Holding tight, letting it go

Last night's TV reviewed: Hold Me Tight Let Me Go; 13 Kids and Wanting More; Hidden Lives: Wedding Addicts; Midnight Man

The Mulberry Bush school in Oxfordshire is a boarding school where children are sent when other institutions have given up hope of being able to contain them or understand their extreme emotional trauma. It has 40 children and 108 staff, a ratio that seems generous until you see what the staff have to put up with. In the course of Kim Longinotto's marvellous film, Hold Me Tight Let Me Go (BBC Four), members of staff at the Mulberry Bush were spat on, slapped, kicked, sworn at with a concentrated viciousness that would make a Scorsese film sound maidenly, and had their clothes soaked in urine. They bore all this with a patience that would seem saintly if it weren't dressed up in the modern secular jargon of reconciliation ("I want you to think about what you've done..."). 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.

And from time to time, they are rewarded with eruptions of spontaneous affection, need and longing: children flinging their arms around their teachers' necks, throwing themselves on their knees to propose marriage with mock fervour, howling at the prospect of leaving the school behind. The children slammed from one emotional extreme to another, and the viewer was left to trail limply in their wake, wondering how long anybody could keep up this pitch of feeling. 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 “fucking cunt” a few times, hit, and disrespected. One child’s abusive misbehaviour set off a chair-throwing chain reaction among the others. Yet, slowly their stories peeled away: like the boy who had lost 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.

A neat summation of the film's moodiness came with the introduction of Charlie, aged around nine, who was warned that while he was at the school he would see lots of things that would make him think, "Goodness, what's going on?" Shortly afterwards, Charlie was seen standing on a desk, then waving a chair over his head while kicking out at a teacher. Goodness, you thought, what's going on? Here and elsewhere, the film seemed to show almost overwhelming surges of feeling, expressed with a boundless physicality, so that the teachers had to restrain the children in ways that, in other contexts, might be disturbing; but despite the strain visible on their faces, none of the teachers ever became overtly angry. As the title suggested, restraint and embrace can be hard to tell apart. The strange, recurring motif was the move the teachers used to becalm 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.

One of the great things about the film was its reluctance to offer simple diagnoses or to shrug blame on to the parents; though in the cases that were lingered over, a sense of having been abandoned, either physically or emotionally, seemed important. Calming down after an outburst, Ben told one of the staff that his mother had said she was "bored" with him. He hated himself, hated his life, he said, but then temporised – he didn't want to say why in front of the cameras. His interlocutor pushed him to go on – perhaps other children who felt the same would like to hear him talk. Ben said: "'Cos my mum stabbed my dad."

That exchange was important because it answered in part one of the anxieties such films inevitably raise: how far were the children acting up for the cameras? Here we were offered a reassurance that nobody was being fooled into pretending the cameras weren't there; and reassurance, too, that we weren't just being voyeurs. But the exchange mattered, as well, because of what followed, when Ben's mother came to visit on one of the six days a year that she is allowed to spend with him at the school. As she played with him in the garden, and then stroked his head as it lay in her lap, Ben for once at peace, the idea that she was nothing more than an uncaring or neglectful parent was happily scotched. What was going on here was far more complicated, far more touching than Ben's account made room for. Similarly, we saw another mother explaining to the school's family liaison officer how hard she found it to talk to her son on the phone, how guilty she felt when she saw him, and that saying goodbye didn't feel as bad as she knew it should. Every parent must have felt some shadow of those feelings: the sense that you can never be a good enough parent, never love your child enough.

This was not a doubt that afflicted the parents presented in 13 Kids and Wanting More. As Karan Johnstone explained, "I'm brilliant at being a mum. I'm probably the best mum I know." I envied her that level of self-assurance, while wondering whether more self-analysis might have been in order. On her 12th pregnancy, Karan was gloating over the prospect of once more having "that baby smell" around the house, the excitement of buying more baby clothes. You did wonder whether a Tiny Tears and a few tubs of talcum powder wouldn't give her the same thrill.

Now I've seen a lot of freak shows on TV recently - programmes about people who are incredibly fat, or incredibly tall, or who appear outlandish in some other way, like being posh but poor, or obsessed with washing their hands. People on screen are becoming more freakish in general - a response, I'm sure, to the proliferation in channels. Weird stuff always catches the eye, and after that it's an arms race. So I thought I knew what to expect when I switched on this documentary about couples who carry on having children way beyond the norm. I thought these people would play the role of the incredibly fat or tall people, or the man who couldn't tidy his house. In these instances, the narrator just needed to speak in a normal-sounding voice while the camera focused on the subject, resulting in a huge, tragi-comic contrast. But this was different. This was not a freakshow at all. It looked weirdly normal. I kept thinking: what went wrong?

There were three couples. One couple had 13 children, and wanted another. Another couple had 10 children, with one on the way. The third couple had 12 children and wanted a 13th. I think I've got this right; the story kept switching around. Two of the couples looked absolutely normal. One woman joked that she was "pram mad". That was about as mad as it got. One of the husbands, Mohammed, liked to play the fool. He was twinkly, with a moustache and a mostly bald head. He said of his wife, "She finds me tempting and irresistible!"

Mohammed's wife Noreen wasn’t so much tired as exhausted. “No more,” she gasped as she lay in bed having just given birth to her 11th child at the age of 35. Her husband Mohammed was having none of it. “She says that every time,” he chortled. “It’s Allah’s will. It is up to him.” 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. “God has chosen the female body to deliver offspring in his image,” he said. Mohammed dismissed concerns about Noreen’s health and likened multiple pregnancy to football training – the more you train the muscles the better they become, he intimated.

Deborah was in the health food store looking for unicorn root extract. “It’s supposed to tone up your uterus if it’s tired,” she said. “And after 13 children I’m sure mine is very tired.” Not tired enough to deter her from having another baby though, as the title of this documentary affirmed. Hubby Derek had just slipped a multipack of Siberian ginseng into his basket. “It helps with man things,” he said with a coy smile. Elsewhere, Karan insisted she just loved having babies. “There’s no other feeling like it,” she said cooing over baby clothes in the run up to bearing her 12th. Asked if she thought having so many children was selfish she merely replied: “We put our heart and soul into the kids.”

And they obviously did. In fact the joyful chaos of large families was nothing if not obvious in this thoroughly enjoyable, occasionally jaw-dropping film. What wasn’t so clear, though, was how any of them could afford it. For a question that will have baffled many viewers, it was skated over with an almost Victorian delicacy. “We do our bit, we go out and work,” said Karan’s husband Ellis. And that was it, apart from some fleeting references to his efforts to convert the adjoining pair of council houses the family occupy into one. As for Derek and Deborah, nothing at all was said of their finances – although their outgoings on wild yak cream and pregnancy test kits alone might have challenged the average purse.

Only Mohammed’s fiscal position was laid bare. A former maths teacher, he put his unemployment down to discrimination. “Nobody will give me a job because I am a Muslim,” he said. A claim put into perspective when a fellow Rochdale resident gruffly pointed out the high proportion of gainfully employed Muslims in the town. Mohammed 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. In what looked like a set-up, a man collared Mohammed and ranted at him for a while about how irresponsible it was to have so many children. But the man looked like an idiot; we sided with Mohammed. Meanwhile a trip to the local cash and carry made big-family sums more graspable: five gallons of milk every two days, 75 nappies a week, and so on. “Three to four hundred a week goes nowhere,” tutted Mohammed.

Mostly, what the camera captured was these perfectly pleasant people, with a few children in tow. Sometimes there were group shots, but these just looked like happy people going on a school trip. There seemed to be no way of capturing the extraordinary nature of the subject matter. Two questions were asked at the start. Why did these people want so many children? And what was it like to be in such a big family? The answers we got were: they have lots of children because they love them. And big families are great fun, but hectic. Ultimately, this film didn't stop to examine what was going on in its subjects' heads in any depth; but the impression you were left with was of people who did not know when to say enough's enough. I'm like that with chocolate biscuits myself. In the end, some things are just very hard to film in a light that is not positive. Giving birth successfully and happy families are two of them. We were left with a documentary about some essentially decent people who looked, at best, harmlessly eccentric. Which seems a pity, because, when you think about it, having 13 children seems pretty damn freakish.

If the 36 children borne by these three couples seemed excessive, it was as nothing compared to the 40 marriages clocked up by the six individuals featured in Hidden Lives: Wedding Addicts (Five). There was rather more of a veneer of psychology applied here, compliments of psychotherapist Phillip Hodson, who trotted out a long list of reasons for this particular obsession, from immaturity to over-romanticism and straight forward attention-seeking. But the emphasis was definitely on fun.

Ron, currently on wife number eight, happily admitted his nuptial compulsion was an addiction. Martin blamed the collapse of seven marriages on his passion for Liverpool FC. The “Liz Taylor of Clydebank”, Sandra, who’s totted up seven big days, is still looking for Mr Right. Anyone who doubted the efficacy of this approach could always look to convicted bigamist Pam, who’s been up the aisle 10 times, though only six of those were legal. “It took me 10 times to find my Mr Right, but I found him,” said Pam, with a definite air of triumph.

Finally, 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.