You can’t hide
Season two of Hunted drives home the fact that the UK is a difficult place to disappear in. Equally, there’s no escaping Ellen’s birthday, finds Steve Kilgallon.
The British television show Hunted has a great proposition: a group of people are given 28 days to stay at large while a team of expert hunters chase them. If they can survive, they share a $100,000 jackpot.
It’s like The Running Man, without Arnold Schwarzenegger and the man who looked like an electronic Christmas tree.
Jonathan Smith’s voiceover for season two of the show (TVNZ, Thursdays, 9.30pm) describes Britain as “one of the most watched countries in the world”.
I suspect that in Britain, where there are between 4 and 5.9 million CCTV cameras on one island, the scales tip a different way to how they would in New Zealand, where you could easily disappear into the Ureweras for a month and re-emerge to claim the cash.
In a grimly dystopian touch, the team of hunters – police officers, customs officials, psychologists, data analysts… all those people you intrinsically distrust – seem to have limitless powers to tap CCTV cameras, hack the hunted’s devices, force their families to tell them everything, post up wanted signs and offer rewards for those shifty enough to grass up their mates.
The lead hunters are the former head of counter terrorism for the City of London police and the former head of covert operations for the Met Police – so we are assured this is genuinely how you would chase down a crim in real life.
Most of the hunting is done from inside a bland office, and online. A small crew of solemn-faced “ground hunters” do the actual leg work.
They all sit and explain how they work and what they do, which is fascinating, although most of the time they’re talking you mainly feel like booing.
However, by the end of episode one, this crack team had somehow failed to catch anyone yet, not even the bloke who decided to escape on a pushbike along a canal towpath, so you’ve not missed much.
Episode two, showing this week, opens on day eight of the chase and focuses principally on a couple of ex-military amputees, who rely on a network of fellow injured former servicemen to plot their escape. Inside the first 10 minutes, they are tracked – bizarrely – to an Indian restaurant in Blackpool, but the chasers unaccountably fail to grab them.
“What would you do?” asks Smith’s voiceover. Not what toffs Hamish and Mikayla do – which is go water-skiing in the Lake District. But you do sit there, watch, and wonder: if you were being hunted how long would you really last?
I often have the misfortune to see bits of the Ellen show (9am, weekdays, TV3), which appears as aural wallpaper while I’m working and the TVNZ breakfast show has concluded. In her 60th year, Ellen appears to be conducting an experiment with the laws of television, by hosting a show in which the guests talk only about Ellen, or about her 60th birthday party, now some weeks into the rearview mirror but still constantly celebrated. It’s like a daily remake of Being John Malkovich, and makes Mike Hosking look like a shy, retiring wallflower in the comparative ego stakes.