I watched the Channel 4 “Dispatches” documentary on Monday evening out of morbid fascination to see how often Cornwall Council featured in the programme. It was billed as 30-minutes of investigative journalism with the title “how councils waste your money.”

You can imagine my disappointment when Cornwall featured not at all. Indeed, I was rather irked that the programme spent nearly half its slot taking pot shots at those councils which “twin” with others around the world.

Twinning is the “clay pigeon” of local journalism, easy to poke fun at, sometimes a smokescreen for town councillors who go off on a jolly but more often dealing in “intangible” benefits such as new but indirect trading opportunities. Cornwall Council does not twin with anybody, so there were no cheap laughs there.

The programme also took a swipe at a northern council which spent several hundred pounds on pedicures. We were treated to shots of the reporter having a foot massage, and saw Communities Secretary Eric Pickles condemn the whole thing as irresponsible.

Only if you listened carefully would you have heard the voice-over quickly explain that the actual pedicures paid for by the council were part of a community programme to benefit disadvantaged children. Well I’m sorry, but there’s a big difference between councils spending taxpayers’ money on disadvantaged children and spending it on their own council members or officials. As a piece of prime-time television, this was actually misleading.

And as I chewed my pencil and doodled in my notebook, I remembered the so-called “credit card scandal” at County Hall – the Daily Telegraph scoop of 2011 which claimed Cornwall Council had spent £9million on all sorts of weird and wonderful things, including the £750 hire of the Sailors’ Arms at Newquay (the sort of premises where barmaids wear only minimal uniforms...) – it turned out, after weeks of investigation, that every single penny had been properly spent, we were told!. Even the hire of the Sailors’ Arms had been simply for the use of the (empty) building to host a government-sponsored event.

The net effect of “Credit Card-gate,” eventually, was to remind us that local councils generally have a civilising effect on society by providing essential services in which there is either too much risk or too little profit for the private sector.

It is so disappointing when the facts get in the way of the story.

Memo to Channel 4: Try Harder.