Is seeing believing?:
Video tampering and fake reporting is becoming ever more common and convincing. So can people really believe what they witness, particularly if a person’s freedom and life is at stake? This is the background to the new British drama The Capture as James
New British drama questions fake news and CTV coverage.
Many world leaders seem quite happy to be “economical with the truth” – to such a degree that it sometimes appears as if we reside in a “post-truth” world.
In this disturbing environment of fake news, how can we have faith in what we see?
That is the premise behind The Capture, a gripping and highly topical six-part British surveillance thriller.
In this drama, created and directed by Ben Chanan, soldier Shaun Emery (Callum Turner) has been jailed for murder.
However, when his conviction is overturned because of suspect video evidence, he is free to go back to life with his young daughter.
But when apparently explosive CCTV footage emerges of him on a night out in London, Shaun’s life is sent hurtling off the rails – and he must battle for his freedom once again.
DI Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger) is brought in to investigate Shaun’s case, but she swiftly finds out that the truth can be elusive. Can she believe Shaun’s protestation of innocence?
Chanan explains the genesis of The Capture, which also explores the extraordinary capabilities of the intelligence services. “Video evidence is one of the most successful ways to convict a criminal,” Chanan says. “Video fakery is also becoming ever more convincing. So what happens when these two developments collide? What happens to criminal justice if we can no longer trust what we see? “When I began writing The Capture two years ago, these questions felt firmly like
the stuff of hypothetical ‘what if’ drama. I think they still are – but maybe not for long.
“Now, barely a week goes by without a new warning about the potential horrors of facial recognition, deep-fakes or fake news. Perhaps we will soon have to find new ways to judge the veracity of video footage.”
Chanan, who has also directed The Missing, Cyberbully and The Last Kingdom, continues that, “My characters, in their efforts to uncover the truth, fall back on more fundamental, human faculties – memory, trust, instinct. But these things are hardly infallible.
“Can the traumatised soldier rely on his memories? Can the idealistic police detective trust the institutions that surround her?
“Eventually, the soldier and the detective will come to question everything they know and believe in. This turbulent scenario reflects how the world feels to me at the moment.”
The Capture also works as a complex thriller because it cleverly intermingles different styles. Grainger, who has also starred in Strike, Patrick Melrose, Cinderella and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, observes that, “It mixes genres – the detective show, the surveillance thriller, the dystopian vision turned social commentary.”
But above all, she adds, “It’s contemporary and it’s now. It’s very much set in the real world of Britain today, and Ben Chanan has done a lot of research so it does feel authentic.
“This was apparent from my own research, too. I shadowed a homicide department in London for a week or so, and spoke to a guy who had been in Counter Terror for years. So much of what he said about that world is there in the scripts.”
The actress carries on that, “The story feels right and it feels real, and you believe it, even though the events that are taking place seem hypothetical at first. That’s what is scary about it actually – you watch it and you believe it could happen.”
This is indeed the most troubling aspect of The Capture: reality has started to catch up with drama.
Grainger asserts that, “Things have changed so much. When I first read it, it had a sort of Black Mirror-esque, futuristic quality of ‘what if surveillance was stretched to manipulation’.
“But real life is moving so fast that it now feels less like a dystopian future and more like social commentary, and so much less hypothetical than it did at first. It brings up so many moral questions of police, society and surveillance.”
Chanan reveals that when he began writing The Capture, even he had no idea how timely it would become.
“My ambition starting out was to create a modern-day conspiracy thriller that evoked the mood and paranoia of my favourite 1970s post-Watergate movies – The Parallax View and Three Days Of The Condor.
“I had no idea our current era would turn out to be such a good fit.”