If real-life histrionics isn't your kind of drama, real-life cop chases, or even better, actual car crashes, might be more your cup of tea. On any given night (if you get multichannel TV) you can flick from Moment of Impact to Police Stop 6 to a show all about the world's dumbest criminals. Twenty years ago "real tv" centred around set-up comedy clips. Something like Candid Camera would contrive an "incredibly funny" situation, secretly film it - and we'd all laugh away at some poor gobshite.
Then the widespread availability of video cameras gave rise to shows such as Jeremy Beadle's Caught in the Act, whereby families sent in footage of really funny events like their twoyear-old toddler falling into the paddling pool and almost drowning. As long ago as 1963, "amateur film" gave us extraordinary footage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy - the famous "Zapruder" film.
Nowadays live footage plays an important role in American news reports, from the coverage of the LA riots, when amateur video was widespread, to the great O J Simpson escape caught on camera by TV station helicopters as he "tore off" down the highway.
Smart programme-makers are now feeding the public's appetite for such images. Something like Fox TV's The World's Wildest Police Videos delivers footage of "riveting drama" as video cameras catch "action of an array of police activity, including high speed chases, robberies in progress, SWAT team raids and deadly shoot-outs".
A programme like Cops (see it on Sky One) consists of a camera crew out on the beat with the cops as they catch all sorts of baddies. Storylines and suspense-stirring music are ditched in favour of blurry images of policemen "apprehending and detaining suspects". Meanwhile, over on UTV, Britain's Most Wanted is a sort of dressed-up advertisement for the work of the police.
We head out into the night with the cops in their helicopter to track down the bad guys. To assist us on our journey, we are given blow-by-blow accounts of the ingenious equipment they have at their disposal nowadays, from heatseeking cameras, which find suspects hidden behind walls, to infra-red cameras, which seek them out in forests in the middle of the night.
Many programmes, like World's Wildest Police Videos, use actual police footage taken from the dashboards of their cars. There is a certain appeal in what appears to be real-life action - who wouldn't be tempted to sneak a quick look if a cop car screamed to a halt in front of someone down the road? These apparently "real" programmes may feed those same voyeuristic tendencies, but there must be a big question mark over the veracity of what we are looking at.
Is it the whole truth and nothing but the truth? While Sky One is showing us the good cops of Kansas City apprehending yet another "perp", over on the BBC a programme about the work of Amnesty International is looking at next year's planned campaign, which will focus on police brutality in America. This programme is showing the familiar video footage, with the cops chasing down a speeding car.
Only this time, an officer jumps out and, pointing a gun to a woman's head, screams abusively at her to get out. Imagine you were on your way to school in the car with your mum one morning and she broke the speed limit. Imagine a garda pointing a gun to her head and screaming incoherently at her. We saw the woman in the Amnesty programme desperately try to undo her seatbelt so she could get out. The cop was apoplectic. Seconds ticked by.
She got out and he smashed her to the ground, screaming, waving his gun, cuffing her. This is "real tv", using the same sort of footage as Cops, or Police Stop 6, but it is not quite so comfortable. Programmes like Cops may just be a bit of light entertainment, but are they "real" or a distortion of reality? Does it matter? Or do these shows help delude us into thinking policemen are the perfect gentlemen who get the bad guys - allowing the police to get away with crimes and leaving us no wiser about the source of crime itself?
