IF YOU are working class, clever as a fox and determined to land one of the top jobs in the country, what are you chances?

Amol Rajan’s documentary How To Break Into The Elite? ( BBC2, Monday) revealed you’d have a better chance of making sense of the second series of Killing Eve.

The BBC’s Media Editor revealed in this disturbing, depressing – yet powerful programme that the elites in business, law, politics, whatever, don’t want oiks anywhere near them. They look after their own.

Rajan interview his ex-boss, former tabloid journalist and TV presented Matthew Wright, whose dad worked for Woolworths, about breaking through the glass ceiling. “Class hold back people,” argued Wright. “It is there. It is impenetrable. If you are going to spend £30,000 a year putting a child through a top private school, you don’t want a bloke whose dad worked in Woolworth’s taking a top job.

“Why would people at the top want you or I getting the jobs that could go to their sons and daughters, having paid out £150-200 grand?” He added; “That’s why 75 per cent of top judges are private school educated. Fifty per cent of the Cabinet are private school educated. Yet, only seven per cent of the nation’s kids go to private school.”

Wright went on to add that Boris Johnson is the 20th of our 77 premiers to have gone to Eton, and it’s a former Charterhouse head boy he had to beat to get there.

But wait a minute; Rajan, who is Oxbridge educated and working class, made it to the very top. And Wright managed to front a national TV show for 18 years. Yet, we learned Rajan’s success began with a fluke; right-place-right-time situation. And Wright clawed his way up from tabloid reporter.

“I punctured a glass ceiling that held people like me back,” he said, “but once I got into the job I realised there are a lot of other glass ceilings.” For example? “I myself have been offed from programmes as part of a diversity drive and I have been replaced by a man of colour. Yet, here’s the thing. The man of colour was private school educated. And I’m state school educated. So there’s this bizarre notion of what diversity is.”

This programme looked at the fortunes of young graduates across the country and their chances of landing top jobs in business and the media. The results didn’t really surprise but they did underline what we’ve long assumed; it doesn’t really matter what qualifications you achieve, if you can’t offer toff connective tissue you’re most likely wasting your time.

Wealth provides connections. It’s most certainly who you know. And how you look. Jobs in TV, we learned, required applicants to have a “studied informality.” That means having the confidence to look casual. How you break into the elite, therefore, depends on your ability to acquire “soft skills”, or to mimic those who are already in the elite. And that is extremely tricky. Working-class kids just don’t know the subtleties, the middle-class manners and mores.

What’s the answer? Quotas? And will the likes of the BBC and Channel 4 and major finance houses change track and look to employ council house graduates? Not likely. A third of the population is working class yet only 10 per cent of that third work in elite jobs – in which they earn on average 16 per cent less than their more privileged peers.

So what do we do? Look to our politicians to change things? Yes, you can just imagine Boris Johnson initiating such a programme. Round about the same time Killing Eve starts to make sense.

I’VE missed Eve so much, as it happens. Eve Myles, that is. In case you haven’t noticed she’s most likely the best actress in the UK and she’s back on our screens with Keeping Faith (BBC1), the drama which sees small town lawyer Faith Howells cope with her missing husband, the return of her missing, drug-dealing, philandering, lying cheat of a husband, but most importantly preventing the hearts of her three children from breaking.

The drama content in this second series holds the interest; there’s a conspiracy to asset strip a company, Faith’s battle with evil in the form of an Irish gangster, possible police corruption, but this has to be the first drama on British television whose success is so heavily predicated on a mother/children connection. There is as much detail of how Howells holds her family together as there is of crime solving.

As a result, the humanity arrives in deliveries the size of the dumper trucks driven her likely new lover, yet doesn’t crash the gears of sentimentality.

And Myles, now wearing a new defiant cobalt blue coat, manages to sell every tear, every cold stare , ever sweary scream to the heavens with perfect believability.

Look out Suranne, Keeley and Olivia. Myles is miles better.