Big Fat Gypsy Weddings: doc- or mock-umentary?

It was a rip-roaring success for Channel 4 - nearly 9 million viewers watched the last of the five-part series on 15 February. Big Fat Gypsy Weddings became a national appointment to view on Tuesday nights, and thesubject round the water coolers on Wednesday mornings.

According to Firecracker Films which made the series, it "went where documentary had not been before". Firecracker's next commission is in the bag, as is My Big Fat Gypsy Christmas (2011). What next, Come Dine with Mr Paddy Doherty - Mr Big Fat Gypsy (2012)?

BFGW captured the zeitgeist of the tabloid red tops which are still running BFGW stories now, well after the end of the series.

Last Sunday, Paddy was offering a bare knuckle fight to the death on the News of the World's front page. It is the Big Brother of our Big Society times.

What's more, the original one-off programme, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, won an award at the Cultural Diversity Network (CDN) Diversity Awards last year, as Most Groundbreaking Programme.

But was the series true to Gypsies, or did it misrepresent them?

Jake Bowers, Gypsy journalist and editor of Travellers' Times Online, was cross, very cross about BFGW at a 'Coventry Conversation' last Friday.

Firstly, it featured mainly Irish Travellers (hence Paddy D) who make up just 10% of the British Gypsy community. Romany Gypsies - the majority - were notable by their absence. Some had been filmed at Meridien in Coventry, where they are engaged in a turf battle, but that segment hit the cutting-room floor

Worse, BFGW featured Irish Traveller traditions that were unknown or alien to Bowers - a Romany Gypsy. The big fat wedding dresses (some of them inflatable, others decorated with lights, like Blackpool Tower) for which the series will be remembered were not something he had encountered in his lifetime on the road - which has featured spells in Sweden, Oxford, Luton and now Hastings.

Worse still, the tabloid-favourite 'grabbing' of young girls which took place at the weddings, to secure a kiss and their hand in a future marriage, was simply not on his radar. As a Romany Gypsy, Bowers said this 'tradition' "has no place in our history or culture" and it makes gypsy women look like "whores and slaves"; while the so-called documentary as a whole had created an image of "trailer-trash Flintstones".

Rather than widening understanding, it has simply built new stereotypes to add to the old, he said. In Bowers' words, BFGW was a "sneering mockumentary, not journalism".

This view was confirmed by a straw poll of the student audience whose positive image of Gypsies had not been enhanced by watching the series. It was further strengthened by the unannounced presence of a Daily Star reporter in the audience, hoping for some titbits from Bowers.

The production company had consulted Bowers in the early stages of research for the series. He now wants to make his own series to show the rich history of and the daily struggles of Gypsy life. He was, though, at a loss as to how his My Real Gypsy Life might win an audience of 9 million.

Bowers concluded that the viewers of BFGW were holding up a mirror to themselves and their prejudices. The series, in his view, said little about his community "but a lot about your's". This row will run and run.

John Mair founded and runs the Coventry Conversations at Coventry University. You can listen to this and others here.