Many British readers will remember the long-running ITV series World in Action, which is credited with pioneering the use of covert cameras in a series of documentaries:
World in Action, an investigative current affairs series from Granada Television (1963–98), used these methods [of undercover filming] successfully where ordinary entry was impossible and where there was demonstrable public interest justification. To enter a guarded steel works where over ten workers had died in industrial accidents, this writer [Gavin MacFadyen] impersonated a local iron worker secretly to film where and how these workers had died. In other undercover films, on corruption and child labour in Hong Kong, he impersonated a Catholic priest from the Holy Carpenter Guest House, and an Indiana doll salesman. Later he would play right wing American television producer while documenting election fraud by the People’s National Congress in Guyana. Other producers secretly filmed while pretending to be anthropologists in Argentina while pursuing Nazi war criminals, and conventional tourists while investigating Czechoslovakia during the Cold War…12
Another World in Action film is particularly relevant to people carrying out their own secret filming today. In 1997, the team rigged an entire domestic home with hidden cameras. That technique, putting cameras in objects that then sit static inside a room, is the one we now see members of the public using most, whether it is in care homes, hospitals, when filming a nanny or even when catching a philandering spouse. Before such techniques came into wider circulation, journalists had invented them for television.
It was not just World in Action that drove through the use of secret cameras as a tool to capture evidence of antisocial or illegal behaviour. There were many other British TV series that used covert recording, programmes such as Kenyon Confronts (BBC), Undercover Britain (Channel 4) and Disguises (ITV).
There are more undercover television series and documentaries than I could list here. The point is that journalists have played a substantial role in the evolution of covert cameras; we have learned some lessons about what works and what does not work. I am trying to pass those lessons on to a new generation of covert photographers and videographers.
CITIZEN JOURNALISM BEFORE UNDERCOVER CAMERAS: ARMED WITH TOURIST CAMERAS
The first wave of citizen video journalism was powered not by hidden cameras but instead by the public using 8-mm and SVHS cameras to film events the mainstream media ignored. The sheer availability of those relatively small 8-mm and SVHS cameras made it possible for almost anyone to get a camera and record what they believed was important, rather than what some news editor decided to send a camera crew out to record.
‘You could now go into a shop in Bradford, Brisbane or Birmingham, Alabama, hand over the equivalent of $1,000 and have yourself an almost broadcast-quality camcorder kit’, Thomas Harding wrote of that video revolution.13
The existence of tourist cameras and video activism from the 1980s onwards produced worries about privacy. Hemmed in on one side by surveillance by the state and on the other by widespread filming by individuals, there was concern from some professionals that nothing would be private.
One leading video activist and later prolific Sky News journalist, Roddy Mansfield, wrote in Harding’s book:
Some people express concern that an army of activists wielding camcorders increases society’s ‘Big Brother’ factor. Yet if you attend live exports or sabotaging a hunt, you’ll be videoed by the police, private security guards and detective agencies working for the government, all of whom are compiling secret files on us. That’s spying on people. Yet when I see a security guard assault someone, or a police officer use unreasonable force, or a fox being torn apart, or a 400-year-old tree being destroyed, I’ll be the first one to video it. That’s not spying on people; that’s justice!14
Taking up cameras always takes bravery.
Those tourist cameras wielded by citizen journalists were not ‘secret cameras’; they were not hidden. They did still sometimes record important footage, where the subject of filming did not realise. The most famous early covert footage – filmed by an ordinary citizen – was the beating of Rodney King by a group of police officers in 1992, in Los Angeles. That footage was covert because the police officers did not realise they were being filmed; they did not know someone on a balcony had a zoom on a small tourist camera powerful enough to capture evidence of that beating from a significant distance.
WHERE WE HAVE ARRIVED: THE CITIZEN JOURNALIST AND HIDDEN CAMERAS
Now it is not going to be people like me who sweat most and really change things. The most interesting secret filming is increasingly not being done by professional journalists. Members of the public are taking up the baton.
In 2012, Joyce Zannoni was disgusted by what her mother was being fed in a care home in Leicestershire. Her mother was supposed to have only liquidised foods, but she had been served beans on toast. On another occasion, her mother’s window was broken and the ceiling was mouldy. It was clear that her mother was not being properly cared for.
The grand-looking house on the hill at the top of a pretty village, with its high stone wall and open garden, was not matching its exterior with good care inside – at least as far as Joyce could tell.
Completely disgruntled, Joyce took up her mobile phone and used it to film what she was seeing. The mobile phone in Joyce’s pocket had – in one fell swoop – turned into a weapon against poor care. It had turned into a method of gathering evidence. She captured hard proof that backed up her concerns.
At that stage, like most members of the public using their phone or a hidden camera to secretly record wrongdoing, she had no thought that the footage she was recording might be featured in a television programme on the BBC’s Panorama programme. That was not her purpose. She just wanted her mother to be given food she could eat.
Joyce’s phone was visible, but it captured what was really happening, without people realising, at least at first. On the footage you can hear when a care worker spots her and tells her she has to stop filming, that she is not allowed to film in the care home. Joyce has to stop – she has been discovered. Although it was not very surreptitious, it was covert filming in order to uncover evidence of wrongdoing until she was discovered.
Mobile or cell phone cameras are becoming an important tool for gathering evidence.
Joyce’s evidence prompted the council to investigate. They substantiated her concerns ‘under the category of neglect’. Their own investigators – coming in as a result of her evidence and persistence – found chaotic mealtimes and serious environmental concerns.
Later, we got involved and some of Joyce’s footage and her photos were broadcast on the BBC.
In response to the film (which I produced), and despite the council’s findings, the care home denied that some residents missed out on food and drink. They did not accept there was neglect and have pointed out that, since the film, an inquest into the death of Joyce’s mother did not conclude that neglect had been a contributing factor.
The owner of the care home also formally complained to the UK broadcast regulator, Ofcom, about that film, arguing that we were unfair. Those complaints were not upheld.15
Joyce’s footage and photos, combined with her incredibly diligent note-taking – she had kept all the relevant emails, dates and notes from that time – had won the day.
This example is only one of many from around the world.
The reach of miniature cameras will only increase over the coming decades.
They need to be used wisely.
NOTES
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