I kept waiting for the twist that would prove me wrong, but it didn’t come. I just listened to all five episodes of the BBC Radio drama Steelheads, and it was so obviously thinly disguised anti-vax propaganda that I didn’t quite believe the BBC would be so stupid. But I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, in this week in which BBC news gave airtime to an accused sex offender to discredit his accuser without challenge.

The premise in this latest outing in the Limelight strand is intriguing: a tennis star with a brain tumour opts to go into cryogenic suspension in hopes of a future cure, but when she wakes up into a transformed world, she discovers that only a handful of years have passed.

Spoilers ahead.

It turns out in this show of thinly disguised metaphors that her brain tumour was a mere pretext to get her into the surrogate time machine, the cryogenic pod, which takes her forward in time five years. What has happened?

Well. Everybody had a “health chip” installed (“Because who wouldn’t want perfect health?”), but then the chips were “hacked” and now everybody has been brainwashed into being shiny and happy and ignoring their problems. For the slow-of-mind, let me point out that for “health chip” you should be hearing “vaccine” and for “hacked”—well, then it’s just the same script people have been using for the past year or so. Vaccines = mind control.

Oh, apart from the people for whom the “health chip” goes wrong, who end up being cared for in — and you won’t believe this got past the BBC’s editorial standards – The Bill Gates Rest Home. Because we couldn’t be spouting anti-vax propaganda without smearing him at the same time.

And who is behind all this? Behind all the chips and the hacking as well? “The elites”, of which Bill Gates is the only named representative.

That’s right: “the elites”.

The only thing missing was some mention of the Illuminati.

Anyway, I’d like to congratulate the BBC for this incoherent exercise in paranoia, especially at this particular moment in time. I’m sure it’ll be fine.