Police TV'snooping' provokes outcry

Press, 27 August 1977, Page 9

Police TV'snooping' provokes outcry

NZPA London Police film showing a woman trying to convice her elderly mother to commit suicide raised the predicted storm after it was shown in England on independent television on Wednesday night. But the target of the criticism is not, as expected, Yorkshire Television which made the documentary called “The Case of Yolande McShane.” Instead it is the police who are taking a bashing for using “big brother” tactics. i Radio phone-in pro- : grammes and daily papers iwere teeming with comment .yesterday, most condemning i the police action in installI ing and using a videotape camera in a room adjacent to that of Mrs McShane's mother in a Sussex nursing home. The 55-minute programme contained excerpts from the police film in which Mrs McShane, who is 60, tells her 87-year-old mother, Mrs Ethel Mott, that it. is not a sin to commit suicide and that a mixture of barbiturate tablets and whisky is almost certain to be fatal. Mrs McShane .is seen handing a lethal dosage of Nembutal tablets to her mother.

During an interview from prison where Mrs McShane is now serving a two-year sentence for attempting to aid and abet her mother’s I suicide, she said: “I’m reading *1984,’ but big brother is already here. It’s quite frightening.” And many of the people who phoned London radio I stations to offer their opinions on the programme agreed. Michael Ratcliffe writing in “The Times” said the programme went beyond the simple questirjp of Mrs

McShane’s guilt or innocence of the police charges. “Whether her mother had a right to end her own life, whether Sussex police had a right to photograph three hours of private conversation through a hole in the pretty pink convent wall with a lens the size of a Biro tip and then to allow a television company to use to videotape in their presentation of the case — these were the issues behind the film.”

A Labour M.P., Mr Robin j Corbett, denounced the police techniques as “those we deplore in the Soviet Union or Chile.” He called for the Home Secretary (Mr Merlyn Rees) to set up an immediate inquiry. “This programme should frighten every thinking person,” he said. But the police stand firmly i behind the film. “I would defend the use of videotape in this investigation. I’m sure the way this force did it preserved all the good things in our modern society,” the Sussex Chief Constable (Mr George Terry) said. But Shaun Usher, the “Daily Mail’s” TV critic said there was more to the police motive in giving the film to Yorkshire Television than simply letting the public know about a serious matter. “Sussex police are pioneers lin closed-circuit TV. For a ; decade they have used it for | the fullest possible record of i major investigation, so obvijously they were not averse | to the national audience being reminded of Sussex’s lead. I “Human pride over prowess, the natural and respectable wish not just to win but to be seen to have triumphed, probably had a part in it,” he said.

Whatever the final verdict of viewers, television had at last done what had been threatened for years, Mr Usher said. It had shattered old concepts of privacy — the line between what could be said among a family and what could be repeated to strangers had been smashed. Even the documentary’s producer, Michael Deakin, had some worries about showing the film. “We present this unique material in a deliberately unsensational ! way. However, we have entered new territory' in the search for realism. The next step, whatever that turns out to be, must be handled with tremendous care. “The next men may not be so scrupulous.” Yet in the view of Mrs McI Shane’s family the present i team did not show enough ’awareness of them and Mrs McShane. Mrs Mott died last week and Mrs McShane’s son, Mr Robin McShane, aged 24, said it was disrespectful to broadcast the documentary so soon after his grandmother’s death. Mr George McShane, said that his wife was “no ogre” and he feared that the other inmates at the orison where she is serving her two-year sentence might be less sympathetic after they saw “this snoop film.” Mrs McShane was confined to the prison hospital for her own protection while the programme was shown.

“It looks as though we are sacrificial iambs to the moral issues raised,” Mrs McShane said. Yorkshire Television said Mrs McShane had given full permission for the documentary to be screened and she had been paid £4OO (about $700) for participating in several interviews in the programme.