On the Run - TV review

With TV schedules crammed to bursting with shows looking at the work of the police force viewers could be forgiven for reaching for the remote at the prospect of another.

On the Run at least took a different tack taking a more proactive role by assisting police in tracking down criminals who had dodged justice.

Despite the interesting premise, however, what was shown on screen was generic fare padded with the usual shots of presenters meeting in grubby subways to discuss their results or walking purposefully through town centre streets.

It was a pity the programme-makers decided to fall back on this televisual shorthand as it took away from some interesting points raised by the show which were barely acknowledged.

In three of the "stings" set up to capture the wanted men, social networking sites were the prime tools used to track them down.

Whether it was through them brazenly having Facebook pages or using social messaging sites – the internet played a huge role in not only finding them but also in capturing two of the criminals.

It would have been interesting to hear more about the roles these technologies play in modern policing and how experts used them to track down the criminals during the months-long making of the programme.

But instead we got ex-Watchdog presenter Nicky Campbell trying to trick one of the wanted men into attending a phony event with the promise of trying out a new motorcycle by emphasising his Scottish accent and adopting the false identity of "Jimmy Gasket".

Unsurprisingly the man, Francis Kiffen-Bruce, didn't show at the arranged event and police who arrived to arrest him left empty handed.

When Campbell finally caught up with Kiffen-Bruce, after he fell for a fake date set up over a social networking site, the presenter seemed more interested in asking why his first ruse had failed to convince rather than why he had chosen to go on the run.

Another of the criminals fell for the same fake date trick after arranging to meet a woman, in reality an actress employed by the show, in a chip shop where he was promptly arrested.

Too often in the programme, the independent team who had carried out the surveillance and tracked down the criminals found themselves on the sidelines after police arrived on the scene to make the arrests.

So what we got was a lot of build-up featuring people sitting in cars talking over mobile phones but not much of anything else once police took over to make the arrests and ushered the film crew back to a safe distance.

The programme did not pull its punches in its dealings with the police. Although most of the stings went without a hitch on one occasion officers took hours to arrive despite receiving a tip off – which was not glossed over on screen.

Members of the film crew were also bitten by police dogs on two occasions during arrests with the resulting injuries shown in graphic details for the camera.

Although the programme achieved its aims, and secured the men it set out to bring to justice, it was a missed opportunity in the end failing to focus on some of the questions it raised.

A more imaginative format to go with its premise would have led to a more satisfying and ultimately interesting programme of this kind.

Lee Watton