Episode three of the ABC's Utopia on Wednesday will lead the show's co-creator and lead actor Rob Stitch's Tony, the Nation Building Authority's boss, to Canberra to check the feasibility of a very fast train.

As viewers of the first two episodes know, the NBA is full of grand dreams that never come true which makes it a great fit for this exhaustively planned and studied city. The NBA even sounds like our own National Capital Authority.

I would have thought Utopia's writers would keep clear of the reality of planning anything new in Canberra, otherwise plots would became so weird, outsiders would rate them too implausible.

Think about it. High speed trains barrelling through Mount Ainslie; a gas-fired power station shooting from $1 billion to $2 billion overnight, only to come back to a $1 billion price tag before blowing up completely.

Earless dragons, legless lizards and mouthless moths stopping planes and trains and everything else except cars and a planning authority sinking 350 bore tests into Molonglo's future residential site and missing 90,000 tonnes of asbestos.

Like many of his ACT planning peers, Hamish Sinclair loves Utopia.

Having experienced the thrills of working in the ACT's planning authority and federal NCA, Sinclair confirms stakeholder meetings are stacked with interest groups, as they are in Utopia, where they de-railed a new container terminal.

"All good humour is based on an element of truth, " he says brightly.

In 2007 Sinclair walked into a firestorm trying to sell the NCA's redevelopment of the Albert Hall precinct to inner-city residents.

"That was a trap, the project officer had gone overseas, and handed it to me. That was the classic grenade," he says of the redevelopment which residents hounded into oblivion.

Another big fan of Utopia is prolific planner Ian Wood-Bradley. A co-author of the Griffin Legacy, he saw a $60 million plan to turn Constitution Avenue into Canberra's Champs Elyseese torpedoed by the Rudd Government, only to rise again as a $42 million grand boulevard in 2013.

Now working for the ACT's Land Development Agency, Wood-Bradley has helped craft bold projects for Utopia including:

Woden's vertical village with three towers up to 28 storeys and sunny sky gardens.

Canberra Brickworks $100 million "Mint Interchange" - a dazzling traffic roundabout on Adelaide Avenue and Yarra Glen interchange, with connections to Denison Street and Cotter Road.

The City-to-the-Lake urban beach, heated for year-round swimming with geothermal technology.

There's a good chance Wood-Bradley had a hand in one of Canberra's biggest projects, disqualified for Utopia because it actually came out of the ground - the $700 million ASIO headquarters.

The reason this one escaped Utopia-like bungling was Wood-Bradley couldn't tell a soul about it outside a secret circle of planners and bureaucrats. (Disclosure: I worked alongside Wood-Bradley for a few months at the NCA in 2007. He couldn't even tell insiders).

When the glass edifice was revealed, Campbell resident Ros Gordon likened the secrecy to a passage of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, when Arthur Dent wakes to find a bulldozer about to demolish his home for a bypass.

He's unaware the Earth is also about to be demolished.

He's told the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.

"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them," Dent says.

"That's the display department," the council official tells him.

"With a torch."

"Ah, well the lights had probably gone."

"So had the stairs."

"But look, you found the notice didn't you?'

"'Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'."

Utopia, 8.30pm, Wednesdays on ABC