This week’s BBC documentary on New Spitalfields Market seems to have caused something of a furore (page 4), with some traders unhappy with the way they have been portrayed.

There’s no doubt the BBC and narrator Phil Davis set out to present a warts-and-all view of the market, highlighting everything from the characters and camaraderie to the tensions and rivalries that inevitably exist between people working through the night in a confined space.

The BBC - in the business of entertainment, after all - chose to focus on some of the characters of the trade, with Peter Thomas depicted as a modern day Del Boy haggling over every last penny and Ali Matur presented as some sort of wholesale market tsar and philosophical commentator (he was introduced as “one of the new kings of Spitalfields”, complete with an underscore of eastern music). It could barely have been more dramatic if they’d given him a cigar and piped Parla Più Piano over the Spitalfields loudspeaker.

What’s the public to make of all this? What you hope they’ll take away is that this is an incredibly hard-working trade, operating long and unsociable hours that few of us could handle. Markets are eclectic, multi-cultural places that supply the nation’s restaurants with food from across the globe.

Is life easy? No. Are there tensions? Of course. But without these individuals the UK’s food offer would be infinitely poorer.