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"A week after the BBC decide to axe BBC Three and cut back further on their youth content, they&amp;#039;ve decided to air a documentary about the rise of female membership in the English Defence League. You won&amp;#039;t find a much better reason to save the channel than this show. Examining the swelling ranks of the far-right movement following the murder of Lee Rigby, it tackled an uncomfortable subject without flinching. BBC One&amp;#039;s usual reaction to the far right is to hop around awkwardly and invite them on talk shows and Question Time to mouth off. BBC Three&amp;#039;s EDL Girls was much smarter.  It turns out you don&amp;#039;t have to shout down the far right. If you give them enough time on TV, they&amp;#039;ll make themselves look silly.  Following the stories of the stomach-churningly named EDL Angels, we were introduced to regional leader Gail, fond of bellowing &amp;quot;YORKSHIRE YORKSHIRE&amp;quot; at random intervals, and lonely 18-year-old Amanda, who we watched becoming enamoured with the EDL after a night down a grim pub. &amp;quot;Literally, that was the best evening I&amp;#039;ve ever, ever had,&amp;quot; she revealed. It would have been a little bit heartbreaking if it wasn&amp;#039;t for the casual aside that followed: &amp;quot;Two weeks ago, I didn&amp;#039;t know what the EDL was, but I always thought Muslims were wrong. Trying to bomb us.&amp;quot; The final girl was 16-year-old Katie from Reading. Katie comes from a staunch EDL family. Her step-father, a man who seems to find a &amp;#039;Police Are Criminals&amp;#039; t-shirt highly amusing, appeared to spend the majority of his days pissing around on Reading high street in a balaclava spouting out guff about burkas and coming up with elaborate conspiracy theories.  Apparently we&amp;#039;re all funding the Taliban&amp;#039;s bullets when we buy halal bread. So think on that when you&amp;#039;re eating your Marmite on toast! Katie turned out to be the surprising hook for the episode. Brought up in a family where the only topic of conversation appeared to be when the next EDL march was going to be, it would have been understandable if she&amp;#039;d fallen into line with her parents and siblings. But she was smarter than that. While, she didn&amp;#039;t go so far as to challenge her family, her refusal to participate spoke volumes. The teenager wasn&amp;#039;t prepared to spend her life being called a racist and put her mum&amp;#039;s nose out of joint when she said her step-father&amp;#039;s antics on Reading&amp;#039;s street made him look like &amp;quot;a fool&amp;quot;.  Watching her family members rowing on the high street, Katie observed: &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s going to be a debate that nobody is going to win.&amp;quot; In a documentary that was filled with bloodied and boozed-up flag-waving hooligans, that was a refreshing dose of common sense. Amanda, who had recently suffered a turbulent relationship ending, was less independent than Katie and more easily swayed by the lure of being invited with open arms into a gang. The EDL girls had added her on Facebook and everything. Despite the constant hypocrisies of the EDL mob (claiming you&amp;#039;re not racist and then chanting &amp;quot;Mohammed is a paedo&amp;quot;... smart), Amanda couldn&amp;#039;t resist the feeling of belonging she got from the protests.  Amanda was lost. She got her education from YouTube comments (&amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s why I hate trains. You hear about a lot of bombers on trains&amp;quot;), and she had given up on justice, accepting that it would be ok to &amp;quot;get battered&amp;quot; on an EDL march because &amp;quot;everyone gets battered in the street&amp;quot; anyway. It turns out when you don&amp;#039;t give young people a voice and any attention, they can get disenfranchised and they might find comfort in the extreme margins of society.  So, back to the BBC. Do we still think it&amp;#039;s a good thing we&amp;#039;re ripping apart our national broadcaster&amp;#039;s dedicated youth channel? Did you watch the show? Do you think shows like this warrant BBC Three staying on air? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/review/a556569/edl-girls-dont-call-me-racist-bbc-three-at-its-best/>