23
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    No problem! It's one of the random things I saw as a kid that have stuck in my memory. I dont even remember much about the show itself. I think I was weirdly struck by the idea that I was going to be alive and in my mid thirties in "sci-fi times" :-D
    – JayFor
    Commented May 28 at 21:41
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This is a very long shot but it is just possible you are looking for an episode of a Channel 4 series called Futurecast which i believe was a spin off from the long running documentary series Equinox.

The episode you describe could be the episode called The Kidnap broadcast in 2000 so it roughly fits your time frame. It does seem to feature police, although whether or not the other aspects you describe are present is hard to judge as the only available clip is very short. The title does seem to imply a hostage situation.

You can watch a clip here...

If this is the show you are looking for then this question is a duplicate of this Trying to identify a 1990s mini-series exploring near-future scenarios

which is how I came to identify this as a candidate match for your question.

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