JUST sometimes, among the general reality rubbish – most of it unbelievable, it has to be said – that is spewed out on today’s television, there’s a nugget of a programme that pulls you up short and makes you pause awhile and reflect.

The recent showing of Wootton Bassett: The Town That Remembers was one such offering. This hour-long documentary from the BBC told the behind-the-scenes story of the Wiltshire town’s spontaneous acts of remembrance for our fallen troops as they are repatriated back home, now a poignant symbol of a nation’s respect for its battle dead.

It all began in April 2007, when a handful of local Second World War veterans proudly stood to attention as a hearse passed through the town’s high street, bearing a Union Flag-bedecked coffin on its way from nearby RAF Lyneham to the coroner at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.

This very simple, private act of respect – done in much the same way as we might pause as a hearse passes us in the street – has now morphed “through a series of accidents”, said one resident, into an all too regular but unbidden outpouring of townfolks’ support for the bereaved families who make the dreaded pilgrimage to this small English market town, and a tribute to those who have paid the ultimate price in the deserts of Afghanistan.

There are so many “ifs” to this story that make it so remarkable.

Forgetting the politics of why we have troops in Afghanistan in the first place, if RAF Lyneham wasn’t the place where fallen troops are repatriated, if the John Radcliffe Hospital wasn’t the place where their post mortems are carried out, if there had been enough money in the coffers for Wootton Bassett to get its long aspired-for bypass, if those veterans hadn’t done what they did on a day that happened to coincide with the monthly meeting of the local branch of the Royal British Legion, if the legion hadn’t then spoken to the RAF base and said would you mind letting us know when another hearse comes through because we want to pay our respects, then this town of some 11,000 souls wouldn’t have become the place that has somehow come to represent us all.

On the town council’s website, details of each repatriation are posted up on its homepage after notification from the airbase that another hearse – or hearses, for on one terrible day there were eight that passed through in solemn heart-wrenching convoy – is to make its 46-mile journey from Lyneham to Oxford.

And although Wootton Bassett has become the focus of remembrance hundreds, if not thousands, of small acts are played out along the whole of the route, along pavements and grass verges, in lay-bys, on garage forecourts and at road ends, as people stop what they’re doing and stand in silent tribute.

Back in the town, on every repatriation day, the landlady of the Cross Keys pub makes sandwiches and brews tea in readiness for the bereaved families to give them some sustenance for the ordeal ahead. “It’s only a few sandwiches,” she says. “Just a bit of kindness…”

Schoolchildren pause in their post-lesson meanderings and watch silently, the only sound the tenor toll of the town’s church bell, and occasionally, a grief-laden sob. Shops close their doors. Residents – their number swelled by bereaved families and friends, not to mention those from all points of the British compass who want to show their respects too – line the streets in tribute. “They’re basically an unknown soldier to us,” said one, “but a son, husband, brother or father to someone else.” And the veterans stand and salute proudly, lowering their standards as the hearses pass by.

One of them is Ken Scott, who over the years has collected the hundreds of written tributes that have been left by grieving families on the town’s war memorial and lovingly preserved them in a huge album. “They’re sacred,” he says. “I hope I never have to fill it completely.”

More than 350 hearses have passed through the high street in the past four years, and they will continue to do so until September, when RAF Lyneham closes and the repatriation ceremony moves to RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. From then, hearses will travel the 20 miles through the village of Brize Norton and along the A40 to Oxford.

There’s talk of the county council building an area for people to pay their respects but somehow, this feels somewhat contrived, as though what has happened in Wootton Bassett can be exported elsewhere.

It can’t. For what makes this town so remarkable is that it didn’t set out to do this. It was simply a place on a map. Just like Helmand Province, a place that without forethought or design, the people of Wootton Bassett have brought closer to home.