Cutting Edge (C4, Tuesday)
MacIntyre Undercover (BBC 1, Wednesday)
Looking For The Iron Curtain (BBC 2, Sunday)
Imprint (RTE 1, Thursday)
Such was the concentration on hidden cameras this week that it seemed prudent to wonder whether we were watching television or it was watching us. It really was a Peeping Tom-fest with workplace snooping, an undercover documentary and revisits to the Cold War dominating the schedules. Given all this prying and spying, it looks like paranoia is set to become the growth illness of the new century.
For his part, Big Brother appears to be moonlighting more in the private sector these days. He still gets plenty of work from governments, of course, but busybody employers are increasingly in love with James Bond gadgetry too.
Cutting Edge screened an episode titled Snoopers At Work. It left you in no doubt that many bosses and IT managers are busy spying on employees. Your phone-calls, faxes, emails, hard disks, Internet-use, everywhere you drive and much of what you say - it can all be monitored by employers. "If employees are innocent, they've got nothing to hide," said Tony Crilly, a professional bloodhound trading under the job description of "corporate fraud investigator". With 250,000 covert cameras sold every year in Britain, Crilly and his sort are creating a savagely destabilising snoopathon.
Watching another "corporate fraud investigator" scroll through a worker's private e-mails felt like being party to an obscene act of voyeurism. Doubtless it's true that some employees defraud employers but industrial history suggests that at least as much swindling has gone in the opposite direction. At present, the ethical dilemma would appear to focus on employers' rights to protect their businesses versus employees' rights to privacy. The central problem, however, is that under current law employees have no legal rights to privacy.
So, where does morally legitimate surveillance end and prurient prying begin? Clearly, if there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that a worker is stealing from a company or wilfully damaging it in any other way, evidence may be sought. But one of our nerdy corporate-fraud investigators said that if in the course of investigating an employee he found out the person under suspicion was visiting a therapist or having an affair, he would pass this information on to his client. As such then, even people's private lives are being commodified in the interests of capital. That's really great, lads.
We saw the snoopers at work. Dismissive of the possibility - indeed the strong likelihood - that they were profiting from violating ordinary people's privacy, they boasted about their gadgetry and techniques. "We mostly do surveillance installation at night. We even take camera shots of desks so that we can put them back exactly as they were," said one snooper. Smoke detectors appear to be a favourite hiding place for miniscule cameras and listening bugs.
Barbara Speirs, a formidable matron who is a regional chairman (the caption did say "chairman") of the Institute of Directors, stoutly defended employing professional snoopers. She defined fraud as "an emotional determination to give less than is expected of you in a dishonest way". It doesn't make much sense to me either but whatever her guff means, I wouldn't like to have to work for Barbara. She appeared to think she had a right to own people who contributed to making her profits. She seemed to me, let's be honest, disgustingly proprietorial and possessed of an emotional determination to take more than is expected of her.
But the snooping is sure to increase - in Ireland as well as in Britain. Given the little we now know about bank boardrooms, cabinet meetings and sundry shady deals in pinstripes, the notion that less-than-ethical bigwigs are routinely prying into workers' lives is doubly offensive. There are, of course, counter-espionage strategies you can adopt: always speak about bosses in glowing terms; visit only Net sites that are obviously relevant to your job; send emails extolling the genius, all-round humanity, compassion, saintliness and practically divine beauty of anybody you suspect may be snooping on you.
Or you and your colleagues might develop decoy paranoia: always act furtively; be cryptic in your conversations and emails; visit Websites flogging surveillance equipment. I mean, to employ Tony Crilly's type of justification, if the employers aren't snooping, then they can't be upset, can they? And if they are - well then it probably serves them right. The idea that the most powerful should have the franchise on fraud-detection is, clearly, a moral fraud in itself. Strong laws, framed not only in the interests of capital - though those too are legitimate - are necessary if social cohesion and personal privacies are not to be snooped to death.
THERE was more snooping on MacIntyre Undercover, a new five-part investigative journalism series. Reporter Donal MacIntyre strapped recording equipment to his body to infiltrate a "firm" of British football hooligans - the notorious Chelsea Headhunters. Big Mac certainly went the whole hog to perpetrate his deception. He hired a flash Mercedes to impress the savages, moved into an apartment block where one of them lived and even had a CFC logo tattooed on his arm. During the tattooing, Mac fainted. It wasn't the most promising beginning for the violence ahead.
Still, Mac did record some remarkable footage and conversation. We heard Andrew Frain, nicknamed Nightmare, joke about slashing an off-duty policeman's face. Nightmare did this while seated in Mac's rented Merc. As he did, Mac grinned and chewed gum maniacally. Jason Marriner, one of Nightmare's mates, recalled taking advantage of an away match in Poland to visit Auschwitz with some other morons. While there, they photographed themselves doing Nazi salutes. "The Jerries start going dippy. A Polish geezer starts crying. I think I put the final nail in the coffin when I tried to get into the oven," said Jason.
Nightmare, Jason and the rest of the Headhunters are all well over 30. They support not only Chelsea but Combat 18, the ultra-right, racist outfit with links to Northern loyalist paramilitarism. At one point, we saw them trying to attack a Bloody Sunday commemoration march in London. They waved loyalist flags, screamed chants about the UFF and UVF and threw bottles at marchers. But this wasn't politics - it was psychopathy. Likewise, in Copenhagen, Jason sought to be as offensive as possible. Some Danes kicked the crap out of Mac.
The guff of the hooligans was as moronic as their behaviour was sick. They spoke of "firms" and "top lads" and "manors". It was a Cockney cornucopia of the most vile bile. Jason explained to Mac the vicissitudes he faced in following Chelsea abroad. "I done my boll***s last year, you know what I mean. I went to every f***ing single one, you know what I mean. I was out in Slovakia and all that boll***s, you know what I mean. I done 'em all. Sweden, Italy, Spain. I done 'em all." I think we all know what you mean, Jason.
Certainly, some of this documentary footage was exceptional. Mac's script, however, was irritatingly pedestrian and schoolboyishly righteous, repeatedly emphasising the risks which we could see he was taking. At first this stressed Mac's vulnerability but gradually it grated. Still, the evidence produced did justify the use of deception to get this story.
Privacy and deception are, of course, major issues in media ethics and with the growth in the availability of miniaturised and sophisticated electronic devices, we can expect more Big Macs as well as more Barbara Speirses. At least MacIntyre Undercover came back with more than bonking "celebrities". The great irony in it all, though, was the idea of ultra-nationalistic, racist Brits following Italian-managed Chelsea, the most continental team in England.
RATHER more thoughtful, yet still obsessed with espionage, was Looking For The Iron Curtain, one of a number of documentaries commemorating the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Reggie Nadelson and Vladimir Pozner both grew up in New York's Greenwich Village and both had socialist parents. Vlad, however, went to the Soviet Union, where he became a propagandist for the system. Reggie, one of those just-too-confident American women, opted for journalism in the West.
The pair hired a Trabant for their 1,200mile journey from the Baltic to the Adriatic. As a directorial device, this had some appeal even if, quite predictably, it allowed Reggie to complain too often about it being a crappy car. They found remnants of the old Iron Curtain - mostly stretches of barbed wire and watchtowers - and they spoke to people who remembered the heyday of the division. As ever, their former health and education systems were defended by the commies and ex-commies. They did admit that corruption had become institutionalised and that collapse became inevitable.
Vlad, in fairness, was able to reassess both the good and bad of the system he had served. But Reggie, though she wasn't idiotically or offensively triumphalistic, was just too narrowly pragmatic about it all. She really wasn't interested in the contrasting hues of the big picture but settled for a reductionist "this works, that doesn't" assessment. Even a "more-of-this" than "more-of-that" works approach would have been defensible. But her crude "that's-the-way-it-is" evaluations, while being the standard way to view capitalism's victory over communism, didn't allow for the post-Iron Curtain Western propaganda, which clearly has vested interests in inculcating such simplistic, bottom-line judgments.
FINALLY, Imprint, RTE's book programme, which brought us from considerations of undercover matters to matters between covers. Theo Dorgan continues to present and he's doing well: knowledgeable without being egregious; relaxed but not smug; respectful yet not gushing. Compared with so many TV presenters, who clearly hail from the cominatcha school of egoism, Dorgan, in my book anyway, doesn't intrude between the material under discussion and the job to be done in interviewing guests and linking the segments of the programme.
This week, Eve Patten from TCD's English Department and journalist Liam Mackey reviewed Michael Baigent's and Richard Leigh's The Inquisition, Julie Parsons's The Courtship Gift and Ciaran Carson's Fishing For Amber. Bernard MacLaverty was the author interviewed and Joanne Hayden presented the weekly literary listings round-up. It was all competent and generally restrained. If it lacked the studio dynamism of the better Late Reviews, it was nonetheless more satisfactory than most book shows produced by RTE down the years.
Perhaps the break from the week's glut of paranoia-inducing documentaries made it particularly welcome. Anyway, on the strength of the review given to Carson's new book, I'll buy it. That's always the real test for reviews, isn't it? If you agree with them, they're good and if not, they're not. Should Carson disappoint, forget all the praise, Theo.