The cyber thriller that’ll make anyone over 30 feel VERY old
To a teen, anyone older than their 20s is ancient. You might as well be 103 years old as 33. It’s always been that way. But one telling moment revealed the gulf in modern Britain, as teenager Maisie Williams confronted her online stalker in Cyberbully (C4). She looked at the slightly dated slang in the scary messages pinging up on her screen, and guessed: ‘You’re over 30, aren’t you?’
The point is that Britons under 30 have never known a life without the internet. and if they’re under 20, they have never l i ved without constant surveillance.
our tablets, phones and laptops have built-in eyes to watch us and GPS locators to track us — and we love our digital spies so much that we queue all night to own the latest and the most intrusive technology.
If you’re old enough to remember when making a call away from home or the office meant standing in the rain outside a red booth, waiting to use a public telephone at 20p for two minutes, you’ll be wary of these overpriced chunks of glass and silicon.
You probably wouldn’t dream of sending a saucy selfie — but then, you and I are of a generation that thought twice before taking our holiday photos to be developed in Boots, in case the spotty herberts in the developing lab caught sight of us in our bathing costumes.
For the current crop of teens, there are no such inhibitions. Their phones are like an extension of their arms. Think of the young couples you’ve seen in cafes and restaurants, sitting silently opposite each other, staring into their miniature screens — all their social lives are held in the palms of their hands.
Cyberbully tried to envisage how horrible life would instantly be if those wireless spies betrayed us, if some malign force took over the social networks.
Maisie, who i s superb as the tomboy and would-be assassin arya Stark in Game of Thrones, played Casey — a stroppy 17-year-old, shut in her bedroom while her longsuffering dad relayed messages through the door (‘I’m home . . . Your dinner’s ready . . . Football’s on!’)
as she nattered online with her friends, through Twitter, Facebook and a host of other transient apps, someone was watching her. Casey never found out who: male or female, some kid from school or an anonymous pervert.
Whoever it was, they had been following everything she did, prying into her messages and even noting what medication she took.
To heighten the sensation of creepiness, it often felt as if the viewer was the hacker, because much of the drama was shot through the spyhole lens in Casey’s laptop.
The story was a miniature melodrama, mostly a two-hander played between Casey and the electronic voice issuing from her screen.
But by the time she snapped shut her screen and tore open the bedroom door, it seemed more like a morality play — a warning against the temptations of living life through the internet.
The chasm between youth and maturity i s the big j oke of Brooklyn Nine-Nine ( E4), the Golden Globe-winning police sitcom that is back for a second series. Like a cross between Starsky & Hutch and Grange Hill, it’s a pell-mell comedy of sight gags, swagger and name-calling.
Saturday Night Live comic andy Samberg plays Detective Jake Peralta, an over-grown schoolboy with a secret crush on his biggest rival — Detective amy Santiago (Melissa Fumero). Every arrest he makes, he is showing off to catch her attention: he might as well be pulling her pigtails.
Their humourless chief, Captain Holt, is played by andre Braugher as a granite mountain of a man, perpetually on the brink of crashing down on his unruly crew like a landslide. He’s the teacher battling to keep order in a classroom full of nine-year- olds who have overdosed on fizzy pop.
New York’s police department has faced a media onslaught in recent months, but Brooklyn Nine-Nine doesn’t care about that. This is a world of slapstick muggers, where an undercover cop can infiltrate the mafia by joining in at a gangster karaoke night.
The first episode is repeated tonight on Channel 4. Try it — and don’t pretend you’re too grown-up to laugh.