Moral panic is the right reaction: we are afraid of our young

Some things don’t change in Britain: the teddy bears and CCTV pictures, for example. First come the teddy bears. A princess dies in a sordid drunken accident, a child is abducted in Portugal, two girls are brutally murdered in Soham, a child is shot accidentally-on-purpose and you can’t open a newspaper without seeing a photograph with a teddy bear in the foreground among the gladioli. The legitimate grief of the people most directly involved is swamped by the maudlin tears of strangers who muscle in on it; and the stuffed toy becomes for us what black-plumed horses were for the Victorians. I look forward to the day when the lions in Trafalgar Square are replaced by teddy bears, as being more consonant with the new, improved British national character.

Then, if the occasion of the outpouring of ersatz emotion — one might call it a griefoid-reaction — is a peculiarly nihilistic crime, the announcement soon follows that it took place on camera.

Of course, the pictures aren’t much good, they are what is known as ‘grainy’, that is to say they need forensically dubious computer-enhancement taking days or weeks in order to produce even disputable evidence of identity, but somehow this reassures the public that capture of the culprit, with condign punishment to follow, is at hand.

But the singular failure of CCTV cameras to moderate the behaviour of the British — unless you take the optimistic view (or is it the pessimistic view? It’s so difficult to tell the difference between them nowadays) that it would be even worse without such cameras — points surely to another cultural trait, namely the ambition of a lot of young Britons to appear on screen while being nothing but themselves, that is to say without any effort. How else but the worship of one’s own banality, combined with a propensity to dream of the unlimited powers of consumption, can one interpret the success of programmes such as Big Brother? The cameras in the street are but a rehearsal for the big time.