Turn on Sky One next week, and if it's not showing the umpteenth repeat of Friends, you're likely to come across a type of television that didn't even exist 10 years ago, but is now all-pervasive across British channels. You can choose from Cops, America's Dumbest Criminals, or most blatantly, Speed, "a documentary series providing a unique portrait of a country obsessed by the car". The blurb makes a half-hearted attempt to pretend that this is some kind of perceptive, Channel 4-style film, but we all know that it's just another half-hour of police footage, shot from a dashboard-mounted video camera.
For broadcasters looking for cheap, compelling product to fill their schedules, the explosion of video surveillance technology in the 1990s has been a godsend. Real bank-robbers! Real car chases! All that's needed is a little window-dressing to pretend that some sort of public service is being performed in these programmes. To be fair to Sky, its programmes are pretty unashamedly presented as the trashy tabloid TV they are, but the terrestrial channels usually get "respectable" types like Michael Buerk to add a little spurious gravitas. The pretence is that we're getting handy hints on things not to do on the road - useful advice like not driving the wrong way up a motorway. We all know, though, that what we're really watching is car porn.
Of course, surveillance cameras are everywhere these days, and provide fodder for all kinds of Real TV programming (how long before we get the Temple Bar Show?). But difficulties with privacy rights still keep most of this material off-limits. Car porn is easy, though - unlike the related genre of crime porn, there's no need to disguise people's faces - there are no faces, and all it takes is a little hovering blob to cover the registration plate of the car in front. Where crime porn reminds you that there's nothing particularly exciting about yet another guy in a hooded top robbing yet another bank, car porn holds out the hope of imminent, terrible catastrophe.
Our relationship with the car is fraught with ambiguity. We wring our hands over the carnage on our roads, yet we cheer the death-defying feats of stuntmen and drool over high-performance killing machines.
Even when people die in movie car crashes, it's never in the mangled, pitiful, messy way of reality. It's no wonder that Crash, David Cronenberg's perverse and beautiful adaptation of J.G. Ballard's novel, caused such outrage in Middle England for the way it made explicit the connections between cars, sex and violent death. Car ads and movies set their concoctions in historic cities or dramatic, wilderness landscapes, but one of the best things about Cronenberg's novel, and Ballard's book, is the way in which it aestheticises the real landscape of the car - 10-lane motorways, brutal flyovers, bleak, windswept embankments. Crash is shot on the outskirts of Toronto, but Ballard was inspired by the concrete badlands on the fringes of London, exactly the same terrain in which British car porn takes place. Ballardists will love car porn - it's the only time that television actually shows the beast in its natural habitat.
Not that there's much realism in surveillance camera-generated Real TV. The car chase in these programmes is the most rigidly structured and predictable of formats. The chase usually begins on a motorway, then takes off up a slip road, hurtles down suburban streets, goes up on the pavement a few times, skids through a couple of near misses . . . By this point, there's usually a chopper involved, providing some visual variety. The perpetrator never gets away, of course - who do you think is putting these tapes together? The police come out of these mini-stories in the best possible light - always calm, always professional, always getting their man.
American material is harsher, probably because it's not always under police control - and TV stations in the US can put their own choppers over a crime scene. The American footage also offers the possibility that someone might get shot.
The British variety of car porn has its own peculiarly domestic obsessions - animals straying onto motorways are a particular favourite. But we all know that things won't work out too badly - the first law of car porn is nobody ever dies - this is soft porn, with the hardcore stuff tastefully excised.
Interestingly, the rise of Real TV has happened at the same time as the decline of the car chase in movies. Since the 1960s heyday of Bullitt and Bond, it has seemed as if film-makers can't think of anything new to do with the chase, except raising it to a level of comic strip absurdity, as in the Lethal Weapon series. Ronin, a new thriller starring Robert De Niro, has some of the longest car chases seen in years, but it mostly comes across as an exercise in nostalgia. There is a sequence of some cheekiness (or morbid bad taste, depending on your point of view) in Ronin, in which black, shiny cars smash their way through the Paris tunnel where Diana died. Even movies these days, it seems, can't get by without a touch of that Real TV spiciness.