Headhunting The Homeless (BBC2)

Apart from her name, Carol Thatcher has nothing in common with her more famous namesake and ex-Prime Minister's daughter. She's been homeless for a decade, unemployed for twice as long, suffered from mental health problems, and had her children taken away from her.

Carol is one of more than 100,000 homeless people in Britain today. Many are caught in a hopeless cycle of beng homeless because they don't have work, and are unable to get a job because they have nowhere to live.

Help - on a small scale, but help all the same - is coming through Business Action On Homelessness, which aims to get people off the streets and back into the workforce. More than 200 companies offer two-week unpaid placements to see how things go. Of the 420 who've been placed in the past three years, 69 have gone on to full-time employment.

The companies involved have the satisfaction of helping others and know it's a good thing to be seen to be doing. Perish the thought that they also get cheap labour. But Eva Hamilton, whose job is to persuade companies to take part, believes that most of them do care.

While Carol was in tears of joy after passing her assessment interview to work at Sainsbury's, 19-year-old Jida Sosimi was being placed with advertising agency Publicis. He'd lost his job after leaving home, was too proud to tell his parents and ended up living in a hostel.

He wants to be a shoe designer and found a sympathetic ear with his work "buddy" Neil Sexton, who decided to make the two week placement of real use to Jida, by developing a marketing strategy to sell his line of shoes.

His plight illustrated just how precariously his life was balanced. He lost his glasses and couldn't afford to replace them. With only £5 in his pocket, he had to chose between eating or going to the launderette, as the hostel didn't have a washing machine.

Those were the least of his problems. After working and rehearsing for a play (about the homeless), he arrived back to find the hostel locked for the night. He was left walking the streets. Next day he discovered they'd given his hostel place away. Neil broke the buddy rules to get him a bed and breakfast for the weekend, to give Jida time to sort himself out.

Officially, this "interference" is frowned on. You couldn't help feeling the hostel authorities were being unreasonable and unhelpful, as Jida was truly trying to get his life back together. Rules may be necessary, but flexibility was needed.

Meanwhile Carol, known to have a short fuse, was getting to grips with supermarket work, being trained by someone younger and made to do cleaning jobs for what she considered sexist reasons. I fear that the next programme may find her back where she began - homeless and jobless.