Television - Andrew Billen worries about social-realist drama getting into the wrong hands

There was a time when I feared dispossessed Britain was never going to get a shout in television drama. Between Boys from the Blackstuff in 1982 and Robert Carlyle's appearance in Cracker as Albie, the homicidal Hillsborough survivor, in 1993, the badlands were hardly visited by our screenwriters. Only a few years ago at the Edinburgh Television Festival, ITV's head of drama more than implied that the channel was not in the business of dramatising the reality of contemporary Britain, although Jimmy McGovern's drama documentary Hillsborough and, later, Paul Greengrass's impressive The Murder of Stephen Lawrence proved that sometimes, and honourably, ITV would push the boat out and let the ratings sink.

Well, it all seems to have changed. When I Was 12 (26 September, 9pm, BBC2) could have been a Wednesday Play, the umbrella title for a series of BBC social-realist dramas 40 years ago whose sole intention seemed to be to give the nation something to quarrel over on Thursday mornings. Dominic Savage's film was the story of a nice lass (and no more than a lass) from a broken home in Burnley who ran away and almost fell into drugs hell and prostitution. Forty years ago, it would probably have prompted questions in parliament, but the merely faint surprise it registered in me was at how much of this sort of thing I have reviewed over the past year or so: The Cops, with its sure take on the belligerence of the dreaded Skeetsmore Estate; two years ago, the one-off, semi-improvised Twockers, an exploration of teenage criminality; Tony Marchant's Never Never, about a loan shark; and Penny Woolcock's two Tina films, Goes Shopping and Takes a Break, half-realist, half-mythic dramas about life on a Leeds council estate.

In the most recent of these, Tina Takes a Break, the children of shoplifting Tina escape to Blackpool where, on the Big Dippers, they briefly enjoy the novelty of being children. In When I Was 12, the "I" of the piece, Chloe, makes it to Hastings where, conversely, she gets a crash course introduction to adulthood. Her inductors are nowhere near adults themselves, but two cheeky teenage drug dealers and fences, Paul and Steve. Their easy cockney patter seduces Chloe, but not her friends Lee and Kelly, who rightly suspect that the boys are well dodgy. Belatedly, Chloe realises they plan to set her up as a prostitute.

Paul's perfunctory act of congress with her, designed to prove that sex is one of those no-great-deals you can make a good deal of money out of, was shocking television, as under-age sex should be. The shifty, middle-aged man with the earring whom Paul and Steve lined up for her first trick covered me in goose bumps, too. I would, however, have been more alarmed by the rest of the story had I been able to believe more than one word in three of it.

I do mean word. There was nothing much wrong with Savage's cinematography beyond its conventionality: the breaking waves, the ghostly moon, the rain-lashed seafront, the rainbow at the end of the street. And I certainly do not mean to discourage the young actors. Francis Pope as Steve and Leo Gregory as Paul were powerful embodiments of underclass bravado. As Chloe, Holly Scourfield did not look 12, but perhaps that was the point. Her adult's eyes, nose and mouth took up so much room on her blank child's face that she looked nutritionally starved as well as emotionally undernourished.

But the lines she had to deliver! Savage was so worried about cramming his plot into 75 minutes that he made every piece of dialogue count in the most overexplicit way. I knew we were in trouble when the play opened with Chloe's monologue about the world being full of arseholes: "I learnt that the hard way." We all speak in cliches, but most of us have moments of originality and ellipsis, too. The characters here spoke in plot points:

Chloe: Why can't we be like other mothers and daughters

and get on?

Mother: I don't know what you want me to do.

Chloe: Love me, that's all.

Mother: I'm trying. I try me best.

As her alcoholic mother (identified on the cast list as "Mother"), Lisa Millet must have had the unhappy feeling that she was a plot point herself.

Like a child lacking the time to finish off his story properly before having to hand it in to the teacher, Savage dashed to the end of the play with Chloe turning on her pimps. "I don't want to do this stupid agreement," she announced and ran off along the seafront. Her opening voice-over resumed: "When I was 12, I suppose I was lucky. I learnt a hell of a lot that year. Now I'm 13, I think that I want to be a child again - for a while, anyway." Cue pop song and rainbow over Burnley. This surprise ending was meant to confound the viewer's expectations. But as there was no evidence that Chloe would be allowed to be a child back in Lancashire, either, it merely irritated. In the wrong hands, nothing can look phonier than social realism.

Andrew Billen is a staff reporter on the London Evening Standard

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