How TV portrays the security industry – usually Security comes out of it badly.
A television advert in summer 2000 to promote Sir Alex Ferguson’s story serialised in the Sunday Times newspaper featured a security guard reading the said story while supposedly guarding one of Sir Alex’s trophies won by Manchester United Football Club. The punchline in the ad comes where Sir Alex comes upon the hapless guard, ha, ha. A 2000 ITV drama starring Ross Kemp as a security guard who inadvertently becomes a natioonal hero shows the manned guarding sector as bumbling and simply not doing its job. The nightclub E20 in the BBC1 soap opera EastEnders never seems to have any door staff or door policy or indeed any trouble that merits having door staff – maybe that is why they are never in sight’ Beppe and Steve the pair running the club have Billy as their glass-collector, who earlier in 2000 was supplying Steve with illegal drugs – Beppe (being a former police officer) not being in on this, takes some of the drugs, mistaking them for legal tablets. Do any of the above bear any resemblance to stewarding and private security in the UK today – not just average practice, but extremes’ Do television portrayals of private security bear any resemblance to reality’ What are they playing at, the people researching, commissioning, acting in and putting into the schedules these pieces of damaging nonsense’ What are they doing other than working in the laziest manner, putting their prejudices into the script in the name of making ‘good’ (sensational) television’
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A raw deal’
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You could argue that private security is not the only sector getting a raw deal from television drama and the media generally – the way journalists are portrayed, for instance, is way behind the times too. But to compare security with the police, security is clearly coming second. There are sympathetic and fairly realistic police characters such as Emma in Coronation Street that show the officer as human. And of course there is the long running ITV hour-long series The Bill, besides out and out comedies that are not meant to show the police as serious and are only vehicles for laughs, such as Rowan Atkinson’s The Thin Blue Line. Yet it is well known – though not researched to the extent that we can actually give any concrete numbers – that there are far more people working in the private security sector than in the police. Why does private security have a low and poor profile in TV as in society generally’ It matters in that 1) TV viewers, who after all are the people using shopping centres and banks and offices with guards, are to some degree affected by what they see on the telly. If TV reinforces outdated prejudices about security guards as incompetent and odd insomniacs, those prejudices will stick; 2) younger viewers will be put off a career in private security – how many school and local education authority careers teachers are suggesting to school-leavers that they can have a career – let alone an interesting and profitable career – in security’
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What is to be done?
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What can security managers do when they see plain silly or wrong portrayals of the industry? The British Security Industry Association in a recent newsletter asked for members to pass details of examples for the BSIA to make a case to the media about unfair stereotyping. The temptation to shrug your shoulders is great – what good will a letter or e-mail do, assuming you send it to the right movers and shakers, and that they go as far as reading it’ Elsewhere on this website is a similar discourse on how swathes of UK academia are anti-private security by instinct, stressing the need for freedom from surveillance, and underplaying <br>
1) the fact that security is necessary against crime within and without the organisation and <br>
2) that the security operations in universities are protecting those very academics, few of whom are doing any research into the industry. How to win over the sceptics, or even to get a fair hearing, depends in part on private security attaining a sounder position in UK society – regulation, higher pay and status. It’s a chicken and egg situation, while TV stations put down the industry.
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Reasons to be cheerful
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A bright sign is that TV is shifting from its prejudices against one aspect of the security industry – CCTV. Taking a lead from academia – whose members are of course glad to star on the telly – TV has traditionally featured CCTV, if at all, as a ‘spy camera’ intrusion on our civil liberties. Yet CCTV footage can make ‘good ‘ (that is, watchably exciting) television. Hence documentaries such as ITV’s Beware: Vandals on the Rampage on October 3, and what can be termed the crime-fighting genre – Crimewatch on BBC, Lights:Camera: Action on ITV. These, let it be noted, are very much from the police’s point of view foremost, the police being well aware of how important it is to show their best face in the media and to kick up a fuss (whether loudly or with a discreet word by the right person in the right ear) when the police are shown in a bad light. It could be that security managers and their organisations ought to actually spend some time and money on getting a good press – reacting positively to media approaches (while being wary of smooth talkers who are only out to stitch people up in the name as ever of ‘good’ TV) and offering their own success stories to the press and TV programme makers. But security managers are very busy people and their organisations are rightly wary of being identified as having security problems that want solving or even having a security staff to deal with. One outstandingly good BBC1 documentary that put CCTV and retail and Oxford Street crime-fighting in a good light was Shops Robbers and Videotapes, screened one 9.30pm in July. Again, the programme concentrated on police and while private security got a look in, individual retailers were not identified – presumably making a corporate decision that being linked with the documentary by name was overall a bad thing. Instead, the non-police organisation to do with security that did get a mention was the British Retail Consortium. It appears then that it is up to the security industry bodies to take a lead:<br>
– to bang the drum for private security in general;<br>
– to very selectively but effectively drop like a tonne of bricks on programme makers, and the TV stations using their pernicious products, whenever the security industry is shown in a laughably yet damagingly poor light. That way, the people actually writing and casting and paying for the drama think twice next time;<br>
– to go out and try to interest said programme makers and TV stations in some truths about private security.<br>
That’s a very uphill struggle, admittedly. In a seminar about door stewarding and the leisure industry at Ifsec 2000, Stefan Hay of SITO told the audience that he spent half an hour on the telephone to a woman from Granada, the ITV company behind the Ross Kemp drama. Suffice to say that all he said went in one ear and out of the other – as the finished programme demonstrated. Perhaps as long as it’s possible and profitable in a free society to make drama out of stereotypes, the problem of media misrepresentation will stay with us.
