My cat was up late last night (Master Whittington was sleeping off a hangover purchased from his recent findings), and watching some of the 'live action' tv shows.

Mainly from America, and some from the UK. But in between laps of milk and pawfuls of flaked tuna, he managed to scratch out some simple questions for me. I'll do my best to explain his feline reasoning.

It all started with a UK show, showing an actor impersonating a policeman, pulling over a motorist and generally creating mayhem.

You see, impersonating a policeman in public (it's ok in private) is a criminal offence. You can (and should) be charged, and maybe spend some time relaxing at Her Majesty's Pleasure in one of Her Majesty's Prisons. (They probably have branches of HMV in HMPs these days, but I digress...)

And therein lies my cat's problem. If the drivers they were pulling over were genuine candid members of the public (as the show implies), then they could be prosecuted by simply showing the video to a real police officer.

I asked one of my local peelers (Policeman) under what circumstances I could dress up in public as a policeman and do this, and he was adamant that I would have to be a real policeman, or face prosecution. As my parents were married, only the latter is an option for me.

So my cat concluded that the show is most likely filmed privately, and certainly not in public UK. This also means that the other people are all actors.

I watched a few more examples, and started marvelling at the fantastic camera angles (from hidden cameras) beautifully focussed, and panning really smoothly.

Some of the scenes may have been genuine, but a lot of them are either illegal, or completely scripted and acted. In the police-ones, you can spot the real ones, they are the shaky, hazy bits of video, often with a timer-clock in a corner of the screen.

Under UK law, police video that is produced in court must have a time-stamp on it to prove when it was shot. High quality video without a timestamp is not usable as evidence in a UK court.

Time for me to watch my TV a little closer.

Anyone else found some cracks in reality?