Gritty reality, or middle class fantasy of poverty?

BBC Scotland's documentary series The Scheme has been shelved because one of the contributors to its remaining episodes is facing criminal charges.

But the observational series about the life of six families on a housing estate in Kilmarnock has already made more waves than you'd expect of a film in which "one local family leads the charge to reopen the old community centre" (according to the iPlayer description of the last episode). 

More noticeable than the old community centre was the vivid picture a life of crime, alcohol, drugs, violence, unplanned pregnancy and unemployment.

The series has been criticised as "poverty porn" by Pat Kane (below right), the writer and singer from Hue and Cry, who debated the editorial issues with Channel 4 executive Stuart Cosgrove (below left) on Newsnight Scotland last week (from 13 minutes into the programme). 

Kane objected to what he saw as a middle class view imposed on the footage by producers and editors: "It's continuous with Wife Swap, How Clean is Your House?, Supernanny ... it's actually serving up the undisciplined poor to confirm the contented majority in the electoral consequences of not putting funds to these people."

Cosgrove countered that "all forms of culture have selection in them" and that the crucial test would be whether the people in the series were happy with how they were depicted, not whether "former schemies turned intellectuals" - as he described himself and Kane - approved of the edit. 

It was a revealing discussion, allowed to run at length, highlighting the dilemmas of this kind of film: can you make editorial choices that produce a coherent programme while being true to the complexity and ordinariness of much of the footage gathered in making an observational series?

I suspect the series was commissioned on the promise of exactly the kind of 'shocking' storylines that have drawn fire from MSPs, among others. So, if the film-makers have that kind of material, should they balance it with more 'positive' stories because not everyone who lives on the estate is in trouble? 

There were some positive stories, such as the community centre (although it didn't appear until 23 minutes in), and the story of a dancing competition. By including them, the series committed itself to a balanced view of its subject (the scheme), rather than simply telling the most dramatic stories it came across. 

The balanced approach leaves the programme-makers having to defend their work as true to the overall reality of life in the scheme, whereas a stronger, more negative selection could have been presented as a deliberate focus on social problems, not intended to represent the wider reality. Ironically, the latter might have been easier to defend, as it would have to make no claims outside of the stories on screen.