Pan, tilt, and zoom, 
Guard's slumped in a room, 
Checking the football results. 
Ignoring the screens, 
The action unseen, 
Unless there's a violent assault. 

Staff are commuters,
When they turn off computers,
Fleeing their daily ordeal.
Taxis and busses,
A motorist cusses,
Beating his fists on the wheel

Train carriages heave, 
As they all want to leave, 
Their colleagues and worries behind. 
Commerce and greed, 
To buy things they don't need, 
But nobody values free time.  

No one sees what I see,
Overwritten each month,
Give me the BBC.
My footage forefront.
The news or a film, or a comedy show,
Maybe a dashcam to record where you go.
But I'm stuck on a pole, linked to a PC,
The solitary life of CCTV.

Restaurants and pubs, 
And later, nightclubs,
Fill with couples and hopeful young men 
Alcohol, weed,
and stuff made from seeds. 
They'll wake up with headaches again. 

Blokes call with laughter,  
To those they lust after,
From bars looking over the streets.
Their sozzled advances,
Don't get any glances,
Not even a quickened heartbeat.

No one sees what I see,
Overwritten each month,
Give me the BBC.
My footage forefront.
The news or a film, or a comedy show,
Maybe a dashcam to record where you go.
But I'm stuck on a pole, linked to a PC,
The solitary life of CCTV.

It's the end of the night,
But the shops still have lights,
So the thieves know the best things to nick.
A drunk in a doorway, 
Stinks like an ashtray, 
Still clutches his fading glowstick. 

Sweepers of roads, 
And delivery loads, 
Appear long before shoppers and staff. 
Day after day, 
It goes on the same way, 
As if it were choreographed. 

No one sees what I see,
Overwritten each month,
Give me the BBC.
My footage forefront.
The news or a film, or a comedy show,
Maybe a dashcam to record where you go.
But I'm stuck on a pole, linked to a PC,
The solitary life of CCTV.
Your CCTV, 
Watches you, watches me,
It just wants to be free,
CCTV

“I was thinking about all the footage that CCTV cameras gather and how so much of it must be the same thing repeated every day, so I decided to write that daily footage as lyrics.

After a chat with Moz, I realised that if I were to anthropomorphise one of the CCTV cameras I could ask it whether it liked its job. The answer was that it wished it was another type of camera, maybe one that films the news, TV shows, or simply being a dashcam would be more interesting than its current job.

People vilify CCTV for spying on us like Big Brother. Maybe they don’t like it any more than we do.”

Ronnie