Thin line

The British government spending nearly half a million pounds on xenophobic propaganda? UK Border Force on Sky One is the latest of many fly-on-the-wall documentaries for the channel that reduce issues like immigration policy to a black-and-white conflict between heroic know-it-all officers and devious foreigners. An endless stream of dark-skinned people arrive from the middle East, Africa, and Asia, wanting for some reason to get into the country, but instead are mocked, ridiculed, and condescended to, by people who Sky trailers call partisanly and presumptuously "our own".

UK Border Force is part of a lineup of cheap Sky shows that in some ways recall 1990s docu-soaps, but unlike Airport which mixed lighthearted stories about rodent infestations with more serious immigration issues and made a star of jolly rotund Aeroflot worker Jeremy Spake, the new shows are one-sided in who you sympathise with and laugh at. People in authority make sarcastic comments as they track down petty criminals and confused or drunken members of the public in shows like Road Wars (traffic cops) and Night Cops (cops on night shift), both on Sky more than once this week. These show replicate boring days at work for a cynical, uneducated, occasionally vindictive workforce, who assuage their boredom by playing for the camera roles like the tough cop, the street philosopher, or the joker; some have a degree of humour or social comment, others are entirely mindless.

Like many of these series on various channels, UK Border Force was funded by the Home Office, which gave 400,000 GBP for eight one-hour-long shows (the Daily Mail hates it too). Promoting the immigration officers as "human lie detectors" offers a nice tie-in to Tim Roth drama Lie To Me, which Sky is also screening. When you're running a channel with a budget a quarter of Channel Four's (source: Guardian) you need all the help you can get.

EDIT December 2009: The show has started referring to illegal immigrants as "clandestines", making them sound like aliens from a science fiction series.