TVScope The Strangest Village in Britain Channel 4, Thursday, June 16th'You can't win now, can you?" says one disgruntled worker to another after losing ground in a demarcation dispute over the filling of a water boiler. It's the sort of remark you'll hear 10 times a day in any workplace.
However, this remark is made at Botton Village, a community on the North York Moors. More than 300 people live there and almost half have mental handicaps. The others are support workers and their families.
There are Camphill communities all over the world and we have almost 20 in Ireland (www.camphill.ie), mostly in the southeast. The Camphill communities were formed in response to war. In 1940 refugees from Hitler's invasion of Austria established the first community at Camphill, on the outskirts of Aberdeen. They feared, rightly, for the lives of people with mental handicaps under the Nazis.
Despite the programme title, Botton Village isn't really all that strange when you look beyond the surface.
The demarcation dispute, the workplace banter, the resident who complains that "Botton has changed. It's not like it used to be anymore" are all instantly recognisable by anybody who has ever been in any workplace or community.
What's strange is that everybody has a job, everybody has a role and everybody has his or her own importance. You don't get that in the part of our world which is ruled by IQ levels and profit-maximisation.
The people in Botton Village and the other Camphill communities probably couldn't design a nuclear warhead in a month of Sundays and you couldn't rely on them to organise a proper genocide - you need people with high IQs for that sort of thing.
What you get in those communities, though, is people caring for each other in a way that is becoming increasingly uncommon in other parts of our increasingly busy world.
Katie has a terror of slipping when she walks and needs other people to help her make even quite short journeys on foot. She gets that help from the other villagers. As the documentary points out, if she did not live in the community, she might never get out of doors.
The documentary itself was fascinating and made without condescension. When the residents saw a preview of the film, they were disappointed, according to the local newspaper, Whitby Today.
"The film focuses heavily on tensions in the community and not on the positive aspects of our lives," a spokesman said. "But we have featured in the media on many occasions over the years and we always have mixed feelings about them."
What they find particularly annoying is any implication that they are a closed community. "We're absolutely open and willing to answer any questions and explain everything about ourselves - we have no reason to hide anything."
To this viewer's eyes, though, the bickering which the film chose to focus on simply served to underline how similar to the rest of us the people in Botton Village are.
Community life, of course, is not for everyone. One such person is Barry, a man who decides to leave and live on his own in Whitby. He is a well-spoken man who grew up in an Ambassador's residence in Paris but who no longer knows where his father is. We are told that when he moved, he was visited two or three times a week by local support workers.
When the TV crew went to visit him he refused to let them in. According to the voiceover, the support workers said he had become withdrawn. But by the end they were reporting that he was building a new life for himself.
Meanwhile, back in Botton the community members go on with their own intense, involved lives.