TV Eye: Relief from yob rule

Yobs. You see them on the news, the boy racers burning their tyres and the kids boozing on the streets, giving each other the bash and the finger to old farts aged over 20.

Yes, there are yobs and slobs everywhere - but do we also have to have British female yobs inflicted on us on Saturday nights?

That was the plan last Saturday, anyway, when TV One had scheduled the launch of Ladette to Lady, an ITV reality series which follows a group of foul-mouthed slappers as they go through finishing school.

The network delayed screening this cultural milestone to make way for a tribute to the Maori Queen, who was every inch a true lady. The kapahaka sequences also featured some very fine work by young people, proud of their culture. Not yobs.

Ladette to Lady will now debut this Saturday, which makes reruns of The Professionals on UKTV a really attractive option.

But there was an excellent British yob-drama on after the tribute to Dame Te Arikinui. Mr Harvey Lights a Candle was about that most fearsome phenomenon - a classroom of teenagers being taken on a day trip; in this case, to Salisbury Cathedral. This was the idea of their teacher, Mr Harvey aka Mr Happy, as in, not.

Mr Harvey was a role perfectly suited to the lugubrious hangdog features of Timothy Spall, bearing precious cargo in the form of an old photo of him with his wife, taken when he had proposed to her at the cathedral 21 years ago.

The trip was never going to go smoothly, as the gloom-and-doom bus driver predicted from the outset. A Muslim boy was picked on because he carried a bag with the Koran in it. "Tick tick tick," teased one little creep known as the Bomber because of his penchant for graffiti defacement.

One of the girls was a cutter, of her own wrists. You saw one boy crossing himself - praying he'd win a video game. So it was a busload of hormonally charged yobs speeding along the motorway towards the cathedral and trouble.

Spall infused Mr Harvey's buttoned-down persona with a quiet desperation and anger just waiting for a trigger to create an explosion of emotion. Emotion was something Mr Harvey never displayed, except unhappiness. But the theft of his wallet - and the photo - lit the fuse, and he had a spectacular meltdown.

"My faith hangs by a very thin thread," he muttered to one of the other teachers, played by the very fine Celia Imrie, after his frantic search for the wallet. He got the picture back, eventually, but it was defaced.

The climax came when Mr Harvey reached the very spot where the photo had been taken and his guided tour turned into a revelation that after the honeymoon, which comprised a two-week tour of all of Britain's 27 cathedrals, his wife had killed herself after the first year of marriage. That stunned the yobs - but Helen, the cutter, had slipped away into the scaffolding above and Mr Harvey turned into quite the hero, but not in an obvious way.

In the wrong hands, this was a drama that could have teetered into sentimentality or lost momentum altogether. But it subtly dealt with layers of issues about personal faith and courage, and Spall, as always, was mesmerising. So were the kids. They turned out to be quite nice in the end.

Will the ladettes? Does anyone care? As I said, The Professionals looks like an option. And Ladette to Lady will probably rate its dirty, beer-soaked socks off.