Rach does TV: A week of documentaries.

It’s been a busy week.

This week’s Coppers was the last in series, and saw a gentler method of policing in the sleepy Scottish Highlands. In fact, it was so sleepy that a former Glasgow copper told us that when he first moved from the inner-city, ‘I thought my radio didnae work.’ 

No mate, there’s just no crime.

So in Pitlochry, which made the town from Heartbeat look like Downtown LA, we did get to witness a Saturday night drug bust. One lad, caught outside the local pub was in possession of a small amount of crack. Luckily, he was caught in Pitlochry, and as such benefited from the ‘slap on the wrist’ approach to drug-crime. Turns out the coppers knew the lad’s family, so as long as he headed straight home, avoiding the pub on his way, they’d say no more about it.

Right.

Tuesday saw the controversial Channel 4 Documentary, My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding, which this week featured surprisingly few weddings. Of course there was still ample airtime given to large dresses, fake tan and ‘bling.’

This episode focused primarily on the plight of the girls in the gypsy communities, highlighting the fact that very few stay in school beyond the age of ten or eleven. Mary, an 8 year old preparing for her first Holy Communion, seemed to have never even heard the term GCSE.

One teenager, Angel, offered a glimpse of hope for the whole of womenkind. She had continued her education in the hope of a life beyond child-baring and housewifery. The tragedy was that she was bullied by both sides for her choice.  Her school peers excluded her as a pikey, her community couldn’t understand her choice.

For the rest of the girls, the future held marriage, babies and bleach - a life of semi-servitude at the beck and call of men who rarely seem to deserve it.

And finally, last night saw Making Bradford British.

This much publicised documentary declared itself to be an attempt to discover what "Britishness" is and whether multiculturalism can really be achieved.

So what happened?

Less than one minute it, and over his pint a ‘gentleman’ barks, “If a dog’s born in a stable, it doesn’t make it a horse does it?” I can only assume that in this intellectual metaphor the dog was a ‘non-white’ person and the horse was the essence of being ‘British.’

Brilliant, best get a bigot in the opening credits I always think.

8 people, all of whom were born and bred in Bradford, and all of whom had failed the British citizenship, were put in a house together.

“I cannot think how any intelligent, rational person can be a racist,” said Maura, a posh 66 year old magistrate. No Maura, neither can I. Cue talk of ‘paki-bashing’ and arguments about trips to the mosque.

“The colour of your skin is absolutely irrelevant, but if you’re a dick head – you’re a dick head,” was Maura’s forceful conclusion.

And I couldn’t agree more, but all in all people got on. Because through conversation and compromise came understanding.

Until next week of course, when they’re moving into each other’s homes and communities, and I’ve got a funny feeling the dick heads might be out in force.

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For twitter commentary on all hard hitting (and less hard hitting) channel 4 documentaries, follow me @brownrach

Drink up: Tune in

I’m not sure if it says more about Channel 4 or me, but I seem to be watching a lot of tv  dedicated to crime and social dysfunction at the moment.

Channel 4 passed the Big Brother baton on, and needed something to fill the airwaves. So they’re filling them with a specific side of British life, one where the majority of people are punching someone, vomiting somewhere or flashing something.

And I seem to be watching it all.

Last week, Bouncers was a documentary following the lives of a group of men with the unenviable task of ‘gatekeeper’ to the nightclubs of Newport, South Wales. They scanned, with a look of unexpected contempt, the unsteady gaggles of girls and boys seeking permission to enter these salubrious establishments. It is up to Joe, Jamie and Geraint to decide who is likely to be more trouble than they're worth and who still has the spending and drinking capacity to be let in. Only the trained eye can tell.

“Sometimes I have to bar people”, Joe confided. Really Joe, you surprise me. He goes on to recall the time he had kicked his way into a male loo to find a woman in mid-bowel movement simultaneously performing a sex act on her boyfriend or, at least, the man she happened to be sharing the cubicle with.

"She said to me: 'Am I barred?'" Joe tells us. "I said: 'I've just found you in the men's toilets taking a shit while you suck your bloke off. Of course you're barred.'"

I'm not sure that I needed to hear that anecdote. Still, I felt obliged to share it.

But it wasn’t all crude comments and short skirts, Joe, formerly a high-earning insurance underwriter until the recession hit the town, now has to subsidise his job as a bouncer by  working in a pawnbrokers. "It's a right kick in the teeth, of course," he said. "But there's always someone worse off." And he met most of them – pawning their jewellery by day and drinking the proceeds by night.

So, that’s drunk and abusive people in Newport covered, now to turn over to Coppers for drunk and abusive people in Nottingham. But don’t worry, because here the Coppers in question are the ones with guns. One member of the firearms team, Jim, summed it up, "Shooting guns is great.. It does give you that buzz … It's the Gucci end of the job"

Right.

But the thing about Coppers is that is somehow manages to be both funny and tragic. This week, for example, featured Barbara.

Barbara was arrested by armed response unit officers after turning up at someone's house and pointing a gun through the window. Most people, faced with four or five police officers with massive guns, might decide that a certain amount of diplomatic retreat was in order. But not Barbara, who’d had a fair amount to drink and believed that the police had turned up as her back up: "He's robbed my watch!" she screamed repeatedly, a picture of outraged innocence.

Even though she’d been caught pointing a gun through the window, she kept telling us all how she ‘didn’t believe in robbing people and hurting people.’  Until of course she remembered the theft of the watch and added, "but I'll kill that bastard!"

It turned out that the weapon was only a BB gun and Barbara rapidly sobered to be quietly mortified. As she told us of her past however, it was indisputably tragic.

And it’s a clue to the watchability of the show that the documentary makers leave in the jokes and flippant remarks made by coppers and robbers alike, and trust the viewer to understand that laughter does not imply a lack of seriousness.

Because we all know that comedy is what you pull on over tragedy if you want to insulate yourself from its effects.

And finally there’s Party Paradmedics, which I couldn’t make it through. This was a documentary which, for variation's sake, showed us drunk and abusive people in Kavos.

If you’ve never heard of Kavos, well from the 5 minutes of the show that I could stomach, I gleaned that it's a hangout in Corfu for British youngsters who want to screw each other, but not before getting absolutely paralytic. Every day.

I turned off, not because I’d had my documentary fill. No, rather because Party Paramedics was simply tragic, and for the first time in all of it, I felt embarrassed to be British.

Anti-social behaviour may be as old as history, but its brazen parade for the camera is a much more recent phenomenon. It's also one that Channel 4 appears dedicated to documenting.

To ‘enjoy’ my twitter documenting of such classic shows as #coppers and  #bouncers you could follow me @brownrach

A blogger bereft

Downton has finished. I got a telegram with the news and I’m heartbroken. I’m not entirely sure what I will do on a Sunday evening now. Songs of Praise just doesn’t cut it.

Let’s face it, Downton Abbey is brilliant because it looks like a costume drama but behaves like a soap.  The characters change personality every few minutes, and the plot has moments of absolutely lunacy; but as it’s about posh people and is loosely based on historical events, we conclude that it must be acceptable to watch.

And acceptable it was. The nation was hooked.

Who amongst us will forget Matthew’s tingle?  We didn’t see that coming did we? That miraculous leap when paralysed Matthew jumped from his wheelchair to rescue Lavinia from a falling tea-tray.

Lavinia sadly lost out in the public vote and died. Too obvious? Apparently not. Thank god for Spanish flu as a useful device for bumping off characters.   "It's a strange disease with sudden savage changes," said the doctor, as Lavinia began to look distinctly peaky.

Mr Molesley however did not have Spanish Flu. No, turns out he was just pissed.

And who was the mystery mummy – the one who’d survived the sinking of the Titanic, woken up with a Canadian accent and remembered that he was the long lost heir of the Abbey? Even the Eastender’s writers couldn’t have dreamt that one up.

Luckily for us all, Lord Grantham remembered just in time that he was not a lothario, and will be sticking to discussing port and dinner jackets rather than groping the maids.

Sir Richard will be starring in panto this Christmas as the wicked witch of the west.

And Edith, who used to be a bit evil, is now throwing concerned looks left right and centre.

But of course Mary and Matthew can never be together; not least because of Matthew’s over-reliance on white-face paint. “We're cursed, you and I, and there's nothing to be done about it," Matthew told Lady Mary.

I would guess that there's at least another series to be ‘done about’ exactly that.

We certainly hope so, because how would we cope without it? I’m not sure. But I won’t be defeatist. After all, it’s so middle class.