| The Governors' Programme Complaints Committee
(GPCC) is responsible for monitoring the effectiveness of complaints
handling by the BBC, including hearing appeals from complainants who
are not happy with the responses they have received from BBC management.
The GPCC came to findings on 22 appeals in quarter one: 20 related
to matters of impartiality and accuracy and two related to matters
of taste and decency. After careful consideration, the Committee upheld
two appeals in full or in part.
One complaint that was upheld concerned the show Campbeltown on
BBC Two. The complainant was one of nine people to complain to the
Programme Complaints Unit about t Campbeltown. The programme was
billed as "an intimate portrait of small-town life which follows
the lives of four teenagers growing up in Campbeltown, an isolated
town on the west coast of Scotland. It has little to offer its young;
its old industries are now barely viable, there's no swimming pool
and the cinema is shut on a Friday night. These teenagers are faced
with trying to find work locally or leaving for a new life elsewhere."
The complainant maintained that the programme was "deliberately
dishonest and misleading", and that the programme maker had
a "predetermined agenda" to show that "living in
a small town is a dead end experience and chose sequences which
demonstrated that and omitted sequences which contradicted that
viewpoint". The complainant then cited examples of the ways
in which the programme had depicted negative elements of the lives
of the four teenagers, and omitted positive references.
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