My review DVD stuttered through 25 minutes of the astonishing Cutting Edge: 13 Children and Wanting More (Channel 4) before breaking down utterly – perhaps under the sheer weight of sprogs. Deborah Simpson, 43, had 13 children and wanted another. How did she remember who they all were? She went to the supermarket to find wild yam cream, which apparently tones up the uterus. If my immediate reaction to that morsel was “way too much information” there was plenty more to come.

Mohammed, married to Noreen (11 children), seemed to be enjoying his reputation as tabloid bogeyman of Rochdale. He went to the town centre and had merry scraps with locals who thought he was a benefits scrounger.

Mohammed said that his inability to find a job, despite apparently having seven degrees, was down to racism.

I’m not so sure: the health visitor, rather like us, watched incredulously as he cheerfully banged on about God deciding how many children he should have, seemingly utterly ignorant of Noreen in total agony after giving birth to their eleventh child. “God has chosen the female body to deliver offspring in his image,” he said.

Will you have any more, Noreen was asked after giving birth to No 11 – it was all she could do to hold her hand up and mouth “No”. “She says that every time,” Mohammed said with a big grin. He dismissed the health visitor’s concerns about Noreen’s health and likened multiple pregnancy to football training – the more you train the muscles the better they become, he intimated. Then the DVD broke – handy as I was about to throw the remote at the screen.

The great thing about the staff at the Mulberry Bush boarding school in Oxford is that they may be saints, but they are saints who live on earth. Kim Longinotto’s Hold Me Tight Let Me Go (BBC Four) showed how they looked after children who have been excluded from school or have suffered extreme emotional trauma. The children are damaged. They swear, they’re rude, and when they are being horrible, the staff do not tell them off, they don’t ignore them. They tell the children that they have upset them and address them as adults – if they want to be treated properly, they have to treat others properly is the message.

These documentaries are supposed to be uplifting, but it looked like thankless, horrible work. In a typical lesson, a teacher would be spat at, called a “f***ing c***” a few times, hit, and disrespected. One child’s abusive misbehaviour set off a chair-throwing chain reaction among the others. Slowly their stories peeled away: the boy who had lost his father, the boy whose mother had stabbed his father. The staff persisted in drawing them out, the children responded. One went home happier, another said he wanted to marry his teacher, but she told him he was too old.

And, as you wiped a tear over that, the next scene showed another bout of kicking, spitting and swearing.

“I think you’re really cross,” the teacher said as she got jabbed in the ribs. The strange, recurring motif was the move the teachers used to restrain the abusive children; it was a very firm hug, a hug that stopped them harming others, but also taught them about being held and possibly – their very first acquaintance with love and safety.

The Government, secret services and a badly named defence policy think-tank were still bumping off people for not entirely plausible reasons in the final episode of Midnight Man (ITV1). The conspiracy drama ended with madness intact. James Nesbitt, as the ruffled hero Max, got used to sunlight and took off his silly hat. His cyber-literate daughter managed to bring down the fascistic Western industrial complex by downloading a vital video. The lady from the right-wing defence policy organisation betrayed Max.

Reece Dinsdale shot about 20 people in the back of the head, his hair shiny with black shoe polish. Nesbitt’s editor was also a criminal. Alan Dale lathered up his Ugly Betty American accent until it was so Yankee Doodle Dandy it made Boss Hogg look Home Counties. A blackhearted ending, with Nesbitt framed by the baddies as a murderous, light-phobic lunatic, beckoned but he was reunited with his daughter and all wrongs righted. Another police procedural with him as a decent though flawed hangdog hero is surely imminent.

Out of the box

— The Hills is one of those reality shows in which we’re not quite sure what has been set up and what hasn’t. A new season of the show about the squabbling LA ladies starts on Sunday night. MTV has been showing trailers on rotation for weeks which have driven dumbly addicted fans like myself completely mad (although the answers are probably online). Is Heidi becoming friends with Audrina? Are Heidi and Spencer finished? Will Lauren ever escape that weird cupboard at Teen Vogue?

— A correction: yesterday we said that the last TV adaptation of Robinson Crusoe was in 1964 – but reader Richard Broke points out that there was a TV play in 1974 starring Stanley Baker and Ram John Holder, and directed by the late James MacTaggart (as in the Edinburgh TV Festival MacTaggart lecture).

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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