A documentary team came face-to-face with angry residents furious at the way their Bradford housing estate was depicted in a BBC film.

Award-winning documentary maker Kate Blewett and members of the production company True Vision travelled from London to face the music at the Delph Hill Centre last night.

She agreed to the meeting after the screening of her film, Eyes of a Child, on BBC1 last week caused outrage among the community living on the Delph Hill estate.

The programme showed two eight-year-olds talking about a drugs deal, a six-year-old boasting of his ability to hotwire JCBs and lines of boarded- up houses with wrecked cars outside them.

At the meeting Councillor Tony Niland (Lab, Wyke) launched a scathing attack on the programme makers accusing them of showing only the estate's negative side.

He said: "I don't think you grasp what you've done. You've filmed a minority of children who were in a real mess. But you don't realise the damage you cause for the majority of the children who live on Delph Hill who are not like this.

"What are you going to do for the majority of the people in this community who I think have been dealt with really badly by this film? As far as I'm concerned you have portrayed this community as a disaster."

Maureen Hill, whose 14-year-old son appeared walking in the background of a scene in the film, was so upset at one point she left the meeting room in tears.

Before leaving she said: "When my sister who lives in Portsmouth saw her nephew walking across the scene she thought that's the kind of estate I live in. You don't know the trouble you've caused my family."

Kate Blewett, who also made the award-winning documentary The Dying Rooms about the living conditions of Chinese children, apologised for any upset her film had caused.

But she said: "The film is not about the specific estate. It was about families who gave us examples of the difficulties of growing up in poverty. We researched right across the country, not just in Bradford. It wasn't that we just picked out Delph Hill."

Brian Woods, also a producer with the team, stressed that Delph Hill was never named in the documentary and that no-one outside the estate perceived the film to be from that area.

Kate Blewett said the BBC had received more than 3,000 letters in response to the film, most giving positive reaction to the issues raised.

She added it was the production team's intention to set up a foundation to provide guidance using a 'mentor' system to help youngsters in the film to improve their lives.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.