Before television, François Truffaut once remarked, we used to stare at the fire. After television, what will we watch? If The People Next Door (Channel 4) is anything to go by, we will watch each other, using all that technology allows – CCTV cameras, nanny cams hidden in cuddly toys, iPhones secreted in our pockets, webcams streaming 24/7 on social media.
In this astute one-off drama from Ben Chanan, seemingly genial young couple Gemma and Richard move into a new house and immediately install CCTV cameras overlooking their front and back gardens. As I watched, I felt that soon every single thing happening in the world will be captured on camera. As their dinner party guests point out, everybody Googles their neighbour. Privacy is so over, and voyeurism has never been so easy or potentially satisfying. Not to mention degrading.
That said, Gemma and Richard’s footage is even more boring than watching paint dry. There’s the 1am front path. The 2am cat stalking something in the back garden. Marshall McLuhan was wrong – it’s the tedium, not the medium, that’s the message.
But then the noises begin, and Gemma (Joanna Horton) and Richard (Karl Davies) become obsessed. Are the couple next door in an abusive relationship? What about their toddler son? Why did he wander into Gemma and Richard’s house unsupervised? Why did he disappear soon afterwards? Have his parents beaten him so much that they locked him in his room to conceal their shame, like some grotesque update of the madwoman in Mr Rochester’s attic?
Chanan’s drama will appeal to anyone who has ever become suspicious about their neighbours and only later wondered if their obsessions have got the better of them. Maybe it’s Gemma and Richard who are the problem. Maybe they are the abusers, the law-breakers, the freaks.
Richard is initially unsure – maybe it is just his imagination working overtime. Is he creating something out of nothing as he nightly presses his ear to the wall? “I couldn’t tell if it was getting worse or if I was listening harder,” he tells the police. Social services visit. And go away without finding any evidence to support the couple’s fears.
“Where am I getting this from?” snaps Gemma. “Real life. Read the newspapers. People do horrible things to children.”
Fair point. So, soon the couple are going through next door’s bins, secretly filming their children, smuggling a nanny cam inside a toy gifted to one of them. And then, one night, when the people next door are out, Gemma and Richard steal next door to settle once and for all whether they are paranoid or whether their neighbours are, indeed, child beaters. As they wander the neighbours’ house looking for clues, Chanan ramps up the jeopardy – will Yvonne and Dennis return, and take out the intruder trash? A well-worn horror movie conceit, but I was cowering behind cushions.
Instead of getting closure, though, the interlopers get caught by the returning parents and Richard gets thumped by the divertingly unsavoury Dennis (which father among us, really, can get away with repeatedly calling his daughter Stinkabelle as he kisses her good night?). Then, understandably, they are taken to the station for some midnight facetime with unsympathetic police.
Chanan gently toys with the possibility that pregnant Gemma is hormonally challenged. “Being a mum,” one cop says to her, “makes you more – ” She pauses. “Intuitive?” suggests Gemma hopefully. “Sensitive,” counters the cop .
Channelling such camcorder thrillers as Paranormal Activity and Red Road, as well as cunningly subverting the basic moves of the venerable yuppies-in-peril subgenre (Pacific Heights or Unlawful Entry), The People Next Door asks topical questions without, satisfyingly, answering them. Does technology facilitate paranoid voyeurism as much as helping reduce crime? Can we ever understand the lives of others? What kind of weirdos put their bins out at 2am? And what kind of weirdos watch them do it?
If The People Next Door is a fair representation of Britain in 2016, I may have to leave. Everybody films everything. Gemma films Richard in the shower. Richard films Gemma and her bump. If only the cat had opposable thumbs and an iPhone, he’d be posting videos of cute humans on YouTube.
It is striking, then, that it was up against The Reassembler (BBC4) in the schedule. James May’s series, which finished last night with him reassembling a 1984 replica of a Stratocaster electric guitar in what looks like real time, has him worrying that nobody is watching. “I know there have been some catastrophically unpopular programmes over the years,” May conceded the other week before fitting the recoil starter mechanism to the body of a lawnmower. “But has it ever got to the point where the only person still interested in the programme is the person on the telly so there’s nobody really watching it?”
If no one is watching The Reassembler, it’s because, in this multi-platform viewing milieu, where everybody can monitor the lives of others without leaving their La-Z-Boys, we’ve found different stuff to gawp at.
