I don’t normally do your so-called relevant or contemporary blog pieces [writing about something already out of date – surely that makes it timeless?], but today I was asked to make an exception to that rule. There was something that everyone was talking about and people were asking me my thoughts. So don’t blame me when the blog ages badly. It was never supposed to be like this. Blame STV because it is obviously so broke that it can’t run Quincy M.E. re-runs in early afternoons anymore that I could be spending my time blogging about.
Yes – The Scheme. It is a television documentary. But it feels like a video the civil service has produced for the Government. About what type of society they expect to encounter when they come out their bunker after the bomb.
The narrator starts by explaining the premise: It follows a set of 6 unique and different families who all live in a small scheme in Kilmarnock, reflecting the greater society in Scotland. It is implied that this will be an uplifting if hard edged documentary, of salt of the earth type people living within megre limits.
Except, it is clear from the outset that far from different families, they all share broad commonalities.
Each family has a current problem with a family member who is addicted to either drugs or drink or is trying to overcome and addiction to drink or drugs. Each family has had prison time experience in some form. Each family blames external factors for their situation. Each family talks about having to be hard to survive on the estate. Listen to me calling it an estate! I obviously meant Scheme. Once they start talking, the families are entirely incomprehensible in what they are trying to say – with high pitched whining west coast accents that seem decidedly lacking in the famed “Banter” but full of spat out misdirected profanity. And everybody chain smokes. Even the 6 month old baby is shown trying to light up (albeit by trying to gumly eat the cigarette lighter – but the learned intent is clear in its eyes).
With the inference that it reflects society at large, apparently by the documentary makers’ desire to take this logic to the nth degree with this film, this means I buy dog food from the Ice Cream van, only I suspect that the dog food cans I am purchasing are in fact filled with heroin.
One man is on Methadone and meets up with his ex who is just out of prison, but “on the tag”. She arrives drunk on his doorstep and carrying nothing but a heroin addiction. Within a week he is back on heroin with her, she is having some sort of breakdown because the tag is preventing her from meeting out some old scheme justice to the people who she doesn’t like and the two are engaged and “never been happier” as the man gurns with rolling eyes through the screen at me with a sallow, grey, pox, corpse complexion, loose teeth, and baseball cap, with his mutt dog defecating on the floor of the living room behind him. He doesn’t have a ring to give her but in this life, a kiss from his dried out, left in the sun worm lips is as good as a binding contract.
Only it isn’t. Within moments, he is being charged for sticking a knee forcibly into the ribs of his bride-to-be. Bizarrely, this prompts the complaint from her that her husband-to-be can “only hit women” in a tone that suggests she also wants to him to start hitting men as well as women.
That is he let off with a warning makes no odds as by the next cut in the documentary he ends up in the jail anyway for dealing small time drugs. While he is there she, struggling to make ends meet, drinking, smoking and presumably still drug taking, eventually abandons his injured dog, being unable to pay the vet bill, and leaves, barely able to tell the viewer any more, such is her numbed, vacant face, than “It’s no ma fault”.
That this dog, Bullet, is edited to cast the all important emotional hook to catch the viewer and illicit something for the viewer to route for is very telling. All the residents and family members struggle to make a case to care about them. But the dog, left to run off and be hit by a car is followed through from being involved with a dysfunctional, violent family, put in a life and death crisis and shown being saved by a kindly vet before eventually reaching the redemption of a stable caring owner is the only positive narrative arc in all this footage. It is not quite up with the Littlest Hobbo, but the dog is the major humane part of the documentary.
There is an attempt to show some positives in the lives of these people, besides the dog. But each time, the end is a punch line in a joke from the stagnant waters of hell.
One family has an eldest son in prison for assault, a delinquent middle son but their youngest is a daughter preparing for a dance competition. What transpires is a community hall full of yelling and screaming people and blaring club dance music as all the competing girls, dressed as Las Vegas Round Counters from a 1980’s boxing ring, whirl round the hall leaping and flailing making sure to slow down in front of the judge to shimmy some more. The girls jostle each other for position often hitting and pushing one another. Even the judge is hit, with a dance move, for all I know, simply called, “Forearm smash”. It is loud, chaotic, confusing and made me think that this is exactly how I would imagine Mad Max 3: The Ballet would turn out.
The parents of the girl plan to have a week long holiday. The father needs to get away. Both he and the mother are winning their fight against their alcoholism, but finding employment is proving difficult. Recently, the father was unsuccessful in an interview for work in a pub. He blames the recession. His wife, perhaps more astutely, considers if there is not more to do with that it was their one time local, where they would smash bottles and he should have tried to get work somewhere else.
Anyway, they decide a holiday from trying to find a job would be good. They are taking their daughter, but can’t afford to take their 20 year old son. But they also can’t trust him to be left behind in the house on his own. So they all leave the morning of the flight after the ex-alcoholic mother has glugged down a few mugs of vodka for courage to get on the plane. The parents and daughter head to the taxi and the son sees his set of house keys being popped back through the letter box and is sent through the morning fog into the scheme, homeless for the week, to fend for himself. He immediately goes to his 16 year old girlfriend, just down the street, who we soon learn has got pregnant by him. She wants to keep the child but her mum says that if she does she will be kicked out the house. The girl has a big decision to make: “Ah dinnae believe in abortions eh?” and takes a long draw from her 2nd cigarette of the morning.
On their return from holiday, the parents discover the son is now on heroin and has been spending most of the week coping without them by, I would gather, shooting up. He denies it to the camera: “F**** sake, man. Am no f***in’ doin’ f*** all, man”. This is a problem for his pregnant girlfriend. She had forgiven him with a ruffle of his greasy hair for sleeping with the fiancé of the drug dealer next door during the week: “He wis drunk – that’s ayeways thair excuse in’it? Taken advantage of!” but if this is true, this is something else entirely. She might need to forgive him with some even grander gesture when he says it was because of the drink.
And this is where it leaves the viewer.
Disastrously this 4 part documentary has been shelved after only 2 episodes for legal reasons. I need closure! Will the junkie lovers get it back together?
As with Jeremy Kyle, Come Dine With Me and now this, I wonder what the people think of themselves if they watch it back. I rather suspect here, that they will be signing autographs in their scheme streets. I am sure that the people involved will say, “Ah, we are just like the characters out of Train Spotting”. Or at least they will try and say that with words that don’t make sense through jaws which have long since became slack because their bones have literally dissolved through drug abuse. It would be ok if they were just characters. But they are not. Characters are exaggerated in their personalities and not designed to have actual lives that require to function out with the confines of their own made up universe construct. But these are real people who the viewer is invited to watch making bad decisions in ever decreasing circles and as they do so, becoming ever more defiant of their life choices.
Many viewers find it blackly comic [and bits are unintentionally hilarious], real life soap, and socially informative piece all at once. But make no mistake, this is hugely depressing, relentless, brutalised television.
In summary, compulsive viewing. It's the place to be. Not really the actual place to be. I mean me watching them on the TV. They can't come through the screen can they?!?!
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