Sorry Alex James, but the solution to homelessness isn't as simple as mucking in and getting your hands dirty.

Homelessness is one of Britain's most stubborn social problems, with as many as 800,000 people sleeping on the streets every night, and bold new show 'Home Is Where The Heart Is' promises to get to the bottom of it.

Over a period of weeks, four celebrities and their families have agreed to take a 'carefully chosen' homeless person in to their midst and 'broaden their horizons'. Yet as noble and heart-warming as it all sounds, the veneer soon began to crack, and beneath it, a set of deep-seated prejudices and fears emerged.

Alex James, in particular, seemed to have forgotten what show he'd signed up for. From the very outset he looked - and sounded - positively disgusted whenever the word 'homelessness' cropped up. Judging by the sallow look on his face, you'd have thought that Peter Sutcliffe was about to waltz through his front door, plonk himself down at the dinner table and start waving an axe around!

The second he met the 18-year-old drug user who'd just left home after a string of bitter family arguments, you could see every ounce of life in him slowly ebb away to nothing. Blatantly unable to stare homelessness in the face, Alex seemed to adopt the role of slave-driver instead. He happily treated the vulnerable young man sent in to his care like a trusty farm dog, working long, joyless hours for a bare minimum of pay.

It was all to 'give him a sense of purpose' and to 'get him off his arse and in to a more meaningful life', according to the ex-Blur guitarist. Sadly, this deeply problematic and reductionist approach to tackling homelessness reared it's ugly head with almost every other celebrity, bar one.

Even the disarmingly sweet Anneka Rice forced her 'apprentice' in to a grueling, part-time care job without so much as a briefing or the slightest chance to adjust to a life not spent sleeping in car parks. As a result, the poor girl inevitably suffered a panic attack before leaving early for the day and getting through a ten-pack of cigarettes in about five minutes flat. Anneka's solution? Give her an easel and a set of paints and treat her like an autistic 5-year-old.

Aldo Zilli took a similar approach, taking a homeless ex-soldier under his wing at a top restaurant. After making him cook in front of professional chefs (a task he tackled with great dignity and the best of humor, considering he hadn't cooked for himself, let alone had a cooked meal, in the best part of a decade) Aldo spat out his food and demoted him to a kitchen porter.

Again, all in the name of 'the work ethic'. But it's all ok, Aldo tells us, because he too was homeless at the age of 17 and he managed to improve his circumstances. Still, if ritual humiliation and a fool-hardy determination to work like a mule serves as the rope 800,000 people have to climb to get out of the hole, I can understand why there are still so many rough sleepers in the UK.

Only interior decorator Justin and his civil partner Collin McAllister approached the task at hand with more dignity and understanding. Instead of sending a homeless alcoholic who's been dependent on drink for nearly three decades in to the work place, where he'd have to fight to survive a single day, they sat him down and tried to get to grips with his situation.

They started to ask searching questions about his life before homelessness. Had he always been dependent on drink? What led him to start drinking in the first place? What, if anything, would he change about his life? He answered in a manner of cool, self-possession that seemed utterly ironic considering his circumstances: ''If I could go back and change one thing, I'd stop my parents meeting so I'd never have been conceived. That's what I wish I could change. That I wouldn't have to be alive.'

Visibly shocked by this painfully honest revelation, Justin is reduced to tears, and for the first time in a show that's been running for nearly thirty minutes now, I'm starting to get a feel for what these people must be going through on a daily basis. And I'm sorry Alex James, but the solution isn't as simple as a few days of hard graft.

Unfortunately for those on the streets, Alex James isn't alone in his opinion. The prevailing attitude in this country concerning the homeless seems to be, 'I've got a 3-story London town house and a silver Porsche 911, so why haven't you?'

Indeed, the 'get up off your arse and go' mentality exists in nearly 3/4 of British citizens, with many bypassing homeless people altogether. Only a tiny minority of Brits admit to forking out a few pennies here and there, and only out of a sense of guilt and not a genuine willingness to make a difference.

Yet the real problem facing the homeless today centers around people's attitudes to work. As Alex James so candidly puts it, 'being homeless must be the biggest motivation to get up, get back back in to work and make the best of yourself''. I'm sure that if you went from door step to door step and interviewed every homeless person in the country, your findings would scream out to the contrary.

What Alex, and so many others like him, fail to understand in their state of blissful ignorance (or plain pig-headed denial) is the largely corrosive effect homelessness has on an individual. Can you imagine waking up at 5 in the morning, having just been moved on by the police, with clothes that stink of your own excrement and an unwavering world-weariness built up and fortified by years of abuse, name-calling and violence, and want to go and work for those same people who'd probably spit on you if they had half the inclination? No? Me neither.

It's the ultimate catch-22 facing most homeless people in the UK, especially those with drink and drug habits. We're seen by the rest of the world as a country with a safety net - a place that protects and insulates it's lower classes and forks out billions a year in state benefits as a life-line to those who are floundering below the poverty line. Of course, lived experience tends to sober the mind to reality, and it must all look a lot different from the wayside.

For every person sneering that a homeless individual should get out of the gutter and get a job, there's an employer sitting in a glass office somewhere refusing to hire someone who's had no choice but to crawl in to that gutter to survive. They don't seem to take in to account that you may have had to urinate on yourself from time to time, or that you might smell of car fumes and spilled alcohol, or that your idea of 'smart business attire' is a clean hoodie and a dry pair of trainers.

Yet when they inevitably slam the door on your face in a fit of disgust, their attitude doesn't falter. They're still going to blame you for your state of unemployment. That is the real problem underpinning homelessness - the assumption that everyone out on the streets is there by choice and through their own faults and actions, and that the fastest way to turn them around is to get them a job they can neither find nor have any hope in Hell of landing.

To think that work equals sole purpose and motivation is to ignore the situations that many homeless people find themselves in. Many of those lining the streets today are there because of domestic violence, alcoholism, mental illness or financial ruin. As the famous saying goes, we're all only 5 steps away from homelessness at any given time. All it takes is a break-up, a redundancy or a stroke of plain old bad luck, and the precarious house of cards we build around ourselves comes tumbling down.

Despite this, Britain is inherently embarrassed of it's homeless population and keeps it at arms length. We drag them through a ruthless, money-orientated system without the possibility of rehabilitation or psychological guidance, only for them to emerge on the other side as hardened slaves whose only purpose is to 'give back to the economy'.

It all links back to that warped and pejorative idea that they need to pay us back for some imaginary misdemeanor or threat to society. Lest we forget, these people are often the victims of circumstances that were largely out of their control. Why should they be taught to provide for us when we are the ones responsible, by and large, for betraying them?

Needless to say, the proper solution starts with finding a safe place to live, but then the emphasis should shift from employment to rehabilitation - a concept that only Justin Ryan seems to have grasped, and one that the other celebrities appear to have cast off as 'mumsy'.

He cottons on pretty quick that the world must look a lot scarier from the inside, especially after having spent so long existing on the periphery of our collective moral conscience. It's an ironic truism of sorts. I imagine it must be similar to a lifer's tenuous first experiences of a new world after 50 years spent rotting in prison.

There are routines to fall back in to, and all manner of social etiquette to learn. Not to mention getting used to belonging to a stable community again after so long out in the open. For many of the long-suffering homeless, the modern world is utterly alien to them, despite the fact that they spend most of their time living in it.

If home is indeed where the heart is, why are these celebrities ignoring the heart of the matter by forcing the homeless head-first and handicapped in to a workplace that, by and large, doesn't want them? Why do they believe that slapping a spanner in their hands, shouting 'go' and whaling on the reins is the only solution?

The show's psychologist, who's often on-hand to mediate and offer advice, says that he doesn't want the celebrities to start showcasing homelessness - he wants to take real steps towards positive change. Maybe this explains their hands-off approach. But until they face up to homelessness and look it in the eye, instead of casting a few wary sideways glances, those 800,000 people face a very uncertain future marred by chronic disappointment at worst, hard labor at best. Now is the time to change that.

That's what this show is desperately trying to get at, and it's heart appears to be in the right place at least. But the road to Hell is paved with the best of intentions, and it's high time for Alex James to drop his rock-star attitude and take after Justin Ryan before the poor young man in his care becomes just another body on a bench, like so many others who will never get this glistening chance at a new life.