With three minutes to spare, a replacement guest is found, but a minute before he's due on air he too looks likely to abscond, leaving Cathy Newman to desperately engage him in small talk to keep him in place.
The Class (15) François Bégaudeau, a former teacher, plays M Marin, the kind, beleaguered teacher trying desperately to engage with, not condescend to, and inspire his class of unruly 15-year-olds in Laurent Cantet's formidable drama.
(You should see the e-mail messages I got from one brainy friend near Woodstock trying desperately to engage me in a debate on the Supreme Court decision on school vouchers. My response: Come to New York, and we'll talk about it over martinis).
Sometimes we need to escape the world, sometimes we need desperately to engage with it.
They are conscious, engaged, wanting desperately for their kids... and all too often at a complete loss as to how to help them find success, independence, a sense of peace.
An Indian soldier is so lacerated by war that he cannot tolerate the sound of bullets; a Kashmiri teenager is turned so upside-down by violence and death that she communicates by means of a doll; a psychiatrist calmly but desperately tries to engage in talks with both sides.
But it is Emma who sounds the severest warning: "This strategy feels like a box ticking exercise – at a time when we desperately need fresh, innovative and engaged thinking.
Even as some buyers are engaged in bidding wars, some sellers are desperately trying to unload properties and finding no bidders, driving foreclosures to their highest level in a decade.
Indeed, it is precisely this training that produces the committed and engaged citizens and workforce that America will desperately need in the 21st century.
