I’m not sure if
it says more about Channel 4 or me, but
I seem to be watching a lot of tv dedicated
to crime and social dysfunction at the moment.
Channel 4 passed
the Big Brother baton on, and needed something to fill the airwaves. So they’re
filling them with a specific side of British life, one where the majority of
people are punching someone, vomiting somewhere or flashing something.
And I seem to be
watching it all.
Last week,
Bouncers was a documentary following the lives of a group of
men with the unenviable task of ‘gatekeeper’ to the nightclubs of Newport,
South Wales. They scanned, with a look of unexpected contempt, the unsteady gaggles
of girls and boys seeking permission to enter these salubrious establishments. It
is up to Joe, Jamie and Geraint to decide who is likely to be more trouble than
they're worth and who still has the spending and drinking capacity to be
let in. Only the trained eye can tell.
“Sometimes I have to bar people”, Joe confided. Really Joe, you surprise
me. He goes on to recall the time he had kicked his way into a male loo to
find a woman in mid-bowel movement simultaneously performing a sex act on her
boyfriend or, at least, the man she happened to be sharing the cubicle with.
"She
said to me: 'Am I barred?'" Joe
tells us. "I said: 'I've just found you in the men's toilets taking
a shit while you suck your bloke off. Of course you're barred.'"
I'm not sure that I
needed to hear that anecdote. Still, I felt obliged to share it.
But it wasn’t all
crude comments and short skirts, Joe, formerly
a high-earning insurance underwriter until the recession hit the town, now
has to subsidise his job as a bouncer by working in a pawnbrokers. "It's a
right kick in the teeth, of course," he said. "But there's always
someone worse off." And he met most of them – pawning their jewellery by
day and drinking the proceeds by night.
So,
that’s drunk and abusive people in Newport covered, now to turn over to Coppers
for drunk and abusive people in Nottingham. But don’t worry, because here the
Coppers in question are the ones with guns. One member of the firearms team,
Jim, summed it up, "Shooting guns is
great.. It does give you that buzz … It's the Gucci end of the job"
Right.
But the thing about Coppers is that is somehow manages to be
both funny and tragic. This week, for example, featured Barbara.
Barbara was arrested by armed response
unit officers after turning up at someone's house and pointing a gun through
the window. Most people, faced with four or five police officers with massive
guns, might decide that a certain amount of diplomatic retreat was in order.
But not Barbara, who’d had a fair amount to drink and believed that the police
had turned up as her back up: "He's robbed my watch!" she screamed
repeatedly, a picture of outraged innocence.
Even though she’d
been caught pointing a gun through the window, she kept telling us all how she ‘didn’t
believe in robbing people and hurting people.’ Until of course she remembered the theft of
the watch and added, "but I'll kill that bastard!"
It turned out
that the weapon was only a BB gun and Barbara rapidly sobered to be quietly
mortified. As she told us of her past however, it was indisputably tragic.
And it’s a clue to the watchability of the show that the
documentary makers leave in the jokes and flippant remarks made by coppers and robbers alike, and trust the viewer to understand that laughter does
not imply a lack of seriousness.
Because we all
know that comedy is what you pull on over tragedy if you want to insulate
yourself from its effects.
And finally there’s
Party Paradmedics, which I couldn’t make it through. This was a documentary which, for variation's sake, showed us
drunk and abusive people in Kavos.
If you’ve never heard of Kavos, well from the 5 minutes of
the show that I could stomach, I gleaned that it's a hangout in Corfu for British
youngsters who want to screw each other, but not before getting absolutely paralytic.
Every day.
I turned off, not because I’d had my documentary fill. No,
rather because Party Paramedics was simply tragic, and for the first time in all of it, I felt embarrassed to
be British.
Anti-social behaviour may be as old as history, but its
brazen parade for the camera is a much more recent phenomenon. It's also one
that Channel 4 appears dedicated to documenting.
To ‘enjoy’ my twitter documenting of such
classic shows as #coppers and #bouncers you
could follow me @brownrach
