Last night saw the first episode of Smuggled air on Channel 4, a new reality documentary in which contestants try and sneak past UK borders without detection. It must have seemed like a good idea when they thought of it, with much in common with another hit, Hunted, in which players try to move around the country undetected.
However, after 39 people were found dead in a refrigerated lorry in Essex on 23 October, victims of an alleged people-smuggling operation, you might have thought they’d think again. Indeed, the original transmission of Smuggled was cancelled last Monday – a casualty, as TV shows sometimes are, of current events rendering them deeply inappropriate.
So severe was the clash between reality TV and reality that many were surprised Smuggled went out last night, just a week on from its cancellation. The Home Office, which has responsibility for immigration control, has called Channel 4 “insensitive and irresponsible”, and even suggested, in an off-the-record briefing, that the TV network might have “blood on its hands”, a consequence that presumably would occur if real-life traffickers reproduced the tactics and routes shown in the programme. These views received more support on social media than is usual for a government department – especially one currently run by the often incendiary and contentious Priti Patel.
Pre-transmission rows over TV shows tend inevitably to be conducted between people who haven’t seen them. But now we have. Last night, viewers watched four attempts (another quartet will feature next week) to get into Britain without showing a passport or encountering border patrols.
A husband ferried his camper van from Caen to Portsmouth, while his wife hid in a cupboard. Four lads – one carrying a fake passport – drove from Amsterdam to Newcastle. A truck, with a stowaway under coats behind the front seats, travelled from Dover to Calais. A young man rowed a dinghy across the English Channel towards the Dorset coast. It’s unfair to those yet to watch to specify the outcomes of these missions, although you may assume that, if all four had been rumbled, politicians might not be feeling so sore.
From the show’s detractors, the most common – and compelling – complaint is that people trafficking should not be the subject of light entertainment, especially so soon after an illustration of its gruesome truth. But the closest it came to jokiness was the forced banter between the lads in the van, as a tactic to distract border officials. Even Hunted has an aim beyond fun – using a reality format to explore the range of surveillance available to the state – and Smuggled took this concept of a soft genre concealing hard journalism far further.
Its revelation of the porousness of British borders is not only embarrassing to a tough-on-immigration Home Secretary, but clearly has serious implications for a government proposing both a new hard border between France and the UK, and two mysteriously soft ones between the island of Ireland and Great Britain.
A second potential objection is that Smuggled breached broadcasting guidelines and laws; this is the area that the Home Office will have most feverishly explored. But, on the evidence of the episode shown, the series seems to have been impeccably “legalled”.
All the participants would have been able to produce a valid UK passport if challenged, and, while it might have been difficult to explain why one passport-holder was concealed in a storage space, to travel in such a way is uncomfortable not illegal. With regard to the Home Office’s fear of the exposed border holes being used by malefactors, it seems unlikely that operators such as those behind the transport that ended fatally in Essex would be interested in the single-body scams used in Smuggled because, brutally, the profit margins would not be high enough.
If an individual tried one of the ways portrayed, and died, then the broadcaster might, as the Home Office argued, have “blood on its hands”. But the government can already be said to have its fingers covered in the red stuff by allowing migrant trafficking to be as simple as Smuggled made it seem. Instead of moonlighting in TV criticism, the government department might more usefully address the border security lapses exposed by the show.
Smuggled brings to mind a stunt once common for popular newspapers, in which a reporter would hide a mock-bomb on a plane before take-off, then be photographed triumphantly holding it aloft after clearing customs at the destination. This practice stopped when, post-Lockerbie and 9/11, even the discovery of pretend explosives would be enough to delay or divert a flight. But the methods used by Channel 4 exposed no members of the public to inconvenience or danger.
Another possible objection is that transmission should have been delayed by more than a mere week. This “too soon” view is part of the most plausible complaint against Smuggled, widely found on Twitter: that it is simply insensitive and irresponsible to screen a show that alludes to the circumstances of more than three dozen recent deaths, discovered on British soil.
That, however, is a matter of, well, taste. In a culture hyper-sensitive to the risk of offence being taken, a reason might be found for banning almost all television – and, indeed, culture – because, with social media serving as a global register of distress, it can nearly always be proved insensitive or triggering to someone somewhere.
Although uneasy viewing at times, Smuggled is justified for me by revealing some of the reasons why it was apparently so easy to sneak 39 people into Britain in a freezer trailer – a question that, again, the government might find a more profitable use of their time than auditioning for a parliamentary edition of Gogglebox.
In a democracy with a free (though heavily regulated) media, if a government wants to stop a TV programme going out, there must be an unchallengeable case that transmission significantly threatens national security or individual safety. Smuggled doesn’t come near to meeting that criterion. Tense and revelatory, the show hid important reportage beneath its flashy chassis.
