As with the best soaps about neighbors, here is a short reminder of how we left the residents last year: As a bunch of scumbos.
Or, slightly more expansively: In a drug laced, violent, sucking tar pool of a place dripping with neglect that held no chance of redemption to anyone resembling a contributory life, we saw Marvin battle and lose his addiction to heroin, and despite stating he was “happy as Larry” at her return, subsequently beat up his just out of jail, pregnant, addict girlfriend. We witnessed a holiday go bad when the mum and dad in trying to overcome their own alcoholism left their reprehensible 20 year old behind (locking him out the house) returned to find he got his 16 year old girlfriend pregnant and was now more determined than ever to start a heroin addiction of his own. We saw Bullet the Dog escape the show by cleverly throwing himself under a passing car.
This programme was depravity on a scale that should have had Ant and Dec standing with a running number caption underneath as they beg for our pledges.
The Scheme had been criticised equally as a form of “social racism” and elicited a university online debate asking if it was “Poverty Porn for the middle-classes".
Although, admittedly, there are now people taking tours of the scheme to the extent that residents have been forced to make homemade warning signs from the (possibly stolen)sides of sheds, the show was not filmed gratuitously.
Of course there will have been some playing up to the cameras and their image but generally it was pretty clear how people live and operate was accurate. Seldom will somebody shoot up just to play up to a stereotype. Rooms in lieu of any paint or wallpaper were covered in the family and friends' graffiti tags nibbed in thick, black marker - sometimes the doors too - were not stage backdrops to faked feelings.
These were people when confronted with the accusation "You wouldn't do that in your own house" could all respond: "That's where I learnt to do this".
The BBC defended the decision to bring the series back because, it said, the show didn’t have the chance to reveal the hope and lightness in the latter episodes. I think that this is also shirking the real point.
The BBC by little design, created a must watch TV programme. The plays on i-player of an episode regualrly topped a full week's of Eastenders. And not just in my house. The BBC was always going to schedule the remaining episodes in spite, and even because, of the controversy and cult aspects.
In truth all I wondered was if it could give the same death rattle laughs of the damned over the bleak landscape of the reality it depicted in episodes 1 and 2? There was no doubt – the fun had drained away somewhat in episodes 3 and 4. The hope and lightness the BBC promised only served to make the darkness darker and those without hope appear more hopeless by contrast.
If the house proud husband and wife introduced in episode 3, (who, perhaps significantly, had managed to buy their council home) where they entered in the Lovely Garden competition (coming 2nd) were the supposed regeneration in the cells of The Scheme then the new family also introduced was as tactless as cancer.
This family, the brilliantly Scots mafia named McMurray’s, composed of a single mother at the end of her tether, eldest son (tackling the obligatory heroin addiction), middle daughter (a persistent offender with a foul quick-fire lexicon and “FUCK ME” written in day-glo pink on sunglasses) and youngest son (trying to get an education if he could only stop doing the “daft things” like – allegedly – holding up the local Post Office round the corner – which he almost certainly did do).
We further managed to catch up with the pro-active group formed to restore a community centre to the scheme. This was perhaps the BBC’s defense of the programme made extant: Hope and stoic heroism to admire. The group had identified the dilapidated old centre as potential premises and had been working hard (with the words of inspiration and then, when she died, spirit of the matriarch of the group behind them) to obtain the lease from the council. They had raised £4000 – which was exceptional given their circumstances – but their plans were dashed when a quote of £30,000 was handed to them by the council in order to allow them to use the building safely. Although, I would have given it 3 months before the center was raised to the ground by youths if they even had the funds to open it in any case, the fact that these people had little understanding of costs due to their own living conditions was starkly sad.
This was now onto Emperor Strikes Back layers of misery.
With the characters not doing anything particularly amusing – filming someone self-administering hard drugs through a dirty, bent needle, in his mum’s kitchen and listening to a 6 months' pregnant 16 year old muse between puffs of a cigarette of a faith that the 20 year old father-to-be will “get aff the heroin, like” in time for the birth while in fact we have just seen footage spliced in of him making no such attempt are both scenes which are mainly mirth free – so it is up to the narrator to add the laughs.
Breezily the voiceover states:
“It’s the next day in the scheme and James is off to get his morning bag of smack”. If not for the plucked out notes of a particularly depressing Radiohead guitar solo tribute in the background and the “smack” bit he might as well have been contextualizing a scene from Portland Bill for kids. Utterly surreal.
The series ends with a narrative roundup of the characters:
“James is trying once more to quit his heroin addiction” (earlier James explains how hard it is – with nothing to do everyday a £100 a week benefit is not enough to kick the habit, but just handily enough to buy lots of heroin), the youngest son from the McMurray family had been given a 2nd chance at gaining a college place (after spoiling his first with what his tutor described as: “intensive homophobic bullying”) and the voiceover perkily informs us: “Steven decided not to go to college in the end but committed grievous bodily harm and is now serving a 1 year prison sentence” in the same BBC tone that suggests he might continue with: “Meanwhile Bouncer the dog has got stuck in a picnic hamper trying to get to eat the cakes in it and no one knows he is on the way to the Bungle-Bungles in Helen Robinson’s car as she travels in hope of painting another masterpiece in tertiary.”
The 16 year old girl by now has given birth. She sits lackadaisically wishing to the camera that her baby will have a normal family life, remaining convinced that the father will give up his drug habit soon. But young, jobless, having a drug addled (with penchant for photographing himself with swords on social networking sites) father of her child, sat in a house provided through a charity for the homeless and living off state benefit is where she is and thoughts have to move to the chances for the baby daughter getting anywhere close to a normal family life and in turn being able to provide one to her own family when the time comes. Probably in 15 years.
It is the ever depreciating circle of life of The Scheme. Animate that one with lions, Disney, if you dare.
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