TVScope Growing out of TroubleBBC2, December 7th, 9pm
Monty Don is well known to gardening fans and in this new series Growing out of Trouble, he changes direction and turns his attention from nurturing plants to nurturing people.
The programme follows a two-year project aimed at helping young offenders with substance-abuse problems dig themselves out of the dirt. Supported by the British Probation Services and with a grant of £100,000, Don's vision was simple: buy a couple of acres, find six troubled young people and get them to grow their own food. But this first episode chronicled the huge challenge the project would prove to be, despite Don's simple aspirations.
Finding a smallholding in Herefordshire was the easy bit, but opposition from the local community meant that the project had difficulty establishing its roots.
With six young people already signed up to the project and six months wasted, the rest of the hour-long episode was devoted to footage of Don traipsing the countryside in search of a plot of land. Finally, another site was located and with the promise of regular meetings with the local community to sort out any problems, Don got the go-ahead for his initiative.
The insights into the participants lives were stark. The five young men in the project, aged between 21 and 25 years, had already spent, on average, one third of their lives in prison. Multiple court appearances during the making of the programme attested to the difficulty they had staying out of trouble. And sadly by the end of the episode, one of the participants, Martin, was already dead.
But Monty Don's enthusiasm for the land is infectious. He sees the act of engaging with nature as the answer to a lot of societies ills. By getting young people to turn their lives around through purposeful, practical activity, and despite the initial difficulties cultivating the project, it seems likely that Don's efforts will yield a good harvest by the end of the five-part series.