Wonderland: Boy Cheerleaders, BBC Two

Nowadays it’s not so easy to find a doc you can trust. Since talent shows started supplying back stories as part of an all-in-one narrative package, it’s as if everyone has learnt how to behave when there’s a camera crew around. Meanwhile, in the cutting room film-makers can be quite as manipulative as colleagues who nakedly trade in fiction. But there are some things you can’t fake. A young male troupe of cheerleaders from rough working-class south Leeds? That’s one of them.

This was a delightful film which began where it ended, with groups of pretty little girls in gingham or glittery Lycra springing leggily about the stage in the national cheerleading contest. Cut to the DAZL Diamonds, consisting entirely of boys on the cusp of puberty. They were all in black, but in each paw they clutched a spangly pink pom-pom. They looked like a punchline with no need for a set-up.

Then we spooled back to the beginning, and the world in which these boys exist was mapped out. Little Harvey, all of nine (pictured below), sleeps on the top bunk of a small bedroom under a pink duvet with pink curtains, with two sisters tucked in like guinea pigs down below. Harvey had seen Billy Elliot and was eager to match it to his own life. “His dad doesn’t like him to dance. My dad doesn’t like me to dance. If my dad understood that I like cheerleading... I’ll be halfway there.” Problem was he never sees his dad. He doesn't even know his phone number.

None of these boys do. They were all being brought up by single mothers, most of them repentant tearaways themselves who were desperate for their sons to make a better fist of life. Behavioural issues were widespread. Josh, 13, was always fighting at school and was eventually excluded. Elliott, 12, took criticism so personally that he wouldn’t commit to attending rehearsals. If they were looking for a substitute father to teach them discipline and self-respect, hyper-camp dance coach Ian with his peroxide mop might not have been the place to start. However hard he played the hatchet-faced martinet, he didn’t look that good at keeping control, and he seemed to love being on camera just a little bit too much.

Here and there we strayed into Billy Elliot territory. In a knock-off subplot Harvey successfully got past a first audition for Northern Ballet – “I were shittin’ me kecks,” he confided. But the triumph over adversity is a robust narrative model: you really have to go out of your way to cock it up. These boys - and their weeping, wounded mothers - were simply too ingenuous to let that happen. On a trip down to London to appear on children’s television, several of them were terrified of travelling underground. One boy happily admitted that he cries before he performs. Then he switched to discussing with his room-mate which of their troupe was most like to crap it up at the nationals.

Needless to say none of them crapped anything up. They were far better at cheerleading than the film had previously let on and they beat 10 girls’ groups into third place. Ian was brilliant at leading the cheers. “Boys can do whatever they want,” he said, chuffed to bits. We never quite found out why any of them want to dance in the first place, but that wasn't the point. They do. As the Government prepares to reveal whose budgets it will be slashing in the arts, it was a good moment to be reminded of the difference the performing arts can make to difficult young lives.

• Watch Wonderland: Boy Cheerleaders on BBC iPlayer