The Scheme

[luke]

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part 5 added - the debate about the show is tomorrow, so that'll be worth a watch.

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The Debate added - I found it a bit boring to be honest. Though they had a few contributors who'd had it tough, most seemed to be people who have never experienced anything rough in their lives.

[luke]

thanks for the update show, just finished it - nice to to know marvin is doing alright i think i read somewhere that bullet ended up in london!

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Bullet the dog isn't just in London - he's in the hearts and minds of a nation! haha

I thought this article was a pile of pish. There are people just like the characters in the show living within 100ft of me, so what this geezer's on about I've no idea.

The Scheme is misleading 'poverty porn'
The Scheme's selectively portrayed junkies and violent offenders bear little relation to the bright kids I knew growing up in Onthank
Iain McDowall
theguardian.com,
13 June 2011

The Scheme is not the kind of television I would normally bother to watch. I'm not into poverty porn. I've never seen Shameless. Like anyone else who's stepped outside their front door anywhere in urban Britain anytime in the last 30 years, I already know that poverty and drug-abuse wrecks lives – and that the day-to-day consequences can be unintentionally, blackly funny if you're not directly involved. It's "comedy gold", as some of The Scheme's Twitter and Facebook fanbase callously describe the fraught but genuine attempts of ex-heroin addict Marvin Baird, the show's reputed "star", to deal with his multiple problems.

I made an exception for The Scheme because it was filmed in Onthank, Kilmarnock, the Scottish social housing estate where I was born and where I lived until I was 18. That was when I left for university, leaving one possible life behind and embarking on an altogether different one, although I barely grasped that divisive social, economic and cultural fact at the time.

As personal nostalgia, The Scheme doesn't fare too badly. Nowhere in Kilmarnock is far from the surrounding countryside and Onthank sits right on the rural edge of town. The air's fresh and in the (frequent) aftermath of rain, glistening garden hedges and washed-clean streets take on a palpable quality of renewal and promise. Especially to a gang of wee boys out on their bicycles or resuming an abandoned game of football – or, later on, for teenage lads shyly or boldly in search of girls. The best moments in The Scheme come when the camera captures a downpour on a green space (there's no shortage of them, then or now) or lifts its lens to the routinely magnificent west coast sunset.

As reportage, it's a different matter. The Scheme knows the genre it's in, knows the rules, does everything entirely by the well-thumbed book. Ex-junkies re-up. Violent offenders re-offend. Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, partners – they all let you down, they all fail, or are failed themselves. The unemployed stay jobless, the hopeless stay hopeless. Currently, there are maybe no more than half-a-dozen boarded-up, uninhabited properties in a local housing stock of around 1,000. But the camera returns to them fixedly, obsessively, does its level best to linger on the drug enclaves, to ignore or creep past tidy streets full of still-in-work families with their neat gardens and their paid-for, well-polished cars.

The Scheme's chronic level of hyper-selectivity would matter a lot less if it was only telling the story of the narrow range of characters who fill the screen. But its narrative ambitions explicitly go beyond that. It purports to be a portrait of an entire community, "a snapshot of life in modern Scotland" when it's nothing of the kind. Few sightings of stable, problem-free "traditional" households, no clued-in local trade unionists allowed to explain the wider economic context of de-industrialisation (no politics at all in a series from Scotland: right now – and by miles – the most politically engaged region in Britain).

No good neighbours looking out for each other and, especially, for the old. Worst of all, maybe, not one single instance of the clever, savvy, ambitious youngsters working-class Scotland still produces in droves. Instead we're presented with the prominently showcased Chris, a young man badly in need of an old-fashioned kick up the backside. Chris's horizons stretch all the way to his next (alleged) shag and his next snort of coke. Kilmarnock has a distinctive rock tradition stretching back decades. The stadium band Biffy Clyro are simply its best known exponents. But we never glimpse that here – just a dance competition that fits with the genre rules (loud costumes, The-Only-Way-Is-Essex routines).

Off the top of my head, and only from the years I was living there, my own street produced a chief constable, a theologian and a novelist – plus doctors and scientists in numbers that would give the average leafy home-counties avenue a run for its money. Somehow Onthank's modern bright kids didn't make it into "the snapshot". Maybe they were just too bright to sign up for unpaid TV work. Shameless employs real actors and pays them well. By contrast, Marvin Baird cashes in on his 15 minutes of fame by autographing T-shirts at Kilmarnock's bus station for a tenner a pop.

Media representations matter. TV morphs council estates into smug glad-it's-not-me entertainment, serves up problem cases as circus acts – clown, victim or pantomime villain are the only roles in town. When there's no analysis, no context – the unwinnable "war on drugs", the localised fall-out from globalisation – only the fly on the wall remains. Mindless, not even blinking.

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The first post now updated with streams for the whole series

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The Estate
A series that does the same thing as The Scheme, though this time based in Northern Ireland.


Thanks to Augustgem