BY pressing ahead with its rail crash storyline on Casualty, the BBC is showing a callous disregard for the feelings of those affected by the Great Heck disaster.

It is not good enough for the corporation to meekly claim the Casualty plot was written before the real-life tragedy.

Broadcasters cannot simply say "we thought of it first" and carry on as though nothing had changed.

There was a time when BBC bosses would have quietly shelved the episode after the North Yorkshire crash. Now they apparently view it as a way to draw attention to their show, bringing in a few extra viewers in the process. The victims' feelings have been ignored.

The producers cannot possibly argue that the Casualty plotline is nothing like the terrible events that caused the Great Heck collision. Fiction and reality are uncannily similar. In Casualty, a vehicle plunges off a railway bridge onto the line below. Freight trains are running on the track. The driver calls for help on his mobile phone.

Admittedly, the vehicle in question is an ambulance and not a Land Rover towing a trailer. But that is hardly enough to distance it from the real horror.

Another of the BBC's lame excuses for going ahead with the episode is that it will not be screened until the autumn. That, however, meant filming in March, in the immediate aftermath of Great Heck.

Those bereaved, injured or traumatised by Great Heck will not be right as rain by the autumn.

When Emmerdale ran its Lockerbie-style plane disaster, bereaved families were distraught - and that was broadcast five years after the real thing.

The BBC's decision to film the sequence has outraged Great Heck victims.

If it does screen the show in the autumn, it will cause further anguish.

To do so would be to exploit their pain for Saturday night entertainment.

That would be despicable.

Updated: 11:36 Wednesday, April 18, 2001