The Watchman was Beckett for the WikiLeaks generation
There are an estimated six million CCTV cameras in Britain – one for every 11 people. Who might be gazing at us from the other side of those unblinking, artificial eyes was a question we were asked to consider by
The Watchman (Channel 4), a compelling one-hour drama from writer/director Dave Nath that unspooled like Samuel Beckett updated for the WikiLeaks generation.
Stephen Graham ( This Is England) was persuasively grizzled as Carl, a working stiff monitoring a bank of closed-circuit screens in a nameless Northern city. Here was Big Brother on a minimum wage – all seeing but powerless. From his perch, Carl spied on his ex wife (Sian Breckin) and daughter (Imogen King) and poked fun at mate Lee (Kieran O’Brien) and his attempts to pick up a date.
Carl clearly saw himself as an authority figure but, ultimately, his witnessing of a drug deal and a subsequent altercation with the offenders confirmed he was a small, unimportant man with delusions of significance.
Nath’s background is in documentary, and The Watchman aimed to provoke as much as entertain. Following Cyberbully and The People Next Door, it was the latest Channel 4 drama in which TV thriller convention served as a springboard for an exploration of the dark side of technology, in this case Nath’s worry that CCTV can distort our world view.
Sadly, the attempts at social realism were slightly thwarted by the cartoon lairiness of the drugs gang who looked like an indie band gone to seed. Moreover, in the real world it is surely unthinkable that bad guys caught physically abusing a member of the public on camera would hang about for extended chit-chat – or that Carl would not have ultimately turned to the police for help.
Of course, too much realism might have deprived Nath of his nightmarish ending, in which Carl handed himself over to the ne’er-do-wells and was carted off to his presumed death (a delicious fade to black left space for ambiguity). In the end, The Watchman settled for spinning a rattling good story with a bleak conclusion that succeeded dramatically while evoking the paranoid thought that, whenever you leave the house, someone, somewhere is watching you.
Can Britain Have a Payrise? (BBC Two) was one of those shouty affairs in which opinionated individuals of wildly differing perspectives are seated slightly too close together in a cavernous studio and encouraged to disagree vehemently. Up for the discussion was the thesis that we’re all horribly underpaid – one in five Britons is officially classified as “low paid” – and should be out on the streets banging pots and pans in pursuit of a raise.
In fact, this one-off broadcast would have been more accurately titled “Why is Britain So Rubbish?”, with presenters James O’Brien and Steph McGovern outlining, with a relish that bordered on gleeful, the supposed dysfunction of the UK economy compared to its smoothly humming Continental neighbours. McGovern, business correspondent with BBC
Breakfast, visited Stockholm, where the locals apparently spend their time mooching around coffee shops and working six-hour days at cutting-edge start-ups – and, thanks to their worldclass productivity, still bring home more than Britons employed in the equivalent job
Back at base, O’Brien, an occasional anchor of Newsnight, was interviewing a business owner who looked like a middle-aged Harry Potter and said things like “All people want is handout after handout” (as with most of the contributors, his identity was not revealed). The boos rained down from across the aisle, where lower-earning members of the public were corralled – as a visual aid to the dim-witted, contributors to the debate were seated according to their annual salary.
With everyone red-faced and spittleflecked (and that was before the discussion moved on to Brexit), it was time for another intervention from the chipper McGovern. She was back with a segment in which Britain’s alleged decrepitude was demonstrated by having three random members of the public race against German carpenters to assemble some flatpack furniture (the Brits lost, obviously). “It’s not the Monty Python sketch about who’s poorest,” declared O’Brien at one point. The Watchman ★★★★ Can Britain Have a Payrise? ★★ For a review of The Great British Bake Off, see the news pages