Bottom line is that I’m a content provider.  The word ‘writer’ is more evocative, but what it’s all about is filling time.  And there’s so much of it to fill.  With the proliferation of tv channels, ever more inventive ways of occupying peoples’ attention are required.  And it’s worth keeping tabs on what’s out there, not just on the mainstream channels but off piste.

In this case, I’ve chanced on a show called UK Border Force on Sky 3.  And it’s fascinating stuff.  Pretty William Gibson in fact, inasmuch as science fiction often provides us with a glimpse of the unexpected present.  The protagonists work for the Home Office in exploring immigration cases, and with an esimated million people in the UK unlawfully there’s plenty to keep them busy.

One way to find suspects is to lurk around London’s tube stations.  The brief is to look for people who look distressed in response to the presence of these uniformed officials, and that includes upstanding citizens who see no reason for such work to be performed in public or at all.  Does that entitle the powers that be to handcuff people objecting to the exercise of their duties?

That’s an interesting question, and implicitly political: I can see the appeal of this show to BNP supporters, but the programme and the stories it portrays are more nuanced than single brain celled organisms could cope with.  Sure, a Jamaican guy is held and found to have 96 packs of cocaine inside him — a chance for us to see the modified toilet facilities used to examine what he expels.  Yay, one yardie busted!  But a Canadian man who’s come to stay with a girlfriend he’s met online, only the girlfriend is a bloke, which he felt too complicated to explain…is indeed allowed in.  Not the sort of result a fascist would approve of.

The biggest story is about a raid on a spring onion farm where illegal labourers are working — that tale results in the company providing the labour being given a hefty fine, which is one in the eye for the free market.  In all then, this is interesting stuff if you have any kind of curiosity about how the mechanisms of the state function with regard to enforcing migration laws.

Plus, there are some laughs to be had along the way.  When a Nigerian man proves curiously unable to produce his date of birth, the sardonic response from the enforcer is ‘It’s the day you get all them cards’.  And the whole business with the Canadian and his lover is kind of cute, even if it does point to government having jurisdiction over matters of the heart that could have gone another way with a less open minded interviewer.

Policing reflects the concerns a society has, though whether those fears are sincere or distorted and heightened by the media is a valid question.  And I’d rather that policing of all sorts is open to being seen on tv than being secret.  Problem there being that there’s a kind of of rough and ready unlawfulness that’s of immediate fascination to cameras, while more subtle white collar crime is effectively invisible.  And the bigger stories that may be involved in some stories to do with immigration would need considerably more work to convey onscreen than the kind of voyeurism that UK Border Force traffics in.