Never mind You’ve Been Framed — this was You’ve Been Mugged!
Soon every square inch of Britain will be monitored by security cameras. There won’t be a scrap of pavement or a blade of grass that isn’t under 24-hour surveillance. And a fat lot of good it will do us.
CCTV: Neighbourhood Watching (ITV) supplied video proof of some sickening crimes, committed by the kind of people who make you despair of humanity. And then it revealed the feeble punishments they received, which were enough to make you give up on justice, too. It made a depressing combination.
We saw a woman throw a kitten to her bull terrier in the street. She goaded her animal into a frenzy, and then she grabbed the poor cat and let the dog torment it to death, for seven sadistic minutes.
And then she had the cold nerve to offer a fake apology to the kitten’s owners. For this she was given an 18-month suspended sentence. That’s as good as no punishment.
Perhaps even worse was the cyclist, a degree student, who pedalled full-tilt into a toddler outside her house and dragged her for 10ft along the path. He was fined a pathetic £829 for dangerous cycling, and had the gall to bleat that the whole incident had been very unpleasant for him — he’d been thrown over his handlebars.
I suppose the little girl’s parents should be grateful that they weren’t sued, for causing an accident by allowing a child to walk on a pavement used by speeding bicycles.
It’s a pity the programme didn’t ask a psychologist why it is that so many grown men revert to being stupid schoolboys as soon as they mount a bike. You see them weaving past pedestrians, standing up on the pedals, doing wheelies.
Every day they whiz by, arms folded — look at me, Mum, no hands, aren’t I clever! Make them pass a test and pay road tax. Until then, they should have to use stabilisers.
That’s a rant, but television like this does raise the blood pressure.
The producers probably intended to make a cheap compilation of online videos, a caught-on-camera collection, but this was no You’ve Been Framed. It was more like You’ve Been Mugged — and there’s not a flaming thing you can do about it.
one retired couple surrounded their home in Lancashire with CCTV recorders to gather evidence of bullying and abuse by their next-door neighbour. She was hammering on their windows, ripping up their plants, yelling all sorts — and it took 14 years for the courts to act. Fourteen years of hell.
In the end, a restraining order was issued. That’s the legal equivalent of a stern talking-to, and bound to be a great deterrent, I’m sure.
In the meantime, the couple daren’t leave their home without a police bodycam strapped across their chests.
That’s the next level of the surveillance spiral: wearable CCTV.
Television has to stop treating footage like this as entertainment. In reality, it’s a frightening indictment of casual violence on the increase in Britain, and there’s nothing funny about it.
A starry cast including nicola Walker and Adeel Akhtar (recently seen together in BBC1’s River) did nurse some laughs from The Circuit (C4), a pilot comedy about a dinner party that verges on guerilla warfare.
Walker was having immense fun, as an ex-pop singer (‘I was in Bananarama’) whose girlfriend works in the arms industry. Akhtar was tying himself in knots of embarrassment, which he does so well, trying to convince everyone that he was that type beloved of London liberals, a ‘nice person’.
‘I’ve got Tony Benn’s autobiography,’ he pleaded. The host fixed him with a sneer: ‘Yeah, but I bet you haven’t read a single word.’
The script, co-written by Catastrophe’s Sharon Horgan, ricocheted between the satirical and the absurd. one moment it was mocking the dinner party set’s shallow insecurities, the next a Hungarian woman was weeping into her goulash and braining her husband with a wine bottle.
It was trying too hard, in other words, crowding too much in. If it earns a full series — and right now, C4 ought to be giving Horgan anything she wants — The Circuit will find its rhythm.