Hi Paul. Can you give I4S readers an idea of what your role is on the show?
I’m the executive producer, alongside Charles Thompson, who is also CEO of [series production company] Steadfast Television, and Howard Anderson, who was the series producer. Howard and Charles have about 400 years of television documentary experience between them, so I couldn’t have been in safer hands.
What prompted your decision to make the series?
Five wanted to work with Steadfast Television, and my boss Charles came up with this concept and they thought it was just right.
Does your production company, Steadfast Television, have a background in making these types of programmes?
Before Steadfast was born, about two and a half years ago, Charles had a company called Folio. He made virtually every cops documentary on TV, from ‘Traffic Cops’ to ‘Shops Robbers and Videotape’.
He left Folio to form Steadfast where he now makes shows like BBC1’s ‘Sky Cops’, ‘ID Fraud’ and ‘Road Rage’, ITV’s ‘Send in the Dogs’ and the upcoming ‘Doctors and Nurses at War’. So Steadfast specialises in observational documentary.
I’m currently overseeing a project for Sky One that goes behind the scenes with the Immigration Service called ‘UK Border Force’ that should be on air in September. And on BBC1 tonight [July 9] is a series called ‘Cops, Cars and Criminals’.
Which cities and towns are involved in the series?
We filmed in Leeds for the first episode but stayed on to film for just one day when Millwall came to town to play Leeds Utd. Out of that day we made a whole episode, such was the action, showing the police working with mobile CCTV vans.
We also filmed in Wigan, City of London, Blackburn, Edinburgh twice, once over the Hogmanay period and finally the birthplace of CCTV, King’s Lynn.
Which agencies and organisations did you work with in the course of the series, and in setting it up?
We had to work with the local police constabulary and the local councils and the CCTV operators. All three had to be in agreement on the access, or we wouldn’t have a programme.
Were these agencies and organisations – the police, councils and control room operators – all positive in their agreeing to be involved? If they were any reservations, what form did these take and how did you overcome them?
Securing access was a big job. It was mostly done by a brilliant young producer called Diccon Green, who spent nearly nine months meeting ad talking to councils, police, press officers, Chief Police Officers and individual operators. It was a mammoth task.
Presenter Donal MacIntyre has a high profile in the UK for campaigning anti-crime broadcasting. How much was he involved in shaping the show’s content?
Donal’s usual style is to embed himself into a subject and make an investigative documentary. ‘CCTV Cities’ was more of a partnership with Donal. He spent a lot of time in the CCTV control rooms getting a feel for the job and a feel for the city as well as getting to know the operators. Donal was deeply involved in that respect and was passionate about the series, even though this isn’t his usual way of filmmaking.
Over the course of the series, did certain types of incidents and issues seem to you to be more prominent and problematic than others?
There’s a lot of trouble at weekends after the pubs close. You really wouldn’t want to use this material to sell Britain as a tourist destination. But having seen spent some time working abroad I really don’t think drunken hooliganism is unique to us Brits.
But there’s much more than just brawling in gutters. Across the series we witnessed car chases, ram-raiding, drug dealing, sexual offences, suicide attempts, shop-lifting, knife crime, football violence and an arson attack and a whole variety of offences, some more colourful than others.
In the control rooms that you filmed in, were the systems predominantly analogue video, digital video, or a combination?
There’s a real mixture of technology. Some tape based and some, like Blackburn, totally cutting edge. At the time of filming in Leeds they were about to ‘go digital’. While we were there they were VHS-based.
‘CCTV Cities’ airs at 10pm on Monday nights on Five, and 9pm Sundays on Fiver (Freeview channel 36, Sky: 182, Virgin Media: 186, Tiscali TV: 31). All channels are UK based.
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