When Teresa, a warm, friendly, middle-aged mother, goes to the supermarket with a list of groceries, she breaks down in the aisle and has to come home empty-hand-ed. In her kitchen the 58-year-old weeps in front of her daughter. “I couldn’t see the word ‘ham’ on the meat packages,” she tells Sarah.

Linda, 46, charming and funny, a woman who runs her own business, goes to a bookshop and orders a bag full of books to add to the piles on her shelves at home. Shakespeare and Hemingway are among her favourite authors – she listens to audiobooks of their work in her home.

Both Teresa and Linda have a secret. You’d never guess it if you met them in the street but neither woman can read. They are among an estimated 5m illiterate adults in Britain – with another 100,000 school leavers adding to the total every year. Their difficulty with words is a handicap that has dogged and damaged their lives. “Everything would have been different if I had learnt to read,” says Linda, who admits she has never even voted because of her handicap. “I just lived in a bubble.”

Enter Phil Beadle, a controversial, award-winning teacher of English. After he was voted secondary school teacher of the year in 2004, the public saw his unorthodox methods in action in The Unteach-ables, a television series in which he took a group of unruly children and enthused them with a love of learning. The teenag-ers declaimed Shakespeare to a field of cows and practised kung fu moves as they learnt how and when to use punctuation.

Now Beadle has a new challenge: in a television series starting this week, he sets himself the task of teaching Linda, Teresa and seven other adults to read – in just six months. It’s taken a year and a half to find people willing to expose their frailties on screen; and quite how fraught and emotional a project it will be soon becomes clear. Pointing to the books on her shelves, Linda tells Beadle: “I need to be able to read these. Just like you need to be able to breathe, I need to be able to read these.”

Where schoolteachers have failed, Beadle is determined to succeed. He goes back to basics with a phonics approach that ministers recently accepted as the most effective way to teach reading. The nine grown-ups, who have never passed an exam, learn their alphabet and sound out and blend letters to make words just like six-year-olds do.

Being Beadle he uses some “left-field” techniques too. He sends Teresa back to her junior school, where she was caned and called dumb – after which she would also get chastised by her mother – to confront why she is so scared of learning. And he lets Kelly, who wants to improve her reading so that she can help her son at school, bring the nine-year-old to the twice-weekly classes.

Progress is fraught. There are tears and frustration and much stomping out of the classroom but by the end of six months six of the nine pass an adult literacy test that Beadle makes them sit. They have learned to read three times as fast as government expectations. Teresa writes the first letter of her life and starts Little Women, a book she has always longed to read; Linda enrols at a local college to do a GCSE English course in which she studies Shakespeare. “I believe if I had two years with them, they would all be reading books,” says Beadle.

During the course of making the series Beadle, a father of three, discovers what he calls a “national scandal”. Adult literacy programmes, he claims, “are riddled with holes and based on spin. The thing I’m trying to make a stink about is that they are not trying to teach people to read. These people have already been failed by their schools. It is not just morally dubious to then put them through a programme where they will fail again, it is wrong.”

At the start of his research, Beadle went to observe an adult literacy lesson, hoping to pick up some tips. He had been eager to see how reading was taught to adults, but was horrified at what he found. “I thought it was horrendous,” he tells a bemused literacy co-ordinator. “I found it upsetting the provision was so incompetent.”

“I was allowed into one lesson in London,” he tells me. “It was among the three worst lessons I have ever seen.”

He decided not to use the adult literacy materials on offer, deeming them inappropriate and patronising. Instead he “adulted up” phonics books that are used to teach children.

Now he wants to meet John Denham, the secretary of state for innovation, universities and skills, to hammer home his 10-point plan for change. Top of the agenda is the need for all literacy programmes to use phonics. “There’ve been [big] improvements in schools in recent years. It’s been accepted that phonics programmes are a good way to teach people to read. This approach now needs to be extended to adult programmes,” he says.

“A lot of existing approaches are founded on lies. There’s no scientific evidence for their efficacy. ”

Beadle holds out Teresa as one of the successes of his career. “To have been the catalyst for this kind gentle lady learning to read, to have seen the shackles around her whole life come off . . . it’s like Sleeping Beauty waking up after 200 years.”

Linda puts her experience more prosaically.

“Being able to read is everything I imagined it would be. Since I learnt, I have read some rubbish, but at least I can say I have read some rubbish.”

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