Cutting Edge: My Wall Street (C4, 9pm); Professor Regan’s Nursery (BBC2, 9pm); Taggart (ITV1, 9pm)

THE Cutting Edge documentary is another look at people struggling to make ends meet in the recession. The gimmick, if you want to call it that, is that they all live in Wall Street. Not the thoroughfare that’s the capital of the US money system, but in the 23 roads around our country that are called Wall Street.

In Wolverhampton, we meet father-oftwo Ali who scouring the sits vac columns of the paper looking for work.

One job is described as a “sandwich artist”, which I assume means making sandwiches He feels it doesn’t matter what they call the job as long as he’s earning money and not signing on. He’s applied for dozens of jobs without success.

Wife Saira fears they’re on the brink of losing their house. She cries watching TV documentaries about repossession and collects £2 coins in the hope of keeping the bailiff from the door. It doesn’t seem much, but helps to keep her “nightmares in check”.

Window cleaner Paul is sitting on a gold mine in his three-bedroom house in Grimsby. One room is piled high with Star Wars memorabilia. He doesn’t have just one light sabre, but seven of them.

He and his wife, Kerry, who have a three-year-old daughter, Lucy, rent a house after losing their home and pub business. He works part-time in a pub.

His creed is, if he has money in his pocket, he spends it. His Star Wars collection is worth, maybe, £15,000 or £20,000, but selling it doesn’t enter into his financial plan.

Perhaps the only bright spot in all this financial gloom is in a car showroom in Grimsby, where salesman Frank sees the garage buck the national trend and sell 23 cars in a month. For him, recession doesn’t necessarily mean depression.

Truck driver Clayton, in Ebbw Vale, isn’t so fortunate. He gets made redundant, not long after marrying his childhood sweetheart, hairdresser Lisa, and buying his first house.

PROFESSOR Lesley Regan’s work is to examine consumer markets, by putting them to her rigorous scientific analysis to discover whether they meet her exacting standards.

This week she’s looking at children’s products, concluding that some vulgarlooking ones have more health benefits than their earthier competitors.

She meets a nutritionist at cereal giant Kellogg’s to test the company’s claim that children concentrate better after a bowl of its food.

The Prof goes in search of the ultimate educational toy, before putting the dispute between breast and formula milk under the microscope.

“We don’t tell people what is right or wrong, but we do provide them with the evidence and, in some cases, the scientific studies that then allows them to go away and make up their own mind,” she says.

TAGGART isn’t the series it once was. These single episode stories don’t allow enough time for a decent investigation.

DI Robbie Ross (John Michie) is in trouble again when he loses his contacts book following a drunken night out. The next day, one of his contacts is found murdered with the word “grass” daubed at the scene of the crime.

Colleague Jackie Reid (Blythe Duff) realises his stunned reaction to the crime is down to more than just his hangover, and he tells her about the theft.

While she’s understanding, DCI Matt Burke (Alex Norton) is, as you would expect, less happy. He does his usual impression of an active volcano.