Friday, September 18, 2009

Cameras

Before I made this trip to the UK I had read that Britain was the most electronically surveyed country in the world. Didn’t believe a word of it of course. There were not going to be cameras on every lamppost and in every potted shrub were there? Wrong, there are cameras everywhere. Even worse there are notices and announcements telling you they are there.

I am a little unhinged by all this, I must confess. It is so alien to everything I am used to. I have travelled ‘up West’ to central London on both the days I have been here so far and the damned cameras are getting on my nerves. I am yet to spot the cameras in the previously described tatty High Street but I will find them ‘cos they are somewhere. Behind the sacks of rice outside Korean grocer number three is my current best bet. However once you get to the railway station the hard disks start whirring bigtime. There is one giving you the once over as you buy your ticket and three on the City bound platform as you wait for the 0937 from Shepperton. There are four notices on the platform telling you about the three eyes on posts. The train arrives and there are two cameras per carriage and one of those dreadful disembodied android voices telling you they are there. And we haven’t even got to Raynes Park yet. Once you are on Waterloo Station the surveillance really gets going. There are bloody cameras everywhere. Those seemingly endless subterranean corridors that link the various lines of the Underground at major termini have them every ten metres or so. There is double the number of loudspeakers as there are cameras. I am not yet sure what these are for but it will be to do with compliance of the great unwashed for some activity or other.

I asked my Mum about all this and she just shrugged her shoulders and said it didn’t bother her and it was probably a good idea as it caught bad people. And there was later in the day a really very odd illustration of this mindset. I was watching the telly and a reality program was on before Mastermind. The reality show was following a bunch of feds on patrol in Grimsby of all places. They came across a youth behaving badly (he just looked drunk to me) and gave chase. Aforementioned youth gave them the slip for a while as he scarpered down an alleyway. They caught up with him about five minutes later. Or did they? They weren’t sure it was him as his only distinguishing mark was that he was wearing a number nine England football jersey. Although good centre forwards are hard to come by, apparently their working uniforms are as common as muck. So the feds could have two (or three) blokes running amuck on a Saturday night in Grimsby doing Emil Heskey impressions. Sounded bloody unlikely to me but the feds had to be sure and thought they could do nothing until they were sure. So what did they do? They checked surveillance footage virtually realtime, saw nothing and felt obliged to let the bloke go.

A couple of things struck me about this. Surveillance cameras in Grimsby? Around Buckingham Palace or the Houses of Parliament perhaps, but Grimsby? Looking for illicit cod running? A rash of coble thefts? The ability to look at this footage pretty much realtime and this from a car was a little bit of a worry and then their reliance on the damned stuff being so great that any other sort of evidence in the absence of a bit of video footage was useless.

The Butler in the Library with the candlestick – but only if caught on video.

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