

Working as ambulance crew is not all about bandages, banter and blue lights – these days you have to be as much a social worker as medical help. There’s no Pointless swotting of US state capitals here as the delightfully geeky contestants put their IQs to the test one last time. Taking a tilt at Only Connect’s claim to be the lateral thinking person’s quiz of choice, Puzzling has admirably refused to dumb down as it has brain-fried its way to tonight’s final. The farming Farrows put on a brave face, endure the public embarrassment and end up with a sparkling new home, minus 90 per cent of their tat. That’s certainly the case with a farmhouse in Shropshire which looks stylish on the outside – and more like a landfill once you swing through the doors. Now matter how big the house, we find a way to fill it. Try “Oliver is having a one-to-one with Miss Spicer, the teacher he put in a headlock,” on for size. And while the tone is impressively positive there are some alarming sound bites to hurdle along the way. That’s inevitably expensive and you have to wonder where the money’s going to come from, a topic assiduously avoided here, in this second and final part.

But it’s an intense method driven by the need for one-to-one attention from specially trained staff. It boils down to little more than making sure cries for help are treated with respect and listened to and it works. Gentles, a defiantly upbeat soul, adopts a deceptively simple approach focussed on providing the frequently excluded children she meets with the social skills that they need to thrive in a public environment. So what’s going on? Education specialist Marie Gentles points to the rise in anxiety caused by the enforced isolation of the lockdown years and meets the issue head on as she tackles the issues faced by three problem pupils – or learners as they are called here – at Beacon Hill Academy in Dudley.

The money and the body, however, never turned up. Before he was imprisoned, Krause stole a large amount of money and killed his partner. He looks up the wife of his dead former cellmate Mike Krause, who was a robber and murderer. Rusty Connors is a con man who has just been released from prison. "Water's Edge" was originally broadcast on 19/Oct/1964 as part of the third season of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.
