The Watchman was like Samuel Beckett for the Wikileaks generation – review

There are an estimated six million CCTV cameras in Britain – one for every 11 people. Who might be gazing at us from the other side of those unblinking, artificial eyes was a question we were asked to consider by The Watchman (Channel 4), a compelling one-hour drama from writer/director Dave Nath that unspooled like Samuel Beckett updated for Generation Wikileaks.

Stephen Graham (This Is England, The Secret Agent) was persuasively grizzled as Carl, a working stiff monitoring a bank of close-circuit screens in a nameless Northern city. Here was Big Brother on a minimum wage – all seeing but down-trodden and powerless. From his perch, Carl spied on his ex wife (Sian Breckin) and daughter (Imogen King) and poked fun at mate Lee (Kieran O’Brien) and his attempts to pick up a date.

Carl clearly saw himself as an authority figure but, ultimately, his witnessing of a drug deal and a subsequent altercation with the offenders confirmed he was a small, unimportant man with delusions of significance. 

Nath’s background is in documentary and The Watchman aimed to provoke as much as entertain. Following Cyberbully and The People Next Door, it was the latest Channel 4 drama in which TV thriller convention served as a springboard for a Kafkaesque exploration of the dark side of technology, in this case Nath’s worry that CCTV can distort our view of the world.

Sadly, the attempts at social realism were slightly thwarted by the cartoon lairiness of the drugs gang who looked like an indie band gone to seed. Moreover, in the real world it is surely unthinkable that bad guys caught physically abusing a member of the public on camera would hang about for extended chit-chat – or that Carl would not have ultimately turned to the police for help. 

Of course, too much verisimilitude might have deprived Nath of his nightmarish ending, in which Carl handed himself over to the ne’er do wells and was carted off to his presumed death (a delicious fade to black left space for ambiguity). In the end, The Watchman settled for spinning a rattling good story with a bleak conclusion that succeeded dramatically while evoking the paranoid thought that, whenever you leave the house, someone, somewhere is watching you.