The secret history of our streets remains a secret

There's been a lot of favourable comment about the first programme in the series The Secret History Of Our Streets, which dealt with the damage done to the community around Deptford High Street in the 60s and 70s. It's certainly a subject that deserves treatment, better treatment than this. This described what had happened without telling us why or how. It was a classic case of television's argument beginning and ending with the pictures it had at its disposal.

The old maps of the area which colour-coded certain streets according to the economic circumstances of the inhabitants were useful, as were the hand-written notes of the council inspectors who looked at the properties, but they clearly weren't telling even half the story. There were a few elderly market stall holders to describe how wonderful things had been, an argument that seems to make itself. A retired man who used to be on the planning committee volunteered to be filmed on the site and must have wished he hadn't, so sternly did the camera seem to look at him, drum its fingers and say it had got all day.

Instead of really tracing the story of the woman who had grown up in those streets, at a time when working class people could do very well for themselves, and ended up on a comfortable but bleak-looking development somewhere in suburban Kent, which might have told us something, it spent a few minutes with an elderly Jamaican panhandler, presumably because he was only too delighted to perform for the cameras.

It raised questions it failed to even try to answer. Who did this and why? There was no mention of the political leadership of the London County Council at the time. Maybe if they'd been Conservative there would have been. Some streets that were in worse condition than the ones demolished are now gentrified and eye-wateringly expensive. No TV producer can resist the sight of a plummy-voiced agent showing young professionals round one but it would be a lot more edifying to be told how exactly this change came about. What had happened in the 70s, 80s, 90s? What had happened last week? The film didn't go there at all, probably because it had no pictures.

I came away wanting to read a book.