This is a little piece by an American singing the praises of a number of British TV police dramas that I haven't seen. The author tells us what is striking about British cop shows compared with American ones. There is the issue of guns, of course, but his first point was this:
"... in the British shows, closed-circuit television surveillance is everywhere ... Crime shows set in Britain may offer the best way—apart from actually moving there—to appreciate how much the nation has become a quasi-benevolent surveillance state. If the police need to determine someone’s whereabouts at a particular hour on a particular night, they will dutifully interview witnesses, check phone records, and otherwise establish alibis much as they would in the United States. But they will also—as any fan of these shows can readily attest—check the CCTV. (According to the BBC, Britain has one CCTV camera for every 11 inhabitants.) That’s true even on Shetland, which follows Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez (Douglas Henshall) as he and his team bring justice to the tiny sub-Arctic islands (population 23,000), more than 100 miles north of the Scottish mainland. Those distant hamlets and lonely roads sit under the watchful eye of CCTV, too. ... The awareness of supervision lends British series a greater sense of control, of order, relative to the urban chaos that prevails on American television. Crime is experienced as a deviation from the norm—something that fell into the cracks between the cameras—rather than the norm itself."
My own experience is that CCTV is pretty useless if you ever need it, but we are talking about fiction. The writers of these police dramas put CCTV into their dramas in the same way that Conan Doyle and Christie put guns into theirs: they are something you would plausibly find hanging around without needing to install clunky plot machinery. Wouldn't you like to see a Chinese police drama, just for these kinds of incidental detail?
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