Anything but child’s play

WHO deserves help? Who deserves it less but has to suffer on behalf of others? Some hefty questions were at the heart of NO PLACE TO CALL HOME ( BBC1), which looked at the effects of homelessness on young families.

The problem is especially acute in London, where social housing stocks are at an all- time low and many private landlords are fixated on insanely high returns.

This leaves some lower- income families stuck, for years on end, in hostels and B& Bs, unable to afford the private sector rents, unable to find social housing.

During the film we watched 10- year- old Ellie grow up fast, camping in a council hostel where she had to do her homework on the floor. Evenings were spent sitting in a hallway with her younger brother, whispering so they didn’t wake the two younger ones sleeping inside.

Ellie coped, in the way earnest, sensible young girls do but it was striking just how earnest and sensible she was and how little we saw of her being a child.

The person suffering most visibly was her mother, Erika, effectively stranded when her husband of 10 years walked out on her and their four children. As Ellie camped out in the hallway, Erika remained, for much of the film, at the sink in the tiny kitchen.

There were days, she said, when she just cried non- stop. Others when she couldn’t get out of bed. When she said that, we realised why her daughter seemed so mature. She’d had to be.

Meanwhile, another London borough had declared Nicole and her two children “intentionally homeless”. She’d moved out of her flat when the landlord failed to fix the boiler and into her mother’s, which the council deemed too small for a family.

You could see how that situation might be defined “intentional”. You could also see how overstretched councils might define things as “intentional” when they clearly were not.

Her son, JJ, was a bright, sensitive lad, unable to form lasting friendships because he was constantly on the move. He longed, he said, just once, to say at the end of a day, “I’m going home”.

Both of these families could, of course, have moved out of London to towns and cities with more cheap housing but with less work and further away from the support of family and friends.

The whole world over people move to where the resources are. What does it mean, though, to have cities occupied only by the well- off, others solely for the poor? Or for home to be nothing to do with roots and belonging, just the place the economy sends you to?

KILLER PSYCHOPATHS ( Channel 5) is a show very much built around the personality and presenting talents of criminologist Professor David Wilson.

You expect, when watching it, to be chilled and unsettled by his insight into the deeds and the inner worlds of Britain’s most notorious murderers.

Sometimes, though, he is rather unsettling himself. He argued in last night’s programme that in 2006 his media pronouncements on the unfolding exploits of Suffolk Strangler Steven Wright had some effect on the killer and on the further killings he went on to commit.

That’s unprovable since Wright has never confirmed it but it is certainly possible.

It’s less clear whether the prof has anything to be proud about.