Turn on, tune in, drop off the grid: that was the promise of Hunted, Channel 4’s ambitious new reality series. A group of 14 civilian volunteers are challenged to survive on the run for a month while being hacked and tracked by a 30-strong team of professional “hunters”. The promotional trailers made it look like techno-thriller Enemy of the State, where a vast, government-enabled spying apparatus mercilessly zeroes in on Will Smith’s panicked everyman.
Now that we’re more than halfway through Hunted’s run, the reality has been slightly more prosaic. Most of the fugitives have lit out for the wilds or tootled off to the seaside: less Bourne Identity, more Bournemouth supremacy. But it has also been a thoughtful, often thrilling snapshot of modern Britain and our troublingly entrenched surveillance culture. As portraits go, it is also a fascinating visual mongrel, mixing Apprentice-style sweeping helicopter shots with whizzy computer maps, wobbly handheld footage and distinctive fish-eye shots from miniature cameras.
The Hunted contestants were deliberately selected to be a diverse group, so it has been fascinating to see some of the same things recur, even if the repetition must have been a headache for the production team trying to in effect differentiate each storyline. We’re four instalments in, and every single episode to date seems to have involved a key scene set in, around or underneath a static caravan, apparently the go-to safehouse in our national psyche. Fugitives such as the wily Dr Ricky Allen harboured a fantasy of leading the hunters on a swashbuckling John Buchanesque chase, but watching others such as bickering pals Emily and Lauren romp rather aimlessly with heavy packs over hill and dale in endlessly grey weather has looked more like the 39 shleps.
There are meticulous planners like Dr Ricky and reckless improvisers like Adam, who ended up hiding out in a freezing field after being grassed up by a barmaid he neglected to tip. A common tactic seems to be: “If I don’t know where I am, the hunters won’t either.” Many have headed north, as if Scotland is a place where CCTV and ANPR – automatic number plate recognition, one of the most effective tools in the hunters’ arsenal – are yet to arrive. If you’ve been watching in the surreptitious hope of planning your own successful vanishing, there have mostly been textbook examples of what not to do. Phoning home has repeatedly proved to be the quickest way to be reacquired as a target.
Last week, it was announced that CBS was moving ahead with a US version that, surely, will contain less swearing. One of the idiosyncratic joys of the hunted is how many F-bombs are deployed in both moments of high tension and during periods of prolonged boredom. How will it work in the US? The unpredictable nature of the show doesn’t lend itself to easily exportable format points. There’s a nagging sense the hunters need a signature line when they clamp a hand on the shoulder of their quarry. The closest thing to a catchphrase so far has come from Stephen and Martin, who approached the challenge like a lad’s holiday. After successfully creating a campfire near a canal path, they cheerfully celebrated their survivalist expertise with a cry of: “Bear Grylls can suck my dick!”
The runners are nominally on the loose but often appear trapped inside their own heads, second-guessing their pursuers, struggling with paranoia and even, in the case of Emily and Lauren, getting on each other’s nerves to the extent that they split up. What most of them don’t seem to have processed fully is what happens to those left behind. When the trail goes cold, the hunters calmly apply insidious pressure to spouses, parents and friends. If these known associates are unwilling to offer up useful information, they have their homes bugged by mics and tiny cameras. It’s the sort of casual steamrollering of human rights that we are conditioned to applaud as necessary ingenuity – the sort of thing Jack Bauer might do to track down a ticking dirty bomb – but here feels all the more chilling and upsetting because of the familiar setting.
The hunters don’t usually feel like the baddies, though. For most of the time, cooped up under unflattering lights in their London command and control centre, they seem less like evil agents of an indifferent state than laudably dedicated employees in an unusually stressful call centre. But with various targets on the run simultaneously, keeping track of the exact progress of each manhunt is difficult – the timeline of evidence-gathering and analysis, the movements of mobile hunter teams across the UK, the exact sequence of events as the noose tightens on a cornered fugitive.
For a show premised so much on surveillance, it’s clear that there is a lot of stuff we’re not seeing. Full transparency, following every lead down every dead end, would undoubtedly make for boring television. There needs to be some narrative obfuscation to set up exciting or even witty moments, such as showing contestants freaking out because they think they’ve spotted a hunter vehicle before revealing the closest unit is 200 miles away. But it subtly reinforces the idea that we’re not getting the full story, that someone else – an invisible producer, a hard-working editor – is controlling the flow of information. Just as much as anything on-screen, it’s the most pungent metaphor of the whole series: if Big Brother-type forces are real, we’re never going to see them if they have their way.
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