It is not often that agents are portrayed as heroes, let alone forces for social good – but that is exactly how those who featured in last night’s jaw-dropping C4 documentary came over.

In the north-east, staff at Castledene said they weren’t support workers, but that is precisely what they appeared to be.

With virtually all their tenants on housing benefit, the Castledene staff negotiated red tape and paperwork, and in equal measures helped, respected and disciplined people with a wide range of problems.

When one alcoholic tenant went missing, it was because he had ended up in his second home, jail. A young couple with a 16-month-old baby and serious financial problems had done a runner, but were summoned back to clean and clear a rented home they had left in a filthy state.

But even the Castledene staff couldn’t do much about Jodie, whose anti-social behaviour was the despair of neighbours.

There was Jenny, the landlord from London, whose home in Bishops Auckland had been ransacked and stripped bare by its absconding tenants: even the boiler had gone. Her property was going to cost £5,000 to £8,000 to put right. Controlling her emotions on camera, she admitted she would go home and cry behind closed walls.

“We are 50:50 social workers and letting agents,” said one of the Castledene workers.

We also met a man in the north-west specialising in evictions, for whom murders, deaths, suicides and witness protection were run of the mill – as were trashed houses.

We are not sure what Shelter and Generation Rent would have made of the letting agents and landlords featured in the documentary, fond as they are of using the word “rogue” by way of description as they cling to the belief that agents and landlords routinely exploit tenants.

Normally the Eye inbox would be full of comment from the campaigners for the homeless, but last night it was all strangely quiet.

It is not, of course, politically correct to call rogue tenants “rogues”. Instead, they are “vulnerable”. One can only say that they also made others vulnerable, such as landlord Jenny and Jodie’s despairing neighbour.

Meanwhile, we can only take our hats off to the remarkable people at Castledene for doing a tough and stressful job, day in and day out, which must be quite beyond the thinking and experience of many in the industry.