My household has been watching a British detective series of an evening. As for many families, the overlap in our ideas of ‘light entertainment’ is inconveniently small. I am not entertained, lightly or otherwise, by explosions, speeding vehicles, violence or espionage. I have no taste for sci-fi or alternative realities. Others are easily bored or baffled by the slow development of feelings and relationships, especially when characters don’t say what they think and not much action takes place.
But there is a genre of detective series sometimes acceptable to all: a picturesque landscape, ideally in northern England or Scotland and so cheeringly familiar; a detective with enough emotional range and private life to keep me interested; crimes dastardly enough to provide an intellectual puzzle to those who like such things and not to strike me as distressingly plausible. I rarely care whodunnit, I’m along for the ride.
Happily, there are a few of these. And watching one this week, I was thinking about the narrative position of CCTV. In my writing life, I am suddenly interested in omniscient narrators, those strange figures particularly associated with Victorian fiction who can visit the minds and often unconscious motivations of every character, who foresee the ending and know the backstory. That kind of fiction is called ‘realist’, but I’ve thought for years there’s nothing less real than the omniscient narrator.
CCTV plays something like this role in British crime drama, tracking everyone everywhere, allowing stories and alibis to be verified or discounted, and unlike the omniscient narrator of the ‘realist’ novel, it mirrors our experience. Britain is said to have more CCTV per person than any country except North Korea. (I have not been able to find any authoritative source for this assertion, but plenty of data showing that there are a whole lot of cameras watching a relatively small population.)
Having spent much of my life in British cities, I was always aware of the cameras. They offer – perhaps false – reassurance when crossing a bridge or using an underpass in the dark, and though I knew bike theft would never merit a blue-lights response I tried to lock my bike in a camera’s gaze. As a solitary female pedestrian, often in areas with high rates of street crime, whatever my political reservations in practice surveillance felt mostly benign. Big brother can be protective.
As a driver and cyclist, I like cameras. Ireland’s epidemic of death and injury on the roads is multifactorial and possible remedies beyond the range of a novelist-with-opinions, but as speed cameras became common and then ubiquitous on British roads, as cameras appeared on a few and then most traffic lights, my experience of driving and cycling changed.
Drivers in Britain and much of Europe are generally more law-abiding and safer than drivers in Ireland. A smaller proportion of people elsewhere suffer and die on the road. This may well be because the citizens of formerly colonising nations have more justified faith that the rules are benevolent than the citizens of a formerly colonised nation, but many drivers on Europe’s roads are also descendants of former colonies. Much as I like a structural, historical explanation of human behaviour, here I would like to wield Occam’s razor.
In Britain, if you drive fast or erratically or through a red light, you’re highly likely to get caught, and if you get caught there will be automatic consequences, and after a certain number of expensive automatic consequences you will lose your licence. Once you know a few people to whom this has happened, you slow down and pay more attention; soon most people are slowing down and paying attention. Dangerous driving becomes aberrant.
I am not generally in favour of state surveillance, though more comfortable than with the surveillance of tech companies. It’s all very well while I voted for the government, but each side of British politics suspects the other of totalitarian ambitions. The increasing use of facial recognition technology in British public spaces is alarming.
But when it comes to the roads, among other factors more surveillance correlates with fewer deaths. Everyone staying in padded rooms all the time would also correlate with fewer deaths, at least violently and outdoors; ‘fewer deaths’ isn’t necessarily a final argument. There are causes for which we will die and the general Irish opposition to surveillance has the soundest historical foundations. But there is I think, as I drive on Irish roads, an increasingly urgent question about the cost of that resistance.