Edge of the City, Thursday Thursday, 9pm, Channel 4
Anna Hall's documentary following social workers in Bradford for a year, makes Cathy Come Home look like a sitcom.
First slated to be shown in May, the film was delayed after having the misfortune to receive a good review from the British National Party, which planned to use one segment of Hall's film - which alleges the existence of organised gangs of Asians abducting and raping white schoolgirls as young as 11 - as the basis for a campaign broadcast in the local elections.
West Yorkshire police warned that transmission might cause racial violence. Now that the film has been rescheduled, a campaigning group is again calling for it to be banned.
Watching the film, it's clear that the material is problematic. The central witnesses - mothers who claim that their daughters were "groomed" and then raped - do seem to be using the word "Asian" pejoratively and in a way that might encourage thickheads to brandish the wrong end of the stick. The measures the director has taken to protect the witnesses are also rather melodramatic: they are filmed at night wearing hoods so that the sequences resemble out-takes from The Blair Witch Project.
Even so, banning the film would be even more damaging as the allegations would simply spread and breed in Bradford without the necessary context of the film in which they appear.
And that context is considerable. The contentious segment is only one of four storylines: another, featuring a young Muslim training to be a social worker and showing almost heroic decency, would alone make it unlikely that this film would ever be Pick of the Day in BNP News. It's also clear that Hall had no polemical intent. This is a documentary reporting what it happened to observe among the caseloads of the social workers.
But, though the programme should be shown, it will be a brave viewer who manages to sit through it. There can never previously have been a documentary about a city in peacetime in a leading industrial democracy that consisted of such unrelenting bleakness.
It becomes almost a relief to get back to the paedophile rape ring after visiting the intercut miseries of Caroline, who has a wasting disease, and whose boyfriend Keith has cerebral palsy and is also a violent alcoholic. Then there's Eric, an old man whose legs are going, who refuses to leave his own home, even though moths have infested the uncleaned upstairs. The quartet of horror stories is completed by Matthew, a repeat young offender who has been on Ritalin for seven years and is now being electronically tagged.
The police may have feared that this film would provoke public attacks but my main worry at the end was that the documentary will encourage suicidal despair among viewers about the state of the human race and British society.
mediaguardian
