How many years before a man can have a failing heart replaced? How long before almost any diseased or weakened organ can be taken out and replaced with a spare part? Is this just a dream? Not in the mind of Michael De Bakey.
On August 31, 1939, Alfred Naujocks received a telephone call from Nazi Secret Service headquarters. The message 'Grandmother Dead' triggered off an incident on the Polish border which was to change the face of Europe After twenty-six years of silence, Naujocks gives his version of the part he played in this event which started World War II.
Years ago they were champions-headline news and sporting heroes. But now? This programme traces some of the great boxing champions of the past. Some are happily employed-some live in the shadow of ill-health and ring punishment-and some have contributed to their own tragedies.
For many bachelor girls working in a big city like London, there is probably only one answer to the high rents-to share a flat with other girls. Every day hundreds of girls scan the advertisements for a flat to share.
A gunman in the hills an unarmed woman ... a home destroyed.... a coroner who takes the job to get her hands on the bodies ... this is Kentucky in the autumn of 1965 Two hundred years ago Daniel Boone fought the Cherokees and the Shawnees and he won, making the land safe to be settled by men. women, and orphans from Manchester, Bristol, Glasgow, and London. Today their descendants fight off bulldozers, armed guards, and politicians.
Tonight the Prime Minister will present a sporting award to a partly paralysed man-a paraplegic. This is a story of achievement, partly of Dr. Guttmann and partly of his patients paraplegia is sudden and final - an accident can tie a man or woman to a bath-chair for the rest of their life. And that would be that. but for the work of a doctor working at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.
Christmas 1965 ... in the Welfare State. At a time of giving and plenty, a look at poverty and deprivation through the eyes of five families who cannot afford Christmas.
Every hour of the day and night seven illegitimate babies are born -more than sixty thousand in a year. They may not face the stigma that once was attached to their birth, but what are the problems of their parents? How does a single girl bring up the child she never intended to have? To what extent does the child's father contribute to its upbringing?
Trevor Philpott investigates how class is categorised. He asks whether old snobberies are dead or whether they're merely being replaced by new prejudices.
Man Alive speaks to couples who, for various reasons, have decided not to take the traditional route towards marriage.
Even doctors, used as they are to death from disease, find that the argument about ' mercy killing' faces them with a great moral issue.
The star business is a money spinner. About every mass circulation newspaper or magazine has its star column and its professional star gazer. The public, they say, demands them -and anyway, they add, it's only harmless fun. But is it so harmless? Man Alive tonight examines some British astrologers, their craft, the addicts, and doctors, who maintain that astrology has the power not only to amuse-but kill.
American Independence Day 1966 and 300 members of C.O.R.E. (Congress of Racial Equality) move into Baltimore, Maryland. In America's long hot summer of violence over the integration issue Baltimore was picked as a number one target by race equality workers. Violence was expected. But what was achieved? A Man Alive team was there.
Twenty-five million of us live in houses that do not belong to us, pay a landlord, obey his rules. Council flats, private houses, rooms for rent: a headache for local government, new legislation for Parliament. Misery for some tenants. Crooked profits for some landlords. In a four-part enquiry Man Alive looks each month at the world of the landlord, the tenant, the area where they confront each other, and the alternative - buying a home of your own.
Thousands of parents in this country are coping, or attempting to cope, with the problem of bringing up handicapped children. Their lives are different, their family circumstances dramatically altered. For many the problems seem insupportable. Theirs is a life containing a unique kind of stress.
The oldest criminal organisation in the world. With its roots in the poverty and misery of Sicily, with its twentieth-century manifestation in the waterfront rackets and drug-smuggling gangs of America. For more than 300 years Mafia has plagued the forces of law and order. After a new purge, many of the alleged leaders will be brought to .trial this autumn. But will this finish the Mafia? Will its power ever be broken?
What happens when the children have grown up and left home? Is the marriage empty? What happens when married and single women must accept middle-age? Increasingly today, women from their late thirties to their early fifties find ' that certain age' involves special stress and a unique loneliness.
In the second part of this four-part enquiry Man Alive looks at the world of the landlord, from private operators to the municipal corporations. Who are the men to whom we pay our rent? Who are the men who make the rules tenants must obey? And what are the profits? Twenty-five-million of us live under landlords: few of us know anything about them.
The unobtrusive, speckled grouse Is the most prestigious bird in the world. A good grouse moor in August is a very exclusive place. The first line of Grouse Shooting and Management runs: ' It would be idle to pretend that grouse driving is the sport of other than the rich.' To provide a party of seven guns with a week's good shooting may cost more than £ 1,000. Why does it cost so much? Who are the people that can afford this sort of luxury? What makes them feel that their money is well spent?
The will to fight, they say, comes from the hope of victory. But what about the men who have to fight without any hope at all; who know, even before they begin, that they are doomed to lose? For that sort of fight a man needs a special kind of stomach
The half-castes are not wanted in the Blacks' camp and they're not wanted by the majority of Whiles; so we give them a good education and if they've got a good education, well they've got a chance then of looking after themselves. When you are 1,000 miles from the nearest civilisation, in the heart of the Australian bush, freedom has a special name to the White rancher and the Aborigine farmhands.
Twenty-five million of us live as the tenants of landlords. In the first programme of this four-part series Man Alive looked at the problems of tenants; in the second, at the attitudes of landlords. Tonight's programme looks at the area of conflict between the two. When landlord evicts tenant, when tenant calls in the rent officer, when both disagree: how are the differences resolved both inside and outside the law?
The wily Steptoe and his son have made national characters of the Cockney totters. Every morning hundreds of real-life Steptoes set out in their carts to drag the city streets for treasure-and for bread. What manner of men are they-businessmen, or beggars, rich men, poor men, or thieves? What do their families think of them? What are the tricks of the trade?
In the struggle for racial equality there are two ways for the American Negro. The militant, vociferous, demanding way of the civil rights demonstrators; or the other way, the middle-class way, the soft approach to integration. When a middle-class Negro is well-off, educated, professionally successful, he has all the things that should make him acceptable in a prejudiced society. But do they?
'Jesus Wept and so Should All the Sinners' is the command of evangelist preacher David Wilkerson , an American with a message for Britain. His critics accuse him of using mass hypnosis to produce the crowd of weeping sinners who come forward at his meetings to be ' saved.' He justifies his techniques by reminding critics that Jesus wept. He weeps himself - frequently.
In Great Britain in 1966 we have the mini-skirt, swinging London, the highest average wage in our history, a Labour Government, and the wage freeze. We also have the most complicated and the oldest system of aristocracy in the world. There is something very British about the way we regard our Peers. For those who inherit-and for those who are appointed—what is it like to be living like a lord?
Thirty years ago. going Into service was a way of staying off the dole, of keeping your daughter out of trouble. They went into a servant's hall, a family within a family ruled by butler and housekeeper. Every underfootman, every house or kitchen maid, knew his place and kept it. Promotion was certain, if slow, but none were ever allowed to forget they were servants. Today the big households are disappearing, servants are harder to come by. So, who does answer the bell-and, with the aristocracy impoverished, who rings it?
At only nine years old the average American girl is almost certain to be taken by her mother and fitted for a bra: just one of the commercial pressures brought to bear on the sub-teenagers of the United States -children with a billion dollars a year to spend in pocket money, children who are a target for the men with something to sell
Twenty-five million people live In homes owned by landlords, and, as was seen in the first three programmes on this theme, it causes problems. There is an alternative-for some: house purchase But that too can cause trouble, bring problems and pain to the person who tries buying the roof over his head.
Most of us see the fairground only once a year, think of fairground people as a cross between con-men and gypsies -out to take our money from us in the few hours they are in town. But what really goes on in the world of freak shows, hoop-la a stalls and the giant machines? Who are the families who control the fairs and make a fortune from them? Who are the gaff lads with dyed hair, earrings and tattoos who follow the fair for the fun - and the girls?
Most of us at one time or another must have considered dying; considered how we would feet if we knew about it in advance; how much would It affect those we leave behind. An idle speculation? Not for thousands of us. Many men and women know they are going to die, know almost exactly how much longer they have to live. How do these people adjust? What can they do for those they must leave behind? How are they affected when every day they find themselves living with death? And what is it like for those who must wait with them-and then live on after?
Every night they thunder across our television screens - Red Indians: proud heathen warriors, a legend from the past. But nearly half a million American Indians still live on reservations in conditions described by President Johnson as ' enough to brine the blush of shame to our cheeks when we look at what we have done to our first citizens.' The tribes still have war dances at night -for the young men in uniform going overseas to Vietnam to fight for the American cause. But how do they live on the reservations? What is their pride? And whose is the shame?
When election time comes around everybody with a vote has the chance to send the man of their choice to Parliament. But who chooses the candidates themselves? What secret procedures take place behind closed doors? What questions are asked? And who vets the candidates' wives? Man Alive cameras have, for the first time, been behind the closed doors to find out.
The conventions have not changed much in a hundred years. It's still a ring announcing to the world a girl has got her man: it's still a time of waiting, of saving, of preparation, and of stress. Being married presents problems enough. Being engaged to be married brings problems of its own. Is virginity old-fashioned? Do you save for a home or spend on your courtship? It's a testing time - and a trying time.
On a small island off the coast of China an old man and an ageing army wait-in the forlorn hope that the day will come when they return to the mainland as the liberators. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist Chinese army who retreated to Formosa seventeen years ago, flushed off the mainland by Red Chinese victors, still believe that they will one day rule China. In the meantime they bombard the mainland with little hydrogen balloons and propaganda messages, and have spent £1,500 million of American money. But as the old soldiers fade away does the dream fade too?
Millions of married couples see bringing up children as fulfilling and worthwhile. But for many couples the first real stress of marriage comes when the conventional picture of family life is complete; comes with the arrival of children. In this country we frequently have romantic illusions about children: ' they make the marriage ' we're told. But all too often they very nearly break it. We may expect our marriages to face economic uncertainty, emotional insecurity, sexual incompatibility, but some of us are unprepared for what happens when the children come.
What are the pressures that bring a marriage to the brink of disaster-force a couple to consider a future apart from each other? It is not always ' the other woman' and it does not necessarily happen in the seventh year of marriage. This programme examines marriages which are quite literally pivoted between break-up and recovery.
The man, the woman-and the children of broken marriages. Second-hand people - or is that just the way everybody else treats them? What happens when a marriage is finally over? Who suffers most? And what chance of a new life is there for the men and women who have been put asunder '? In 1967 more marriages than ever will end in the divorce courts. More people will wind up trying to start again. But the rows do not always finish there: children sometimes become the ammunition between parted parents. The bitterness does not always stop with divorce.
When the Communists took over China, most of the missionaries were expelled. Many of them landed with the refugees in Formosa and now thirteen million people there are being subjected to the most concentrated religious onslaught since Mohammed swept across Asia. Nearly one hundred different varieties of Christian missions-good people, doing good work. But with scores of Protestant denominations, every kind of Catholic, and several fringe groups declaring that both Protestant and Catholic are misguided, it is not surprising that one missionary's elbow sometimes gets in another missionary's ribs - nor that the bewildered Formosan people have found a way to Jesus all their own.
The problem of what to do with dependent relatives has always concerned our society. But in the end it is with the individual-a member of the family - that the responsibility lies. There is probably no harder test of family loyalty than when one person sacrifices his or her life to look after another. The people clamped together by family loyalties are often disparate people-relations whose relationship is one of blood alone; people who have had to choose between sending dependants into a home and being free; or looking after them and being chained.
Judith Powell , blonde, twenty-one, an art student with good looks and a guitar, wants to be a pop star. The pop machine has just discovered her and taken her over. She's being trained, groomed - prepared for pop stardom. She used to be a nobody; now they hope to make her somebody. They'll teach her to handle the press, what to drink, what to wear-how to climb to the top in one of the toughest fields in the world. If she makes it she'll need talent as well as the men and women of the the pop machine. She'll need to be able to sing. But is that enough? What goes on behind the scenes in the making of a pop star?
What happens when one man or woman decides everybody else is out of step? Out of step with the society in which we live, and with its rules and regulations. Can a single persons tenacity beat the system or must the individual get involved in fruitless struggles with authority-only in the end to be bulldozed into submission?
When the British ruled in India they brought into being a new race - of mixed British and Indian blood-the Anglo-Indian. They were brought up In British ways to serve British ends. For nearly two centuries they served the British Empire in the Police Force, the Army, the Railways, and Post Offices. Thev lived in a half world between the British rulers and the Indian subjects. They called England ' home.' When the British departed, a quarter-of-a-million of them were left behind. How do they fare now?
The mayors of Great Britain - robed, chained, and surrounded by pomp - are under fire. Chosen for seniority and not for talent, they are frequently accused of being pompous but powerless, traditional but irrelevant. We, the rate-payers, pay for them. What do we get back for our money? The Royal Commission on local government is examining the role of mayors. But how do the mayors themselves interpret their duties, behave behind the scenes, give us value for our money?
The kept woman, the mistress - clothed in mink, dripping with diamonds: the good-time girl - getting the best from a man, without the responsibility of being married to him: the marriage-breaker: the tart. The popular-one could almost say conventional-image of ' the other woman ' draws more from fiction than reality. For her in reality there is loneliness, a particularly hurting kind of jealousy, and a few snatched moments of furtive happiness. Whether she is morally right or wrong, do we understand her life?
... and it takes more than bricks and mortar, planning, and bathrooms to make it so. Our cities are bursting at the seams. The new towns seem to sprout in our countryside overnight. Our noisy familiar slums are being levelled by the bulldozer, the families rehoused in towns designed by planners to provide everything we need. But do they? What happens when families from London's Shepherd's Bush. Manchester's Moss Side, or Liverpool's Scotland Road move in to their new houses? What goes wrong? Why is there so much discontent? And what ought to be done?
The Union Jack flies outside his window, from the bonnet of his car, Is imprinted on his loyalties. Geoffrey William Kirk , C.M.G.; born August 9. 1907; educated Mill Hill and London University; salary £4,385 a year; job? - British Ambassador to El Salvador. He's our man there. He has a staff. He is the leader of a small British community in a Central American country so remote that when most people are sent there they ask: ' Where is it? ' and then: ' Why pick on me? ' It is an expatriate community ruled by the Union Jack but dominated by gossip and intrigue. patriotism and jingoism.
Lillian Baker , expecting a baby, Is jailed for a motoring offence. A national outcry follows. More than a thousand women a year are sent to prison in this country, and when they are released the law is satisfied. But does their punishment end with release? Does the stigma of a prison cell go with them into the outside world? In five cases tonight, Man Alive sets out to discover what happens when women who have been punished in the name of the law are set free.
The British love for animals is a national cliche. We all know about poodle parlours and doggy boutiques; the newspaper headlines on cruelty to animals, the posters about vivisection But for the lonely, the emotionally deprived, animals seem to offer something no human being can give. What makes us like this? Why do we care too much about animals, so little about our fellow human beings?
In the Roman Catholic Church priests are celibate-there must be no women in their lives-God's laws are to be obeyed and Canon Law, determined by the Vatican, is stern and unyielding. Millions of Roman Catholics throughout the world are concerned about the conflicts within their Church. Rows about contraception; arguments about celibacy; discussions about inflexibility. The priests argue too. Ten thousand of them have quit in the past ten years; many have married in defiance of their Church, suffered ' excommunication. Who are the. priests who, in the eyes of their Church, have rebelled or sinned?
Half a million people live with fear -irrational fear; often uncontrollable terror. They suffer from phobias; silly, odd things dominate their lives. Cures are being developed, but slowly and not always effectively. In the meantime, there is little comfort for those who panic in the presence of dogs or leaves, birds or visitors. The frustration of a life ruled by fear and the ridicule of friends and relatives who will not, and perhaps cannot, understand, often becomes intolerable. How do they live with it?
Sandie Shaw wins the Eurovision Song Contest for this country; Twiggy becomes the most talked-about export to America we have had in years; Johnny Speight , the man behind the cockney comedy show Till Death Us Do Part, causes an uproar and is asked to write a new series for a vast sum of money: and designers like Alan Aldridge with their shoulder-length hair and Cockney twang are invited for royal lunches. All four of them are in this week's programme. It's not just talent and a lucky break. It seems to be a positive advantage these days not only to be successful but to be working* class with it. Perhaps it helps all of us to believe we are becoming a classless society.
... and who are the Beautiful People? What is it like to live-and not sleep - a ' fourteen-hour Technicolour Dream '? Seven thousand English people went through a night of psychedelic experience at Alexandra Palace finding out. So did three Man Alive film crews and their reporters. There were never less than three pop groups playing; there were inflatable plastic events; mountains of bananas; concerts of coloured lights. The organisers made a profit and the message of love, beauty, peace, and gentleness was spread. Whether you are square or groovy, way out or mellow yellow, you ought to try and understand - it seems there are going to be more.
Suicide is a way of death that anyone can choose. The wealthy and apparently well-adjusted are as vulnerable as the poor and the deprived. But for those of us close to someone who chooses to die in this way there is another issue besides the sense of loss inseparable from sudden death. It is the issue of responsibility: ' If only,' we say, we could have done something ... ' How much can we do to prevent someone who wants to commit suicide? How far should we blame ourselves when they succeed? With the people who have faced this, lived with the suicide of someone else, Man Alive tries to find out.
But the idle comment of a hotel executive in the lush tourist section of Jamaica is hardly the answer to the problems facing the island. In the recent elections violence and gun-fire resulted in death. Poverty, bad housing, illiteracy, and unemployment face too many Jamaicans today. The tourist industry is booming. The hotels flourish, visitors are happy -and seldom see the slums or the difficulties. A hotel room can cost £500 a week - if you are one of the privileged. On the other hand you may have to feed a family of seven for £2 10s a week - if you are one of the poor
In this country today male homosexuals break the law, are liable to prosecution and punishment. Parliament is considering new legislation to legalise the behaviour, in certain circumstances, of these men. But even if the threat of blackmail, of violence, and of police prosecution is removed from their lives, will the rest of us accept their behaviour? Our society today is heterosexually geared. Homosexuals receive minority treatment - intolerance, suspicion, often disgust. But are they a threat to the rest of us? In the first of two programmes dealing with men and women homosexuals, Man Alive examines this question.
Lesbians: women who prefer to live their lives with other women, women who reject the company and love of men and reject the idea of children and family life. Lesbianism is not illegal. But for most of us it is unacceptable. There may be no need for parliamentary discussion about the behaviour of these women, but for women who love women, unqualified acceptance by our society still does not exist.
They are the men on our doorsteps perhaps even with a foot in our door -salesmen; earning a living by persuading us to pay for something we may not even have known we wanted. In exhibitions, market places, suburban streets, car show rooms, and 100-a-day hotel suites they practise their skills and take our money. But what is in it for them-apart from the commission? Why do people get more than just a living out of selling? And who are the top men, who may make a million pounds out of a single deal?
Even the women who wept when Valentino died might find it hard to grasp what it means to be a raver. Today the girls who follow the pop groups start young-and once started there is no stopping them. They come from every kind of background. The only things they share in common are their youth and their idols -and the fact that they are part of a world their parents know nothing about, a world with its own jargon, its own morality, a world where the social pattern their parents thought entirely natural has been turned on its head and the girls have become the hunters, the boys the hunted.
They smile at us or shriek at us from the pages of the magazines, or the television screens ... the cheery children asking us to buy, buy, buy. They look natural. unspoiled, ordinary kids. Actually they're professionals in an ever-expanding business which uses children as its raw material. How do they get into it? Where do they learn the trade? And what does it do to the children .. , and their mothers?
The cry of a whole generation of young people. Kathy ran away from home at sixteen, was found six months later living rough, sleeping in derelict houses. Now she is at home again-at least for the time being. She left because she cannot make her parents understand her. They worried because they could not understand what she was trying to tell them. Kathy threw away the comforts of her home life, abandoned the security of mother, father, brothers, and sister. Kathy is, perhaps, the voice of today's young generation; representing the communication gulf between parents and their children today.
More than 70,000 illegitimate children will be born in Great Britain this year. The first Parliamentary Act on the subject was passed in 1576; there have been adjustments since then but not many. Parliament appointed a Committee three years ago to bring about changes in the law. The House of Commons has still not found time to consider the Committee's recommendations. Meanwhile the attitude of society, as well as the law, can make the life of an illegitimate one of stigma and distress. They are the men and women who feel themselves to be alone, rejected: punished through no fault of their own.
Every summer the variety artists go to the seaside - to make the holiday-makers laugh. The big names go to Blackpool and Great Yarmouth, the slightly smaller names go to Bournemouth. Scarborough or Llandudno. You may never have heard the names of the players in ' Startime ' at Ilfracombe. They have never topped a Palladium bill - perhaps they never will. But they still have their professional standards and their high hopes. One day the big break is bound to come. Meantime keep the customers laughing and keep the wolf from the door.
In 1943, when the war was at its height, a pretty girl of sixteen, crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, was admitted to a geriatric hospital in South London-a place only for old people. Today, twenty-four years later, she is still there, living in a hospital surrounded by the old and the dying. Pamela needs little medical attention, she is bright and intelligent. But Pamela has an official national health label: Young Chronic Sick. This two-part enquiry looks at conditions both inside and outside hospital for people like her - and there are at least three thousand like Pamela, sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in geriatric hospitals.
Margaret is an attractive fair haired woman in her thirties; intelligent, quick-witted. She has lived the past seventeen years in an iron lung, ever since she was taken ill with polio as a teenager. Margaret's life sentence has been spent at home - away from hospital and institutional routines. If she had been kept in hospital, like the girl in last week's programme, it would have cost the state £100 a week to maintain her there. Instead her parents, now elderly, work to keep her at home, struggle to look after her. Their only financial help - a few pounds National Assistance. But for Margaret and her parents the real cost must be measured in terms of human effort.
When we were boys adventure was everywhere. We rescued maidens, shot down the bad men, drove the night expresses. Then we grew up and the bold dreams were cast off with the short trousers. But there are men who cannot let go their boyhood fantasies; who devote much of their manhood to preserving their boyhood tor ever. This film shows four of them -living in their dreams.
t could be an electricity pylon in your backyard, it could mean giving up your favourite rose-bed to a bypass, it could be a motorway cutting through fields and farms. It is, in fact, an airport: the proposed third London Airport at Stansted. But it doesn't really matter. What does matter is that in the name of progress people are going to be inconvenienced, upset, hurt. In Stansted they will argue about the planning, the cost and the effectiveness. But what it is really all about is much more simple. Progress is fine-until the day you hear it is going to take place in your own garden.
There is nothing new about the dilemma of parents who want to protect their children from the harsh realities of life and give them at the same time the freedom and independence young people demand. But in today's world of conflicting moralities the older generation may still regard emotional experience as something that needs a decent covering of conventional morality. Their children can hardly escape the urgent pressures of the new morality. Many youngsters today find themselves in a world of double-think. Perhaps the saddest manifestation of the conflict is that it is those on the fringe of it who get hurt most.
Two brides - two very different couples. Norma has lived all her life in Poplar in London's East End and now has married Barry whom she met on a blind date. They courted for two years and were married from her mother's home, just by the gasometer off the East India Dock Road. The reception was a noisy knees-up In the local church hall. Diana, one of the last of the real debs, used to have a flat in Kensington and now has married Timothy, a former escort. They were officially engaged for three months and were married from her parents' home in Buckinghamshire. The reception, for 600 friends, was in a marquee on the lawn near the swimming pool in her father's garden. For the preparations and the weddings Man Alive was there.
A row about corporal punishment in an approved school; an argument in every home in the country; head-masters in conference vote overwhelmingly to retain the cane; parents in difficulty struggle to find a way to discipline. In schools and homes just how should those charged with authority and welfare punish? Many parents give up, surrender to the idea of permissiveness, live uncomfortably with the results of indiscipline. Alternatively, another form of parental surrender: teachers in both boarding and day schools are expected to take over from parents, solve the problem of how to control the unruly young, discover whether it is best to persuade, or punish, or beat.
They are as much a part of the English summer as rain, traffic jams, and school holidays-fêtes. And in the village of Stoke St. Gregory , Somerset, the fête that they have planned, discussed, and argued about for months finally takes place. The organisers organise: their opponents criticise. Feelings flare into the open over the beauty queen competition, and the sandwiches run out half-way through the afternoon. Ponies and gymkhana events; sideshows and opening speeches. Behind the scenes the quarrels and panics. Who gets the credit if it's a success? Who gets the blame if it's a failure?
In Notting Hill, sociologists and dogooders are not unusual. They first moved in to try and finish off Rachmanism, to try and bring peace after Britain's first race riots. Today, Notting Hill is even more sociologically fashionable, and the people who live there have become almost resigned to being surveyed, examined, used as little more than specimens in sociological enquiries. This year there was yet another scheme - the Notting Hill Summer Project. Into the area came 150 students burdened with rucksacks, sleeping bags and high ideals - a group of youngsters who wanted to leave their mark, to begin to change the face of Notting Hill yet again.
They are cases we read about all too often: the domestic tragedies in which an elder sister has to take over the role of mother to a home and family. When the mother of a young family dies or goes away the children are normally split up, cared for in institutions or separate foster-homes. But sometimes the eldest girl steps in. Frequently the girl is little more than a child herself, but if she is willing and courageous enough the authorities may back her attempt, support her desire to stop the family being split.
You hear it said often: I'll wait for him whatever it takes ...' It's bad enough for wives and girlfriends to be parted from their husbands and boyfriends due to business or duty pressures, but when the absence is because the man is in prison, it's a thousand times worse. For the women who wait for their men to do time, the problems are tough-what to tell the children, the neighbours; how to scrape along on National Assistance; how to endure the long loneliness. A few give up the struggle. Those who don't find the cost of their determination to stick out the vigil is high.
Two hundred people - women of seventy, boys of seventeen - spread over two measured acres of sandy beach and digging like mad through a hot summer's day. From time to time they had to be forced to rest, because their muscles, old and young, were driven by the hope that under the next shovelful of sand there might be a silver Maserati. or an E-type Jaguar, a Rover 2000. or a silver Cadillac, an ocean-going cabin cruiser, or a treasure chest containing £1,000. or any one of ten silver Mini-Coopers. Tonight Man Alive tells the story of the greatest treasure hunt ever launched in the name of commerce. It cost £150,000, and they called it ' The Big Dig.'
The description on the police charge sheet at a magistrate's court - a description that fits at least a thousand men and women in London alone. People who wander the city streets, sleep where they can. in parks and stations, until the police move them on. Their numbers are on the increase and the authorities are worried by the problem. Perhaps the most perplexing aspect of the situation is the number of women living this way. Who are they? Where do they come from? What lives did they lead before this one? And why do they prefer the life they have now?
They call her the Duchess of Southwark - she is eighty years old, lives in a Council flat just off Borough High Street, down by London Bridge. Her real name is Anne Garner and she lives alone, but rather like the Lady Bountiful of a bygone era, she fills her life with good works, church committees, and a wide range of acquaintances among the young and old of Southwark. She is determined to remain self-sufficient, to have a full life. How does she set about staving off the emptiness of life for someone who is old, out of date, necessary to no one except herself?
Balxay Is a girls' boarding school In Dundee - an exclusive school with only sixty pupils, where each member of the staff has only ten girls to educate. The girls wear school uniform when they go outside the school - and don't like wearing it. People stare. They stare more at these girls. Balgay is not a normal boarding school. For most of the girls it is a place where they learn to begin life - the kind of life other girls can take for granted. There are no fees and only one way to become a pupil. You must be sent to Balgay by a court, described as 'In need of care and protection.' It is an approved school. But at a time when the approved school system is under fire perhaps this school in Scotland can show us a different way.
Balgay Approved School for Girls in Scotland is not a place of punishment. Few of the girls there are offenders in the criminal sense. They are taken away because their parents have lost control of them, or they need protection, or they are in moral danger. How much do we care about our own children? How often do we make sure they know we care? This second look inside Balgay spotlights the man who deals with sixty girls who feel themselves to be social outcasts, even enemies of society. But who is to blame for making them that way?
John Cousins never stood on the steps of Transport House to declare that, like father, he'd someday become boss of the gigantic Transport and General Workers Union. Douglas Hogg hasn't said he'll be as prominent a barrister or politician as father Quintin. Children of famous fathers, they are having a go at the same careers in which their fathers distinguished themselves. Living up to father's name is a big task. Yet even when entering a vastly different field there are still pressures; criticisms: accusations of ' string pulling.' Unlike his father, David Montgomery , son of the Field-Marshal, isn'a soldier. He works in the perfume business. But like the others he finds there are always comparisons and the personal worry of living up to the name.
t sounds almost like a letter home from a little boy at prep school. It is, in fact, the often-rewarded cry of a pair of wildly successful American millionaires. In fifteen years Kemmons Wilson and his business partner Wallace Johnson have, built the biggest hotel chain in the world - accumulating personal fortunes of £30 million each in the process. Both devout church-goers, they have clung to the simplicity of their cotton state beginnings. To direct their hundred companies from Memphis, Tennessee, they work seven days a week, fly everywhere by private jet - and open a new hotel every two days. They also combine business and God with a fervour unique to the American Bible Belt.
The pop group tunes up. The house lights dim. Into the spotlight steps a young man in a while jacket. The scene for evensong, 1967-style, is set. And, as always. The Rev. Paul Jobson (Church of England) has a full house. Fr. Giarchi, a Roman Catholic priest, enjoys similar success, taking his special brand of religion to the people. In the North they call him the Tommy Cooper of the Church circuit, applauding his slick act performed against a backcloth of pin-ups and pop images. Two clergymen of different denominations, but with similar ideas and ideals: that you've got to have a gimmick to sell anything these days. Some worshippers disagree. Some ministers are incensed by the suggestion. Are the pop preachers selling Christianity or getting in the way of it?
They are used to death in the country, but not death on the scale of the last few weeks when disease has ravaged the dairy lands of England. The number of animals slaughtered is too big to have meaning, the cost too great yet to be measured. But it is not just a financial loss; it is the loss of a life's work, the loss of animals that have almost become pets; the sending away of children: a pervasive air of despair that is the real cost.
' Nobody seriously questions the need for planning in the management of a western Industrial democracy ...' The trite truisms flow from the planners. The people to whom the planning is being done use a blunter vocabulary, as in the pit villages in the North-East. What does all this planning mean at the human level? What is it like to be one of the miners threatened with unemployment? Man Alive travels south from a pit village in Northumberland with two miners who have had to pack up and move out with the wife and kids.
At the very centre of the brilliant world of New York high society is Suzy - queen of all the international gossip columnists: real name Aileen Mehle. Wherever people are famous, or aristocratic, or talented. or scandalous - and certainly wherever they are rich - is where she belongs. She moves among them freely, calls them beautiful people, and every day millions of Americans can read what she says about them In their papers. Now we too in Britain can read the column that has made her rich and famous. What is her world? Who are the people in it?
Colonel Eric Hefford. C.B.E., D.S.O. retired from twenty-four years of army life, looked around him at the crumbling British Empire and stepped deftly on to the band-wagon. He set up shop selling Independence Celebrations to any new nation which cared to call, and eight have so far obliged. Prime Ministers are awed by the pomp and precision he can bring to chaotic rehearsals of Governors and Field-Marshals and thousands of flag-waving children. Always they recommend him to other newly emerging countries. Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Jamaica, Malta, Guyana, Barbados have been through it all with the Colonel. This time it was the turn of Mauritius.
In many countries today the police are armed and ready to face the long hot summer the way they believe best. Could these methods be adopted here soon? How would they affect the role of the British bobby? Is he to remain the crime fighter, servant of the public and friend of children? Or is he to become the tool of local or national government and, perhaps, a public enemy?
In the first of two programmes concerned with mixed marriages, Man Alive looks at the problems and the different solutions found by five different couples.
When a racially mixed couple-black and white-decide to marry it is a brave decision, frequently one made in the face of prejudice and bigotry. White girls married to coloured men or coloured girls with white husbands must find their own answers to the many extra problems that are bound to beset their marriages. But frequently the main consequence and burden of their decision to marry is one that concerns their children. For the children: neither one world nor the other, in a society in which there exists violent race prejudice. How can the parents protect them? What special armour do they need to face the life ahead?
Up in the Catskill Mountains, two hours' drive from New York City, stands the Concord Hotel, a vast concrete camp renowned for one speciality-mating. Here most weekends a human hotchpotch of 3,000 men and women pay nearly £ 20 a day to be herded together, like cattle in a market, and forcefully paired off by a social hostess called Rose. Girls living dull city lives plan their robes and their roles weeks ahead; men who are normally office clerks promote themselves to lawyers and doctors. Most of the women are hunting for husbands. Most of the men are not hunting for wives. It's a loud, brassy, boozy free-for-all. But despite the seemingly jolly veneer the more honest among the participants will admit that the whole scene is a sad charade. Even the snow on the ski-slopes was artificial.
There are now 12,000 registered members in nudist clubs in Britain today-their numbers are on the increase. And the number of clubs catering for them has nearly doubled in the past five years; clubs where they can pitch their tents, park their caravans, or just take off their clothes. The fantasy is familiar: the sea, the sand, and a body tanned by the blazing sun; but reality lies a . good distance off. Nudism in this country is more likely to mean a wet weekend in Cheshire or a chilly day near St. Albans. But die-hard nudists are not easy to deter. They come in all shapes and sizes. Some families even live permanently in nudist colonies. This summer more applications than ever before have been made by groups of nudists to use beaches and swimming pools to prove their point. Exercise keeps the cold out. If it rains we don't spoil our clothes, the argument runs. If it snows you can always keep your Wellingtons on. What sort of people are they? What is the life they believe in so passionately? In nudist resorts and at a nudist hotel Man Alive takes a frank look at the people who mean it when they say ' Take off your clothes and live.'
Henry Higgins is a twenty-four-year-old Englishman, and a bullfighter. Some aficionados (the word for bullfight fans) say he'll be a good one. He has been gored, tossed, and nearly killed. In turn he has already ritually finished off hundreds of four-year-old Spanish fighting bulls His whole life is devoted to bullfighting; both in and out of the bull ring. Man Alive film cameras set out to discover what sort of man he is, what sort of world he lives in. And in the studio we ask cruel to whom?
As many as one million adult people in Great Britain today may well be able to watch and understand tonight's Man Alive programme. But they won'be able to learn about it in advance by reading this. They are illiterate. Men and women of all ages who frequently lead lives of deceit and secrecy in an attempt to conceal their inability to read and write. Women who shop in fear that the colour and shapes of household packages may change-because the words and brand names might as well be Chinese. Men who invent excuses about lost spectacles when faced with forms to fill in and directions to read. People travelling around with their own invented systems of remembering railway stations and bus stops. And perhaps the biggest scandal of all - in 1968 - an estimated fifteen per cent of fifteen-year-old school leavers who have failed to learn effectively how to read and write. Whose fault is it? And what should be done?
The richest nation in the world has problems to match its affluence. Alcoholism has become America's fourth biggest killer disease-after cancer, heart disease, and mental illness - and of the six million alcoholics in the U.S. today, seventy per cent are not to be found on Skid Row. They live with their families, attend church, pay taxes, educate their children, and continue to function on just the edge of social acceptability as farmers, teachers, clergymen, doctors, and housewives. In the first of a two-part inquiry into alcoholism, Man Alive looks at alcoholics and their families from Long Island to California, visits them in prison, and investigates what happens to them in treatment clinics: and then asks ' Is this the way to deal with the problem? '
In Britain today there are at least half a million alcoholics-some ignorant of the illness from which they suffer; others, ashamed and afraid, hiding it from family, friends, and employers. Industry alone has to face a bill estimated at £ 50 million a year in lost output. Are employers facing up to this fact too slowly? Are they slow to recognise the significance of the' Monday-morning hangover,' which keeps hundreds from work? Are they slow to reach out to help the executive who is drink-fuddled through most of the day? Is the drinking executive only steps away from the meths men? What research is being done to find out about the disease and to collate information about treatment methods? In this the last of a two-part enquiry, Man Alive tries to find out.
... the Fifth of November, Gunpowder Treason and Plot But why should we remember? And, more important still, how many needless accidents does it cause each year? What really happened on that first gunpowder night under the House of Commons 350 years ago is vague; no one knows the facts for sure. But what is crystal clear - as far as the casualty departments of our hospitals are concerned-is that today, fireworks are an annual hazard which disable and scar thousands of children. Millions of people get pleasure and enjoyment from fireworks. Firework displays can be exciting and picturesque. But we are still one of the few countries left that sell fireworks to children. The law now says that children must be over thirteen before they can buy. But those who are badly burned are frequently very much younger. Is it worth it when we count the cost? Should we continue to put danger in the hands of children?
What happens when planners build houses for people who then find they don't want to live in them? And industrial estates are offered to employers who prefer to build factories elsewhere? Some say the answer can be found at Haverhill, in West Suffolk. Twelve years ago a dying community of 3,000 country people, it's now an expanding town, population 12,000, most of it ' overspill ' from London. They live in housing estates financed by the Greater London Council. But many houses in Haverhill stand empty. Wages are below and prices (say the wives) above the national average. The planners, they say, have built not a Utopia but a ghetto of city dwellers in the Suffolk countryside.
'Go Back Where You Came From' ... is the ugly phrase of prejudice, the discordant command of bigotry, too frequently heard in the streets of our cities these days. The row about Enoch Powell 's suggested ' ministry of repatriation ' still rages; and the problem for coloured immigrants living in this country is hardly lessened when our vocabulary finds a new word added-' Powellism.' Supporters of Mr. Powell may not see this programme, may not be interested in the story of three West Indian families who did return home after trying to make a go of life in this country; who did, with reluctance and disillusionment, give meaning to the slogan they'd been shocked to find on walls here: Go back where you came from.' They came to Britain full of hope, holding British passports, confident of welcome from the mother country. Now they've undertaken their own ' voluntary repatriation.'
Principal boys used to be girls-now they are boys. This year we have Jimmy Tarbuck at the London Palladium. But at the Victoria Theatre, Salford, there's Bryan Johnson. Remember him? Runner-up at the Eurovision Song Contest in 1960. This year he's Robin Hood. But Nurse Twinkle is a man - Ronnie Coyles. He lives in a flat in Morecambe, far from the sea. The summer season is over, so until opening night he must watch his savings carefully. Rehearsals are hard work but unpaid. That is how pantomime survives. Man Alive goes behind the scenes and traces Babes in the Wood from its early birth pangs right through to the grand finale when Robin gets his Maid Marian and the Sheriff of Nottingham hies off to the woods with Nurse Twinkle-all in Salford, Lanes.
It is ten years since Cuba became Castro's Cuba and this week, as the government-inspired ceremonies celebrate the tenth anniversary of the ' Glorious Revolution,' refugee planes from Havana will land in Miami twice a day-as they do every day. Miami-American playground: a frightening combination of golden sand and blaring architecture-and, for a quarter of a million Cubans to date, gateway to a new life. The United States is a country founded on a concept of taking in those who have fled from other places. The latest ingredient to be added to this multi-racial melting-pot is the confused, penniless, Spanish-speaking Cuban refugees. Within a year or two the young, adapting as they always do, reach for all-American clothes, ideas, and behaviour. But for their parents the adaptation sometimes seems impossible. The American government struggles to cope with the problem. Some American people have found a new focus fer race hatred, and still-twice a day -a refugee plane lands in Miami with families who have been stripped of everything but the clothes they wear before they were allowed to leave Cuba - for the land of coke.
The organisers confess modestly that the Miss World contest is 4 one of the biggest publicity gimmicks in the world.' The BBC cheerfully brings the pulchritudinous finals to 27 million viewers. Fifty-four sets of vital statistics. Fifty-four national hopes burning beneath swimming costumes, carefully inspected for artificial devices. It all adds up to eight days of near hysteria; rows, tears, chaperones and a babel of interpreters. Big girls, small girls, olive girls. Girls who care, and girls who don't. Girls who cheat, and girls who won't. The contest is planned with military precision. The result is a crown, £ 2,500, and a handful of golden ' perks.'
Every year their numbers increase. Report after report has been produced on the problem created by nearly 70,000 illegitimate births annually. And yet the unmarried mother is, today, as badly off as she has ever been. Much of the care of unmarried mothers and their children is left to voluntary organisations-in particular the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child. At the end of last year the N.C.U.M.C. called a press conference-because it was going bankrupt. If it goes out of business society will have to decide what responsibility it owes to the unmarried women who each year have illegitimate babies. Is it right that such social responsibility should have to be left in the hands of voluntary organisations? Do we profess liberalism on the one hand and stigmatise the unmarried mother on the other? Now both Parliament and society may have to decide.
Close on 10,000 of our children-the vast majority of them boys-are now in approved schools, but what good does it do them? They're aged between eight and nineteen years, and they will be kept there for anything up to three years at a cost averaging £ 23 9s. 6d. a week. And within a short time of their release two out of three of the boys will be in trouble with the law again. There are 121 of these schools in Britain, often in isolated country mansions far removed from the environment the boys knew and imposing a way of life quite different from the life many of them have known and will return to.
The country's approved schools are under the spotlight of publicity and no one knows exactly what is going to happen to them. They are condemned as junior prisons, places where the not-so-innocent learn the tricks of the trade of the hardened criminal. They are defended as schools which achieve success with the failures of every other educational and social service; the end of the road that leads back to a normal way of life. Under new legislation the schools will become part of a new system of community homes run by local authorities. But how will they change? Will the present regime alter significantly? Will the present staffs remain in control?
In this country, for the first time, real moves are being made to give our cities one-man-rule-not just rubber-stamp mayors for a year, but leaders with full executive authority. In Canada, Montreal was once a roaring vice-ridden city until a little French-Canadian lawyer named Jean Drapeau set to work. He helped write a newspaper series that exposed the vice. Then he was co-prosecutor at the enquiry into the police force that followed. The city had found a champion. The people immediately made him mayor-and he has been back to the City Hall four times, the last time with an incredible ninety-four per cent of the vote. Mayor Drapeau has given Montreal the modern metro it had argued over for fifty years, a concert hall shelved for twenty-five years, a vast underground shopping complex - and Expo 67, the world fair that won him international acclaim. But now the bills are due. Man Alive caught up with Mayor Drapeau as he faced a city deficit of nearly$30 million - and the first real questioning of his poor record on housing and social welfare. Have we in Britain anything to learn from the policies and actions of this feudal man with a near dictatorial authority, or is he, as one newspaper charged, ' high on prestige, low on compassion'?
If you break the law, no matter if you have murdered your wife or forgotten to pay your TV licence, the chances are that the first court to which you are summoned will be presided over by an amateur-a part-time magistrate. Out of nearly 20,000 magistrates in England and Wales, less than fifty are paid for their vocation. The vast majority are lay Justices, worthy members of society who give up part of their spare time to sit in judgment on the rest of us. They work for nothing more than the honour and the responsibility. The way they are appointed is a mystery even to them, because the selection process is shrouded in secrecy. But the majority of them, even today, are middle-class people of mature years, because they are the people most likely to have the time to spare. It is these men and women who deal with ninety-eight per cent of all criminal cases, let alone all the petty offences like parking in restricted areas, which almost all of us commit at some time or another. The odds are that one day you will appear before a Justice of the Peace. What kind of people are they? What sort of qualifications do they have? Are they the right people for the enormously responsible job they have to do?
You are our American ambassadors. It is through your actions that the British people are able to judge us Americans as we really are and not as some people think that we are ... So spoke the United States Air Force officer at this month's briefing when thirty airmen learnt the realities of being foreigners in Britain. The subject was ' Host Nation Irritants': in peacetime learning to live at peace with the natives is the main concern. There are 52,000 American servicemen and their families in Britain. Eight thousand of them are stationed at two nuclear alert air bases within five miles of Woodbridge (pop. 6,650), a Suffolk market town. Those who cannot face the strangeness of it all never leave the base-an island of America in Constable country: gas stations and air conditioning, canned beer and bowling, clothes care coin-ops, and big American cars. American schools, American hospitals, even the meat is flown in from Washington D.C. Those who brave the outside world, the country pubs, the thatched cottages, the world of the village bobby, see the England the tourist learns about. How different from the ad-man's dream do these uniformed American ' ambassadors ' find us? How different do we find them?
Half a million people go to Football League matches every Saturday, and for every one who goes ten watch a game on television. Association Football is more than a game, an industry, or a way of life. It is an institution. Players become heroes, winning teams become symbols of national pride. But a football team Ls only as successful as its manager, and in football only the successful survive. If the team wins, the players get the credit; if it loses, too often the manager gets the sack. Already this season nearly half the ninety-two Football League managers have lost their jobs. Since the war more than 700 have been fired or have resigned. Two years ago, when Arsenal were an indifferent middle-of-the-first division side, the club physiotherapist, Bertie Mee , was appointed manager. Now they are in the final of the League Cup, and are challengers for the League Championship. For the last two years, Bradford Park Avenue have been at the bottom of the fourth division and this season have to seek re-election for the third successive year. Their hopes rest on the new appointment of player-manager Laurie Brown , formerly an English amateur international, centre-half with Arsenal, Tottenham, and Norwich. What does it mean to be a football manager, to have one of the most precarious jobs in show business where success is measured in goals and failure means almost certain dismissal?
In 1945 Britain was investing £ 150 million a year in education. By 1968 the sum was £ 2,000 million. Every tax-payer can feel proud of his share in this rise in the education budget. But not every voter is aware of the appallingly low standard of education that prevailed in 1945. Nor is it widely known that today six children in ten leave school without an 0-level and that to reduce classes in Primary Schools to forty and in Secondary Schools to thirty we lack 42,000 trained teachers-now. Every child in Primary and Secondary School has a chance-sometimes it's an outside chance -of getting an education. It is only one chance in a lifetime. The present year, 1969, will be remembered as the year of the cuts; when for the first time in a quarter of a century, critics say, the government budgeted for a decline in educational standards -in a time of growing population in schools, colleges, and universities. This week Man Alive examines the arguments for and against the educational cuts with the Secretary of State for Education and Science, Edward Short-and those who seek to question the wisdom of the government policies.
Men with long hair, caftans, and sandals; girls without make-up, fierce with ideals, vocal with conviction. Beards and passion-sitar music and beads. Some of the symbols of revolution in 1969. People who want to opt out of the society most of us unquestioningly conform to. Men and women who reject the suburban life, the nine-to-five values, and the acceptance of governmental rules and social laws that the majority of us hardly ever challenge. But opt out to what? If they reject society as it is today, what would they have in its place? There are communities all over Britain, little bands of fervent believers who have rejected and are attempting to replace. The idea of escaping from the general rat-race is not new. Groups of people have been trying it for years. But in 1969 the way people go about it is sometimes different. With those who are trying today and those who saw it all happen yesterday Man Alive looks at the whys and wherefores of another way of life.
demonstrating-arguing with the police and authorities. The Squatters are a militant group, growing in size, who put homeless families into empty buildings-then barricade them in. They usually pick target property belonging to local councils to draw attention to their cause-the plight of the homeless. Cathy Come Home may have stirred the conscience of the nation, but more than two years later the situation has grown worse rather than better. Council waiting-lists have lengthened, the army of homeless has increased in size. Nobody denies the acuteness of the problem. But is the Squatters' way the best way to do something about it? Militant action certainly makes headlines but will it cure the condition? In the first of two programmes Man Alive examines the Squatters and how they operate.
Men and women prepared to take things into their own hands in order to get to grips with the increasing problem of the homeless. They make headlines for newspapers, noisy footage for news bulletins, and headaches for local authorities and police forces. They don'care. It's what they set out to do. They believe and hope that their activities will mushroom all over the country and they won'stop until they're satisfied that enough is being done for the homeless. But is their way the right way? Last week's Man Alive saw how they operate, who they're doing it for, and who it is they're fighting. This week the programme asks: can they hope to achieve success this way?
The first of three programmes about trouble in our universities Violence and shouting: waving placards and charging police-horses; headlines and loud hailers: the academic life sometimes seems more like a running riot. Puzzled parents, resentful taxpayers, worried university staff, and sixth-formers uncertainly facing an undergraduate future which may contain as many sit-downs as seminars. We hear the roar of student unrest, but does the noise make sense? Are there any words to listen to? What should a university education mean in 1969? With just a handful of parents, sixth-formers, students, and vice-chancellors (the men in the hot seats at universities) Man Alive tries to find out.
Second of three programmes about trouble in our universities Violence and shouting; waving placards and charging police-horses; headlines and loud hailers: the academic life sometimes seems more like a running riot. Puzzled parents, resentful taxpayers, worried university staff, and sixth-formers uncertainly facing an undergraduate future which may contain as many sit-downs as seminars. We hear the roar of student unrest, but does the noise make sense? Are there any words to listen to? What should a university education mean in 1969? With just a handful of parents, sixth-formers, students, and vice-chancellors (the men in the hot seats at universities) Man Alive tries to find out.
Last of three programmes about trouble in our universities Violence and shouting; waving placards and charging police-horses; headlines and loud hailers: the academic life sometimes seems more like a running riot. Puzzled parents, resentful taxpayers, worried university staff, and sixth-formers uncertainly facing an undergraduate future which may contain as many sit-downs as seminars. We hear the roar of student unrest, but does the noise make sense? Are there dny words to listen to? What should a university education mean in 1969? With just a handful of parents, sixth-formers, students, and vice-chancellors (the men in the hot seats at universities) Man Alive tries to find out.
If you're married with two children and with about £ 23 a week coming into the house you will already know all about the problems of spinning out money to make ends meet. And you are far from being alone in this-in fact, you're Mr. Average. The British national average wage is exactly ;E22 5s. 3d., the highest it's ever been. But this doesn'make you Midas, and living on it is nearly always a question of what can'be afforded, what has to go. How do you decide what it shall be? How do you sort out priorities? Man Alive looks at four families living their lives in very different ways and with only their pay-packet in common. When it comes to spending it they are poles apart, separated by attitudes and ambitions. Do you save, or live to the hilt? Would you consider HP? Is it moFe important to have a holiday or better clothes for your children? Can you ever own your own home? Is £ 23 a week a reasonable sum on which to bring up a family? What is the ' average ' life like?
A row has broken out about Commonwealth and immigrant doctors in British hospitals: an argument with all the overtones of being not so much about medicine as about colour. Critics challenge their competence as doctors and nurses in British hospitals. But senior medical men point out that Britain's elaborate health service couldn't operate on the basis of white manpower. More than a third of the doctors and nurses in British hospitals come from abroad. They come in search of training but have much to give as well as to receive. It would appear to be a fair exchange. But is it? Many training appointments in teaching hospitals seem closed to them and most must fill posts which white British doctors and nurses appear not to want. Is the row in our health service going to damage the relationship between immigrant doctors and British patients? Or is there a problem which should be brought out into the open and examined?
' We cannot blame anyone else, even the Government, if we drop each his own pinch of incense on the altar of Beelzebub ...' says Quintin Hogg-Member of Parliament, barrister, poet, and family man. Having condemned the individual as a sinner, he moves on to society: ' If the country lacks discipline, if it ceases to believe in decency, if it ceases to worship at the shrine of honesty and truth, if its women lack modesty and its men lack courage-it's no good laying the blame on ministers, or politicians, or parliaments.' Many, no doubt, would agree with the ex-Lord Hailsham. Others believe, no less firmly, that Quintin Hogg and his followers, though perhaps they are right in the diagnosis of society's ills, are wrong about the cures they prescribe. This week, in the MAN ALIVE studio Quintin Hogg discusses the morals, manners, and fashions prevalent in art and public and family life in Britain today -and explains the principles of Hogg's Honour.
Most people have a view of life in the country that doesn't match reality ... FACT: One farmworker in jour earns less than £ 13 a week (the minimum wage is only £ 12.8s.0d.) FACT: A peculiar wages permit system allows some farmers to have their workers' downgraded and pay them even less than this FACT: One-quarter of general farm workers with more than three children live below the official poverty level FACT: Because of the ' tied ' cottage system, some farm workers' do not even have complete job security and freedom (if a man loses his job he can lose his home, too) FACT: 35,000 men a year are getting out of farm work, leaving these conditions for jobs in the cities FACT: The National Union of Agricultural Workers frequently has its hands tied and seems helpless, partly because it has so few members and partly because its members are so scattered Tonight MAN ALIVE comes from the Old Crown Court, Dorchester, in which, 135 years ago, six men of the land who became known as the ' Tolpuddle Martyrs' were convicted for trying to organise a protest against farmworkers' pay and conditions. Their sentence, then, was transportation to Australia. And tonight MAN ALIVE asks: are farm workers still an oppressed minority a century and a half later?
The Hebrew word that means peace It's two years since the week of death and destruction in the Middle East now known to history as the Six Days War. But since the ceasefire nearly as many people have been killed in the shaky peace as during the war. And in the meantime Israel has entered her twenty-first year of independence-still fighting. As the politicians bargain and the death toll mounts, the strain on the ordinary people of Israel grows. If a nation is living with unease and fear, how do ordinary families react to the pressures? In Jerusalem the older children arrive earlier at school to search their classrooms for bombs. Shopping in city streets can end in disaster with a grenade explosion, a sniper's bullet, or a shell. On the border Kibbutzim armed patrols and dug-outs are still part of everyday life. No family has been untouched by death or casualty. But still the word you hear most is the daily greeting of the Israeli people—Shalom, peace. MAN ALIVE looks at the lives of Israeli families living under the stresses of that kind of peace today.
A third of the people who die in this country in the next twelve months will be killed by some form of heart failure or heart disease-200,000 men and women. The heart attack has become this country's biggest premature killer. More than cancer, bronchitis, and the other killers which we fear, death from heart failure is really the one we should consider now. It's the same story in all countries like ours where the pace takes its toll on the individual. In the United States more than a million and a half Americans will suffer a heart attack in the next twelve months. Six hundred thousand of them will die one a minute around the clock. Now there is hope that this toll can be reduced. New forms of treatment, if rushed into use immediately after the first attack, can save lives. In the States they are pioneering these new methods. But in this country we're not far behind (indeed, in some respects we may even be ahead). In two programmes MAN ALIVE looks first at the situation in America.
It's the biggest killer in the country. One-third of all the people who die do so from heart disease. In the next twelve months 200,000 people will become the victims of a heart attack. New methods are being used to try to cut the death toll, but the cost of saving life is high. In some hospitals in this country they have found a way-at a price. In one city they send the cardiac equipment to the victim by ambulance in order to cut down the delay that costs lives. It's become the safest place in the world to have a heart attack. The city is Belfast. But there are men—experts in medical investment-who ask: consider the cost. In the second of two programmes MAN ALIVE looks at the new methods and then, with the men whose job it is to save lives, asks: is it worth it?
At a reunion of No. 501 Squadron at RAF Kenley, surviving Battle of Britain pilots gather to swap stories and recall the events of 1940.
You see them in the street with their big boots, narrow braces and close-cropped hair - Skinheads. And their enemies: roaring into town on motorbikes, with German war insignia and swastikas pinned to their leather jackets - Hell's Angels. Two unorganised youth groups with one aim in common. They profess hate for the older generation and they're out to shock and disgust by any means. Both the press and the public condemn them as violent, antisocial and dangerous. Skinheads are blamed for football violence, train-wrecking and racial assaults; Hell's Angels for terrorising towns. Are such criticisms justified? Or are the wild ones of today the respectable family men of tomorrow? To find out, Man Alive met Skinheads, Hell's Angels, and their parents; listened - without condemning - in the hope that we all could learn. What they said was more than frank. (1969)
It can be the greatest pitfall of the social year. And it can be followed by a 12-month hangover. It's a month now since the paper-chains came down, but if your secretary hasn't spoken to you since, it's a fair bet that you had a good time at your office party. Traditionally, it's the one night of the year when the firm's hierarchical structure, that normally so rigidly holds sway, totters. Reporter Gillian Strickland and a Man Alive team took a typical office and filmed the preparations for the annual party, the spree itself, and the aftermath. Here is the answer to every question a stay-at-home wife has ever asked; and here is the party from differing points of view: the young secretary in her first job; the executive who doesn't want to drink with the people he works with; the lady in accounts who once knew a more elegant style of party giving - and the bosses who foot the bill.
A glimpse into the work of Radio One disk jockeys Tony Blackburn, Jimmy Young, Kenny Everett, Emperor Rosko and John Peel.
Wards are closing down - nurses are resigning - operating theatres lie unused - recruiting into the nursing profession has fallen dramatically. Symptomatic of the situation is a 20-bed gynaecological ward visited by the Man Alive team. In charge: one student nurse - 'There's only me there all night. I'm terrified; worried stiff in case something happens which I can't cope with.' Nursing is a vocation, but nurses today have to be technicians as well as angels of mercy. They may work for love, but they've had enough of platitudes. Now, they seek recognition in terms of hard cash.
It's where they have the TT races. It's where they use the birch on boys. It's been described as a wind-swept rock in the middle of the Irish Sea. From it, on one of its rare clear days, you can see England, Scotland and Ireland: the Isle of Man; in the middle of, but not part of, Great Britain. The Queen is the Lord of Man and is represented by a governor; Westminster looks after the foreign policy; but the Island is independent. It has its own language; its own people; its own traditions; and it makes its own laws. Income tax is 4s 3d in the pound; there are no estate or death duties; and it's a haven for tax dodgers and the retired.
One swallow doesn't make a summer, and one bad harvest can no longer be carried by a good one - or so the farmers say. Up to the end of the 1950s everyone thought that the farmer kept his pigs in the Rolls - that both animals and owners were fed with a silver spoon. Why now has the cacophony of the farmyard come to Whitehall? Is the farmers' protest a real one, or are they just joining the bandwagon of those demanding more money? Are there many earning fivepence an hour for a 100-hour week?
Did you know that one minute after midnight on your 18th birthday you can - without asking Mum or Dad - get married, sign a lease, raise a mortgage, buy consumer goods on H.P.? All because a number of middle-aged people - the Latey Committee - decided that 21 was much too late in the day for you to grow up. But how much does the Latey Committee know of the society you want to create - whether, indeed, you want any part of their adult world? Is it a privilege to be admitted or a pain in the neck?
We all pay lip service to good causes. We all say we want to help people less fortunate than ourselves. But if the chance presented itself on your doorstep, how would you react? What would you do if you heard of a plan to open a hostel for drug addicts or ex-prisoners in your road? People are often frightened-for their children, the old people, the value of their property-but at the same time admit that these people have got to live somewhere.
The film industry is in a state of crisis. The repercussions of the collapse of the American film industry has hit film production in this country pretty hard. Studios are closing, audiences are shrinking. In the middle of it all a few films are making huge profits - much to the surprise of the film industry itself. Films like Easy Rider have not only broken all the rules of how a film should be made, but have broken box office records too. Is the public voting with its head, choosing and discriminating among films it wants to see? Has the family entertainment film died? Are Mum and Dad sitting at home watching the telly while the youngsters go to the cinema to see only the films which reflect their own interests and concerns? Is the present crisis, in fact, a healthy shake-out leading to the production of better, more intelligent and less costly films
Half the children born now will be, sooner or later, injured in a road accident. One in 50 will be killed. For more than half a century the car has brought not only pleasure but also injury, death and untold suffering to millions. We are involved in a world epidemic of slaughter on the roads that every years kills 150,000 and maims five million people. The prevention of this carnage has become one of the major problems of our time. But short of making it a crime to own or drive a car, is there anything which can be done dramatically to reduce death and destruction on our roads?
Every year in Britain 370,000 people are injured or killed in car crashes - more than the population of a city like Bristol. If these casualties were to happen in one place at one time they would shock the nation into urgent action to prevent such a catastrophe ever happening again. But because they are spread over 365 days and thousands of miles of roads, few people appear to take any notice - or to care. Last week Man Alive looked at the causes of road accidents. This week we investigate one of the weapons available to fight death on the roads - the law. How effective is the law in preventing road accidents and does it adequately protect the victims? Are motoring offenders criminals and should they be treated as such?
Dick Gregory is America's best-known black comedian. He is also a civil rights campaigner who uses satire to put across views no less militant than those of any demonstrator. He's also a brave man. Asked to lecture to a racially mixed audience at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, he knew the risks - and was honest enough to confess his fears. But he went ahead, and didn't so much lecture as harangue his audience, devoting his address to what he calls 'the moral pollution of the country,' jibing at American history texts, television commercials, and the attitudes of white liberals who support the black cause The programme tonight looks at Gregory's life in Chicago, his involvement in satire and civil rights, but devotes most of its time to his address in Alabama.
In Holland a row blows up about celibacy when a handful of young priests refuse to accept ordination unless the obligatory vow to remain celibate is removed. The bishops in charge (like the Bishop of Haarlem, above) have recommended a new approach to celibacy in face of shrinking congregations, dwindling numbers in the priesthood, and an increasing sense, among the five million Dutch catholics, that the Roman Catholic Church is losing step with the 20th century. The Vatican has remained stern. But in Holland there are priests who have married; and others who want to; and the movement for change is strong.
Sister Anita Caspary of California led her fellow sisters of the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in a move for change. They dropped their habits and veils - and started an almighty row which ended in their leaving the Roman Catholic Church. Father Charles Davis became a Catholic cause celebre when he left his vocation and married. In Holland other priests are doing the same. The row about birth control, about the Latin Mass, and the problem of shrinking congregations and dwindling numbers in the priesthood splits the Catholic Church with debate: a debate concerned with the role of Catholicism in the 20th century, the position of the Pope, and the authority of the Vatican.
Gale was beautiful, intelligent and - according to everyone who knew her-had much to offer; everything to live for. Recently, aged 19 and a drug addict, she was found dead in the basement of a derelict house in Chelsea. Harold Williamson and a Man Alive team first met her when making a programme about people who had been brought up in children's homes.
For some it is the fashion today to insult British policemen with labels like 'pigs' and 'fuzz.' Other voices utter noises about law and order - sterner law, more order. Slogans don't help the police. But it is true that there is, today, a crisis of confidence between the British public and our police, traditionally the best in the world. Many of us suffer from wanting to have our cake and eat it, too. We want an orderly, safe society, but we resent the slightest loss of individual freedom as part of the price for this.
Today many people are demanding more freedom, more protest, bigger demonstrations, lighter sentences in the courts, a reformative attitude to crime, a tolerance of youthful violence. Others, alarmed by increasing crime and contempt for authority, demand sterner laws more sternly enforced. Between these opposing factions, often maligned by both, stand the police - the men we pay to keep the peace. Traditionally the police have been outside politics but more and more, often against their will, they are being drawn into the political arena. How will the relationship between police and public develop from the present crisis of confidence on both sides? Tonight, in the second of two programmes on law and order, Man Alive looks at the police, through the eyes of the public as well as the men on the beat - and with outside broadcast cameras, brings both sides together
It's easy to find reasons for leaving the North - all too often the work is dirty and hard, and unemployment pay never yet paid off a mortgage. But when you're safely installed in a warm Southern factory, doubling your money on a conveyer belt, the chances are you're less likely to find a neighbour who's only a cuppa away, or the warmth of the clubs and pubs. This, then, is the dilemma facing those who move South: is more brass and less muck a fair exchange for what they leave behind? Would you swap your friends for a fiver a week more?
In the first of two programmes Man Alive was allowed to move freely and speak face to face with the prisoners themselves. And this programme is the viewpoint - often bitter and cynical - of the men inside. Next week, some of the same men are transferred to a new experimental prison. 1,500 men serving sentences which range from 12 months to life; for crimes which vary from motoring offences to murder. Men crammed, often three to a cell in a Victorian prison, originally built in 1851, to house only 700 Men who say they are treated like animals. Men who say that, for them, prison is only punishment. Men made bitter, angry, apathetic -men likely to come back again to serve yet more time inside. Rule number one of the prison service is to encourage convicted men to 'lead a good and useful life.' But how can anybody do this in conditions like those in Wandsworth?
The Home Secretary described Coldingley Industrial Prison as 'a leap into the future' when he opened this £1,600,000 prison in the middle of the Surrey stockbroker belt, recently. To some of the men inside, familiar with grim, overcrowded, old-fashioned prisons, and even to some of the staff, it may seem just like a step in the right direction rather than a radical leap forward. But it is a change, and a dramatic one. Even though it only holds 300 men, one per cent of the prison population, it may at least point the way ahead in prison treatment. Do we lock men up as punishment, or should we rehabilitate them as citizens? And is Coldingley the answer? What more should be done?
It wasn't even a name that could be found on a map. But the word 'Poseidon' remained in the headlines for weeks on end. In the waterless outback of Australia prospectors working for the-Poseidon Company found huge nickel deposits, and Stock Exchange speculators caused shares to rocket from a few pence in value to as high as £124. What happened to the people out there -the prospectors, the mining men, the inhabitants of the almost deserted ghost towns left behind when the gold - mining boom petered out? Now all of them may be in at the beginning of a new kind of Klondike, from the girls in the unofficial, but thriving brothels of Kalgoorlie, to the old men who've seen it all before. In one outback town of less than 500 people there are already nine millionaires including Amy Pilletti, once a cook in a local hotel. There have been gun-fights and violence - all part of the problems caused when you want a share in Poseidon.
When a couple find they can't have children it's always been a difficult decision to make: to adopt or not. But now they may have to ask themselves another agonising question: would they take on a problem baby. Increasingly these days the only children left waiting in the nurseries are those labelled difficult to place-because they're the wrong colour or the wrong age or physically or emotionally handicapped. Man Alive looks at the adoption process focusing on couples who have taken the decision to give a home to problem babies; and, in a careful look at the adoption system, discovers both failings and implications for the 70s.
Two hundred years ago James Cook, a Royal Naval Lieutenant from Great Britain, set foot in Botany Bay to be greeted with spears and antagonism from the inhabitants of the new Australia - the aborigines. Today, decimated by murder, rape, brutality, and white man's diseases, the aborigines are far fewer in number than the contented nomadic tribes which originally roamed the island continent they called their own. Earlier this year, when the Queen witnessed a folksy re-enactment of Cook's first landing in Botany Bay, the black militants among Australia's aborigines simultaneously performed their own ceremony on the opposite shore. They threw wreaths into the ocean to mark the death of their tribes and to draw attention to the difficulties in the way of their hopes and ambitions to become as Australian as the descendants of the convicts and the settlers from a score of other countries. Jeremy James and a Man Alive team discovered in Australia concern as well as apathy; a problem for a gove
In this programme, the first of two, James Astor and a Man Alive film team look at two borstals, one closed, the other open. Between the ages of 15 and 21 young offenders can be sentenced by courts to spend anything between six months and two years in a borstal. No longer described as punishment - instead always labelled training - it is nevertheless a painful experience for an increasing number of young people. Today there are nearly six thousand young men and women in borstals. More than half of them will be in trouble again after their release - three-quarters of them reconvicted within three years. This high failure rate is seen by critics to show up a system out of step with the needs of inmates and which reflects badly on new ideas in the prison service. It may be called 'training.' It's still a sentence-in which a young offender is taken away from the community; even locked up in a cell.
In the second of two programmes Man Alive follows a boy on his release, and with those in the prison and aftercare service responsible for the system, asks: what goes wrong? A sentence to borstal - anything from six months to two years - is meant to be not a punishment but a training for the outside world. It is often said that the best borstal boys are the worst citizens; that borstal training is acclimatisation for institutional life, not preparation for the world outside. The high failure rate in borstals today may be a reflection on what happens inside a borstal, but it's also a criticism of what goes wrong after a boy is released. One probation officer in tonight's programme describes borstals as 'a method of disposal to ease the conscience.' He knows that six out of 10 borstal trainees are in trouble again within three years of release.
Four students were shot dead, more wounded, when National Guardsmen opened fire during a campus demonstration against American involvement in Cambodia. And a small university town, tragically, makes world headlines. The shootings at Kent State University hardened attitudes that had been there all along. Militant students now see the enemy as coming out into the open. Diehard townspeople talk of a chance to 'finish the job' the National Guard started and put down what they call 'the freaks and hippies' for good. Both university and town authorities waver between repression and conciliation. Moderates on both sides have become uncertain. Above all, the situation in Kent underlines the failure of understanding between generations: between rebellious youngsters and anxious parents, between radical students and conservative townspeople. In the first of four programmes John Percival reports on the tensions underlying the present mood of America.
Jo Yablonski, his wife and his daughter, were killed in their Clarkesville home. Yablonski, a trade union leader in this troubled coal-mining area, stood out as a lone voice against unjust management and corrupt trade union practices. He was silenced by a gang of hired killers in the most savage moment of a long and angry history of industrial strife and corruption. Sympathisers for his cause fight on against callous employers and a suspect union. Wild-cat strikers picketing for the resignation of their own union president carry guns. Union officials protest their innocence, and Yablonski's grown-up sons insist on their guilt. The mood on both sides is one of anger and fear; and in the middle the vast majority of mineworkers who want only to earn their money in peace.
The middle-class white liberals of Sausalito, California, were proud of the integrated schools where their own children could grow up side by side with black children of the nearby ghetto of Marin City. Then a black militant, Sidney Walton, was appointed principal of the local junior high school. He distributed his own book with an opening picture of himself, guerrilla-clad, pointing a gun over a pile of schoolbooks and captioned 'books or guns?' Faced with the realities of black power, white parents feared for their children. Walton was fired. Liberal school-board members were forced to resign, parents withdrew children from school. A liberal showpiece experiment ended as a racial confrontation, bringing to the surface deep, fundamental fears in the white middle-class community. The row goes on. The mood is one of tension - and despair for the future.
In three films so far John Percival and a Man Alive film team have examined three aspects of a society, feared by many to be on the brink of chaos. Top Washington lawyers like Joseph Rauh strive to bring about an end to corruption in trades unions, to produce trust between management and men. Black militant leaders like Sidney Walton despair of ever, legally, obtaining a fair deal for Negroes, and now look forward only to revolution and violence. Young student radicals like Elaine Wellin believe the voice of campus protest will be silenced, if necessary by bullets, before the administration pays it heed. Government advisers like economist Professor J.K. Galbraith fear for the future unless there is action soon. In the studio these people, and leaders of Nixon's administration, discuss the way ahead.
If at first... try, try and try again. But some people go on beyond the point that most of us consider reasonable, seem never to know the meaning of the word failure, although they seem unlikely to taste success. Are they deceiving themselves? Are they really born failures - rather than stubborn triers? James Astor reports on Havergal Brian, a composer with a head full of symphonies; on Mrs Miriam Hargrave, refusing to accept defeat after 39 driving tests and passing at the 40th. And on singer Oriel Clair, refusing to accept a score of refusals.
It begins in London's Kings Road, New York's Greenwich Village, Toronto's Market Street, Amsterdam's Dam Square. It goes all the way through Istanbul, Tehran, and Kabul to the East. For some it ends in contemplation on the Ganges or meditation in Khatmandu. But for others it may lead to drug addiction-in Delhi, among the drifting hippy communes of Asia. For too many it ends in repatriation, disease, even death. The hippy trail is more than a journey, it's an idea; people sometimes looking for new values, more often simply opting out, hoping for short cuts to a Nirvana that does not exist. Jeremy James and a Man Alive film unit followed the hippy trail to India and Nepal. But their journey brought them to London where the trail has finally and perhaps tragically ended for an 18-year-old girl they met in Delhi.
They call themselves Gypsies - others call them tinkers, robbers, tax-dodgers, metal spivs, and a dozen other angry names. For centuries they drifted to the West Midlands to find winter quarters. But three years ago one local council decided that its people had had enough. The tinkers would have to go. Since then the council - Walsall in Staffordshire - has been fighting a running war. Now the council has decided to make a final stand. They voted 41-1 to reject a new parliamentary law ordering them and other authorities to provide sites for travellers. Other councils are coming to their support. Anti-tinker action groups have been formed. Now the government is considering action against the councils. Man Alive brings both sides together in Walsall to ask the question - where can they go?
Smuggled out of South Africa, 'The End of the Dialogue' is a powerful documentary shot by five black members of the Pan Africanist Congress. They, and the people taking part, risked their lives and liberty, for under South African laws they could have been arrested and charged under the 'Sabotage' or 'Terrorism' Acts. Commentators and businessmen go to South Africa, return and tell us about apartheid, but rarely are we told how it feels to be black in South Africa. We all know about apartheid: 19 per cent white population ruling 81 per cent black. Cold statistics like: South Africa is responsible for nearly 50 per cent of the total number of executions in the world; and South Africa's daily prison population 1968/69-whites 3,000, Africans and others 78,000. Cold statistics - until you see this film.
Whether we like it or not, the volume of jet aircraft traffic screeching over our heads is going to increase and go on increasing for many years to come. It is undeniable that aircraft are great money-spinners and dollar earners - London Airport handles more international traffic than any other airport in the world - but for those living near airports jet aircraft noise has reached almost unbearable proportions. Conversation stops; telephone calls are impossible; industry, hospitals, and schools are affected; radio and television sets are drowned out. And as air travel gets cheaper and easier, and airports all over the country expand and runways are extended, thousands more who once lived in peace and quiet find themselves under the flight path of the jet-age giants. But is the noise absolutely necessary? How serious a hazard to our health is it? Do the airlines respect the noise limits imposed? Can jet engines be gagged without ruining performance? Is sufficient being done to control
Nowadays it is difficult to tell who are the New Rich - or the New Poor. Henry Taroni, for example, has dirty hands and a noisy Birmingham scrap metal yard. But he's probably worth nearly a million. Or Louis Green, selling blankets from a barrow in the East End, who picks up £100 for a morning's work. He stays in bed for most of the other six and a half days a week. On the other hand, there are the New Poor, who despite their clean suits and their respectable worthwhile Jobs have been left behind by the affluent society. People like Frank Beveridge, a Ministry clerk, trying to bring up a family on about £24 a week. Or Frank Tebbutt, who gave up a well-paid position as a surveyor to run a charity's animal rescue home. Hunter Davies wrote a book about the New Rich and the New Poor, called The Other Half. Now Jeremy James and a Man Alive film team bring the book to television.
This week, in the first of two programmes, Man Alive examines the work of Community Relations Officers in the field, and the attitudes of immigrants to them. Race relations in this country today is a growth industry. Books surveys, committees, trusts, regulations - abound. Tough immigrant controls on one hand are said to betray a fear of future racial strife. On the other hand good intentions towards immigrants, particularly black immigrants, are expressed in the Community Relations Commission. This was established by the Race Relations Act in 1968 and charged with a wide brief: 'To encourage harmonious Community Relations and to encourage measures adopted for that purpose by others'. The intentions are good, but how effective is the Commission?
When the Government nationalised the race relations industry, great hopes were raised in the community, black and white. There are, today, 80 committees, 50 community relations officers working in the field. There is, at national level, the Community Relations Commission. It has been bitterly criticised. And passionately defended. But what are the facts? Are the Commission's resources adequate for the job? Has the Commission won the confidence of the immigrant community? The Commission's chairman Frank Cousins has resigned. Mark Bonham Carter takes over. This week those now concerned with race and community relations debate the Commission's future.
At this time of the year loneliness can be particularly painful. Loneliness isn't something that affects just the poor; or the old; or the deserted. You can be alone in the middle of a noisy family; surrounded by work colleagues; in a crowd of friends. Money, youth, and success aren't necessarily any protection. Christmas and New Year make it all seem worse -almost too much to live through. In our increasingly crowded and increasingly noisy society the problem of loneliness is also increasing-Why? And what should we do?
A film that has taken more than 18 months to make. Two couples: Ally and Mike Scandrett-Smith, and Pat and Peter Robinson; both had their first babies last year: Now two baby boys are growing up. But the film starts long before then, lives with the couples through pregnancy, birth, and looks at the beginning of childhood, It looks, too, at what happens to couples, adjusting as they are to a world that is two, Who must then face the further adjustment of being three. Two's a couple - three's a family. The arrival of a firstborn is something special. There is nothing quite like it. It can never happen again. Children are said to make a marriage, but they can also strain a relationship. And couples must learn to adjust and grow. This is the story of how two couples waited for, and went through, the arrival of their firstborn.
George Bernard Shaw's Black Girl searched for God in vain. The four black girls in tonight's programme came to this country bringing their own religions with them. To many people in this country the beliefs and practices of these girls appear foreign and inexplicable. The effect on the girls is to produce in their own lives a conflict of loyalties. The more they keep up with their English friends the further they move from their parents. Prebhsaran is a Sikh. She lives in the close-knit Sikh community at Southall-but also, through school, the teenage world of music, and mini-skirts. Vijay is Hindu, a career girl who works in community relations. Her job is to mix with people of all races and religions, but she still expects to marry a good Hindu, of the right family and the right caste.
A new concept of child care is now practised. Children need care from the authorities for a variety of reasons. Sometimes bad housing. Sometimes bad parents. Sometimes difficult children. In theory the Seebohm Report and the 1969 Children's Act have brought into being a new attitude to this the most vital and vulnerable area of Welfare. In practice, while the authorities and the child care officers struggle to reorganise and to change attitudes and methods, it is the children themselves who may pay the price. There are children who need to 'go into care' - and cannot be found a place. There are children 'in care' whose parents only need a home to enable them to be a family again - and a home cannot be found. In the first of a two-part enquiry Jeanne La Chard looks at some of the circumstances which affect the quality of care.
The people most concerned with Child Care, the officers of the Welfare State, the guardians of institutions and homes, the doctors, the psychiatrists, and the politicians, are often their- own most severe critics. The protection of children from both circumstances and inadequacy is one of the chief concerns of those who operate the Welfare State. Changes are taking place. They are much needed. Will they do the job?
We are becoming, so we are told, a classless society. The class barriers are crumbling, or so they say, overwhelmed by the whizz kids, the pacesetters and the meritocrats. These days, a railway-man can marry a deb. How you do what you do, is more important than who your father was. That is what we're told. But what happens when a working class boy like Eric Parsloe becomes President of the Oxford Union? Or Mike D'Abo, after Harrow and Cambridge, chooses the world of pop instead of the Army. Or Diana Regler, born to a life of servants and tennis parties in Kenya, chooses instead to marry a fitter? Any examination of class in Great Britain must be personal. The general rules are changing and there are a great many exceptions. But class consciousness is something you don't have to look far to find - as Jeremy James discovered when he looked for examples of those who have crossed, or tried to cross, the class barrier: and those who know their place and are happy to be there.
Nobody disputes our democratic right to poison ourselves, if we choose to, with nicotine. But have we any choice in the matter? For every £1 spent on telling the public about its harmful effect, £180 are spent suggesting the contrary - cigarettes are glamorous; with coupons, even profitable. The weed kills 27,000 smokers, between 35 and 64, every year. They and the survivors contribute £100 million, every year, to the Treasury. The national sickness caused by nicotine pays for the National Health. This programme is not a debate about whether or not smoking causes cancer or kills people. That's no longer a real argument. This is about persuasion and its problems. Can we give it up - can we afford to give it up? Can we be sold into stopping the habit that kills - but is hard to break - cigarette smoking?
The second of two programmes in which Horizon and Man Alive have combined forces to examine the issues raised by "the drug problem". While scientists and doctors attempt to discover more about the chemistry of the abuse of drugs, the problem still exists - in social terms. It may be true to say that the number of deaths in this country from hard drug addiction is small, compared with, for instance, road deaths or deaths from lung cancer. But that, in turn, is only comparative. There are drug addicts in increasing number in our society today. Can we cure? Should we control? Should we care? Tonight's Man Alive looks not so much at the scientific evidence as the social consequences when both the experts and others connected with the problem debate the future with Desmond Wilcox.
There are today thousands of British citizens who are separated from their wives and families, refused permission to work and refused admission to Britain. They hold British passports and may be forgiven for asking 'What are they worth?' Those Asians in East Africa who chose to become British citizens understandably now call themselves 'the forgotten people.' The East African governments tell them they are not wanted - despite having lived there most of their lives. Both Labour and Conservative immigration policies have denied them automatic right of entry to Britain - despite passports which once guaranteed exactly that. The East African governments say it's not their responsibility; the British government says it has the situation under review. Tonight Man Alive looks at the plight of these British citizens and discusses some of the points the government's latest review will have to consider.
For the first time women serving sentences in notorious Holloway Prison have been allowed to talk face-to-camera about life behind bars. A Man Alive team, invited by the Home Office, talked to prisoners about lives which are spent, day by day, year after year, in the confines of a prison built 120 years ago. Not many women end up in prison. Few are professional criminals, hardly any belong to gangs; almost all of them are young. They're an exclusive group - compared with the 40,000 men in prisons - only 1,000 strong. In the first of two programmes they talk about what brought them to Holloway; what prison does to them; and how they react to the prison officers who, themselves, have been stripped of every illusion but who never seem to give up hope.
Holloway Prison was built in 1852 in what was then a desirable suburb, and because the neighbours objected the architects had to design something that would improve the amenities not spoil them. So, they made it look like a medieval castle. But now they're pulling down Holloway and, on the same site, they're going to build a new prison costing £6,000,000. What will this prison of the future be like? What must it be like? In the final programme of this two-part enquiry, Man Alive brings together those who designed the new prison and the women prisoners who appeared in last week's film.
Four boys aged between 11 and 14. The landmarks of their world are the lingering slums of yesterday, new blocks of flats that aren't being built quickly enough, the warehouses and docks along the river in London's East End. Already they have fallen foul of the law for truancy or stealing-or both. They're in trouble and they're aware of it, but it hasn't dimmed the vitality and optimism of boyhood. There are people who care about them: probation officers, social workers, schoolteachers. But in the end they may be powerless.
In the bad old days of mass unemployment, they used to say that love went out of the window when poverty came through the front door. Another cliche: all that lovers need is each other and two can live as cheaply as one. Today, as giant industries again flounder and it seems that no one's job is absolutely secure, what would the modern romantics say in a materialistic world of money-worship and hire-purchase commitments? For men of craft and skill and integrity the dole can mean more than material hardship. Nobody really starves on social security today - but the soul can be damaged, the spirit corroded. When no one knows if he - or she - will be next to join the dole queue, what happens to the quality of marriage, the atmosphere of family, a man and his children, wedding plans for two, a blossoming courtship? When the bread-winner gets the sack, can love survive on the dole?
In Man Alive tonight policemen, lawyers and members of the public discuss the present situation and consider the future. Most of us believe and are thankful that Great Britain has probably the best police force in the world. Nevertheless there are complaints about police behaviour; allegations of violence; accusations of racial discrimination, corruption and prejudice. When a complaint is made by any member of the public against the police it is made to the police, investigated by the police and judged within the police force. Many policemen are discontent with this system which, they say, sometimes penalises them while under investigation and frequently hampers their desire to be seen to be just. How well does the present system work and what effective changes could - or even should - take place? Is it fair to either side that police are cast in the role of both judge and jury when it comes to complaints about their own behaviour?
Jeremy James and a Man Alive film crew followed the students of the University of Birmingham and Aston in their annual rag week. An attraction to compete with the Mardi Gras? Well, hardly, but then Birmingham is hardly Rio de Janeiro. But the students were trying - all the time. They do these things differently in South America. There they have fireworks and grotesque masks and parades that seem to last for days and the sun shines all the time. Even the nights are hot. It snowed in Birmingham even at midday in March, but the students did try. They had a procession with a rag time band and in the week before carnival day they dwile flonked, pedal-car raced and paddled home-built rafts on a pond only just not frozen. A typical students' rag week with a serious aim - to raise money for charity and some serious events, like donating blood. Yet it all seemed to bring as much trouble as it did joy, particularly the traditional rag mag with its references to sex and bodily functions.
This month will see the fifth anniversary of the day Stokely Carmichael first shouted 'Black Power' and changed the whole direction of the black revolt. Until then Martin Luther King and non-violence were the undisputed pace-setters. But almost with one stroke Carmichael summed up the whole frustration of black Americans, especially the young, and swept it on to a new course. Nowadays Black Power appears to mean all things to all men. The revolutionary Panther, the African-based Carmichael, the non-violent Jesse Jackson... each has his own version of Black Power. A Man Alive film team and reporter Jonathan Power went to the United States. The remarkable men who lead the different black groups have agreed to grant exclusive facilities in the making of this film; some, like Carmichael himself, breaking a self-imposed rule of non-co-operation with the media. For they agree that after five years of tumult and change and much distortion, the time has come for a cool dispassionate look at th
It is four years since the last condemned man was executed in the United States. In most states juries have continued to impose the death penalty, but an unofficial moratorium has so far saved the condemned from the chair. Meanwhile, throughout the country, the number of condemned prisoners has risen to 650. Recently the Supreme Court ruled against two of the appeals that have helped to keep them alive. Now the Court has to decide whether the death penalty is "unconstitutional". In the meantime as crimes of violence increase, new campaigns demand "that we warm up the electric chair again". Denis Tuohy and a Man Alive film team have been allowed behind the bars in Death Row in Huntsville, Texas, to talk to three of the condemned murderers who have lived for years in the shadow of execution.
Before tranquilliser drugs were invented - before strait jackets were discarded - before padded cells were dismantled - Dingleton Hospital on the Scottish Borders won international fame for its 'open door' policy. Since then patients have been treated as adults, with a say in their own - and other patients' - treatment, bosses have been abolished and replaced with a democratic system that gives everyone a voice. Sensitivity sessions and group therapy are sometimes dramatic and violent happenings at Dingleton. They often produce significant results. Jim Douglas Henry and a Man Alive team filmed in Dingleton - where a quiet revolution has overthrown conventional power structures and traditional methods of treatment.
Greener greens, browner bread, redder meat, fresher eggs; the latest costly fad for diet-conscious middle classes? Or the way ahead for the rest of the world? Ten years ago there were only a handful of health food shops in Britain. Today there are more than 1,000 and a new one opens every week. Yin, Yang, macrobiotic, biodynamic, organic, are becoming everyday words. And what we grow to eat is becoming a matter of fierce argument. Then there are the pills, potions and elixirs; remedies and stimulants making claims that wouldn't be surprising in a medieval bazaar; and the honeys and the syrups and the sugar substitutes. The people who grow and sell and eat health foods preach a message of purity and anti-pollution. Others claim that it's all a fuss over nothing. In the meantime it's a £20-million a year business boom. So are we listening to the message of those with a better way of life to offer - or the noises of those with bigger profits in mind?
The awareness of sex in children starts innocently enough. The questions they ask at an early age can be dealt with simply enough. It is as they reach adolescence that their problems grow and the questions that they then ask are more difficult - the answers more likely to become a matter of controversy. The battle for sex education in schools has, for 30 years or more, nearly always been a matter of fierce controversy and debate. A recent film made by Dr Martin Cole became the subject of a national row. He appears in tonight's Man Alive with adolescents, parents, teachers and educationalists who come together to debate just how much children need to know; should be told; by whom; and at what age.
Wearied by the excesses of their own drug culture and even more So by the materialism, as they see it, of their elders, thousands of young Americans are seeking another outlet for their energies in Christianity - heady, fundamentalist Christianity where the Bible is the only word of truth and the only safeguard against an imminent and vengeful doomsday. Mingling with the drug addicts along Hollywood Boulevard and spreading coast to coast, advocates of the 'Jesus Trip' are winning increasing numbers of converts from the ranks of the disenchanted. One sect alone, the Children of God, has built up a membership of 700 full-time evangelists in two years. Abjuring drink, drugs and extramarital sex, they have retreated to their own rural communes to study the Bible and praise the Lord until they are ready to convert their fellow-countrymen. Their life style is built around rock-based religious music; their message is a mixture of idealism and intolerance.
What chance has John Booroff got? At 38, a petty criminal, he wanted, more than anything, to go straight. For five years he made it. He succeeded in putting behind him a lifetime of crime, 17 prison sentences served in 20 years. For the first time in his life he led what the prison authorities call 'a good and useful life.' He met and married a woman who had never had a wrong word with the police. They started a family, he found the kind of security and the sort of love he'd never known before. Then he was back in prison again - where we met him. An experienced, embittered criminal. He's out now, trying, once again, to go straight. Should the rest of us even care? There are experts concerned with prison, crime and recidivists who spend much time considering the problem. The story of John Booroff is that of just one man, one set of circumstances, one life of crime. So if it illuminates the problem, it does so by letting us understand a single prisoner. There are 40,000 men behind bars
First the Home Guard came by its affectionate label of 'Dad's Army'. But since before 1939 the Territorial Army somehow has always been 'The Terriers'. Ex-National Servicemen joined to fulfil their reserve training obligations and some stayed on. Volunteers join because they like the idea of part-time military life. But the Territorial Army has always been a political ping-pong ball. In 1965 it was threatened with reorganisation and drastic pruning to save £20 million a year. But then came a reprieve. And in April this year a drive was started to recruit another 10,000 men. Today it has a new name - the Territorial and Army Voluntary Reserve - and a new look, with new weapons and a new job to do. What makes a quiet civilian family man want to fire guns and drive armoured cars for a fortnight a year and one evening a week? Do they feel part of a serious fighting force? Or do they just play the army game?
Harold Williamson and a Man Alive film team followed the cases of three bankrupts and found that it is not only easy to go bankrupt when you get into debt but it is almost as easy to get out of paying your debts by going bankrupt. The business of going bust is booming. Bankruptcy figures are twice as many as 10 years ago. The sort of people most affected don't include the big business concerns - though they are doing badly enough, as Rolls-Royce and the Vehicle and General collapses show. It's mostly the small, individual businessman and the husband-and-wife teams. Their difficulties reflect the larger difficulties of the country as a whole. But when a family business goes bust what happens to the family itself? And to the creditors?
Even before P.C. Wren's Beau Geste signed on, the Foreign Legion has been an endless source of myth, speculation and romance. The reality is even more colourful. Today, 9,000 men drawn from 52 countries wear the kept blanc of this elite fighting force, and are ready to fight and to die for their officers and each other, in the fiercest corners of a troubled world. The Legion has always discouraged journalists and film crews. But now, a Man Alive team led by Desmond Wilcox has been 'in' the Legion, watching them train and fight, examining its mystique, its traditions, its role as a mercenary army and meeting the legionnaires of today- including a 19-year-old Cockney who signed on during a drinking spree in Paris, a 48-year-old Yorkshire-man, now a Legion NCO, the veterans of Dien Bien Phu, of Narvik and men who once fought for Hitler.
When families break up it is usually Mother who looks after the children. And when the reason is separation or divorce it was usually, in the past, Mother who was given the custody. But nowadays there has been a change, and more and more often fathers are given custody; fathers are being allowed to be mother too. But can a father alone ever really succeed where a mother and a father together have failed? How do men cope? James Astor and a Man Alive film team have looked at three fathers bringing up their children alone: one employed, one unemployed, one self-employed: all with different situations, but all facing fundamentally the same problems.
To the British, woodlands often seem to have the same romantic appeal as the sea. In our forests we see images of Robin Hood rather than observe trees as furniture, building materials, newsprint - or fuel. Down in Britain's forests a passionate row is going on between those who want to keep woodlands for amenity and those who want to exploit them. Effectively the Forestry Commission is responsible for most of Britain's woods. Since it was created in 1919 it has spent £700 million - money that critics say has gone for the chop. Now their policies are being challenged.
Last year the British public gave over £3 million to Oxfam. But however efficiently the charity administers this money, the scale of world poverty is so immense that even those impressive sounding millions are only a drop in the ocean. There are many, both within and outside Oxfam, who would like to see the charity use more of its money, efforts and influence to ensure that the people, and government, of Britain are more committed to the developing countries than at present: to apply political pressure, in other words. But if Oxfam, by moulding public opinion, did try to exert pressure on official policies and actions towards those in need, would it antagonise many of its donors - and perhaps even endanger its status as a charity under our present charity laws?
Ralph Nader fights for consumers; champions the cause of individuals who feel frustrated in trying to win a fair deal. Attempts to stifle him have failed. His campaigns for consumer justice have brought about significant changes in America-made the individual feel that he is no longer abandoned. In Great Britain today there are many who say the time has come for a Nader. The Consumer Council has been closed. The individual feels his position weakened. In the first of two programmes we look at the evidence for the consumer's case; and next week, with the manufacturers, citizens and authorities, as well as Ralph Nader himself, we debate the future.
When ten-guinea shoes fall apart and you can't get satisfaction; when a new car is delivered rusty and nobody seems to care; when supermarket bargains seem less than value for money; who can you go to, who will fight your cause? Ralph Nader is the champion of consumer causes in America. Do we need somebody like him in this country today? In the second of two Man Alive programmes Ralph Nader himself debates consumer protection with MPs, manufacturers, shopkeepers, those who already work on the consumer's behalf and the people themselves who feel in need of protection
Newspapers call it the 'square mile of vice.' Few tourists fail to visit it. Football supporters 'up for t'Cup ' always seem to wind up there - in their cups. But Soho is being tidied up, threatened with replanning. 'Miss Whiplash' will have to find new premises - so will some of the restaurants, theatres, strip clubs, discotheques. But still there will be newspapers in 15 languages; cheroots from Burma; samovars from Samarkand. It seems impossible to consider Soho in any other terms than the centre of the British film industry; the London Orchestral Association; the meeting place of artists, sculptors, stunt men, wrestlers - and the stamping ground of Lord Longford's stern-minded committee. Soho is a place of character - full of characters. Frank Norman wrote a book about it. Harold Williamson, a Tynesider, has come to know and love it. Charlie Squires has always been fascinated by it. Now they have been there together.
In November last year, in fog, on the A1 north of Doncaster, 100 vehicles were involved in a series of disastrous accidents. The final toll: two people killed; 34 injured - 13 of them seriously; and many vehicles written off. Newspaper headlines screamed, once more, 'motorway madness'. Now, one year later, Man Alive has been back to the disaster area, talked to some of those who survived, asked the car drivers, lorry drivers and police how it happened - and why? In a motorway cafeteria beside the M6, scene of another terrible multiple collision earlier this autumn, Man Alive brings together drivers, police, psychologists and traffic experts to discuss how we can ever avoid motorway madness.
An epidemic that, say critics of national policies, is being swept under the carpet. One person in every 200 today attends a venereal disease clinic. VD has become the second highest notifiable disease after measles. More alarming is the spread of the disease among the young - girls of 15-21 and boys from 19-24. Figures for gonorrhoea alone are 14 times higher among the under-25s than among the over-25s. Some people are beginning to ask - is this epidemic the price of the permissive society? Jeremy James and a Man Alive film team have talked to patients and doctors at the clinics to discover how an undermanned and outdated part of the National Health Service is coping with the situation. In the studio parents, youngsters, doctors and patients, as well as health educationalists, discuss what needs to be done.
Twelve miles down the road from the Upper Clyde shipyards a group of determined men are fighting 'to the bitter end.' Seven hundred and sixty men out of work; 11 million worth of machinery standing idle at the Argyll works in Alexandria; a town struck by mass unemployment in an area where 12 out of every 100 men are already out of work. The Plessey Co Ltd finally completed the purchase of the factory and its contents for the cut-price of £650,000 in January. Nine months later they closed it and decided to transfer its vital machinery to their plant in Ilford, Essex. But 200 of their former employees have refused to allow them to move the machines and are occupying the factory. Are they fighting a lost cause or is there some hope that the now silent factory may come to life again, and provide work for the men of Alexandria?
The national and established press is being challenged by a new kind of journalism. Few of us can fail to have noticed the growth of so-called 'underground' papers. Many are shocked. Others applaud the presence of a radical, anti establishment, journalism. The people who produce these publications see them not as underground but as alternative. They are committed to the belief that the existing press is too wedded to the establishment and ignores, or misrepresents the realities of ordinary people's lives and their problems. Jonathan Dimbleby and a Man Alive team have looked at three alternative papers: IT - the founding father of the London tabloid underground; Socialist Worker - a revolutionary weekly aimed at the working man; Tuebrook Bugle - a militant community paper produced by the people of a Liverpool twilight zone.
Helen Gurley Brown, author of the best-selling Sex and the Single Girl, is in England to start a war. Her target: the newly emancipated, trendy world of a handful of British women's glossy magazines. Her ammunition: a saucy, man-catching magazine called Cosmopolitan. On the home front, faced with big circulation problems, her rivals nervously maintain there's no room for another glossy. And, not surprisingly, the prospect of a British version of Cosmopolitan is causing quite a stir. Some people are afraid of Helen Gurley Brown. Her big guns are being aimed at glossies like Nova and 19, magazines which have done away with the 'worried blue-eyes' image and now frankly discuss things like virginity and VD. Others remain unmoved, like Mrs Betty Kenward, otherwise 'Jennifer' of Harpers Queen. Her diary, and her values, will definitely not change. Even Helen Gurley Brown can't alter that.
John Pitman reports from Hyde Park, which was Henry VIII's former hunting ground. The park has now become home to early morning keep-fit swimmers, sailors and fishers of the sometimes frozen waters of the Serpentine, members of the Household Cavalry exercising their horses and the rather less formally attired civilian riders on Rotten Row, as well as fashion photographers, free speakers at Speakers' Corner and a vast army of other park lovers.
Tonight Denis Tuohy for Man Alive explores the tradition of the British children's comic through the eyes of enthusiasts, publishers and critics.
A Man Alive team, invited by the Home Office, talked in Holloway prison for women, to the prisoners themselves about lives which are spent day by day, year after year, in the confines of a prison built 120 years ago.
Can you read this? Could you write it? Robert Payne is a bright 16-year-old - normal in every way except that he can barely read and write. He's just one of the bright, likeable children in tonight's Man Alive. He suffers from what some experts call dyslexia. Dyslexic children find it very difficult to learn what comes so naturally to most of us. They are not necessarily dull - indeed, many are more intelligent than average. But they often spend their school lives in misery and frustration - thought of as stupid. Is enough being done for them? Why do some experts argue that dyslexia is nothing but a label used to excuse backward children? In the first of two programmes, Jim Douglas Henry and a Man Alive film team look at those who are frequently written off with 'could do better.'
If you can't read a signpost, a tax return, a public notice or an examination paper, life is an uphill struggle. Many bright, intelligent people fail to learn to read. They may suffer from what some call dyslexia. Often they are written off as stupid. In last week's programme we looked at the children, parents and teachers caught up in this Problem. In this week's Man Alive with parents, teachers, doctors and educationists as well as the children themselves, we set out, in the studio, to discover what can be done.
The legendary Legion where men, escaping something - or seeking something - can enlist under a new name and bury the past. For once, the reality is more vivid and colourful than its celluloid imitation. Few have told it. The Legion protects its secrets, encourages anonymity and positively discourages journalists and film teams. But it still serves - and fights - today: 9,000 men drawn from 52 countries, wearing the kepi blanc of this elite fighting force in some of the fiercest corners of this troubled world, prepared, always, to die loyally for their officers and each other. More often than not, they do. For the first time the Legion cooperated with television. Desmond Wilcox and a Man Alive film team have been 'in' the Legion watching them train and fight; examining its mystique, its traditions and its role in the 70s.
They have always been a source of material for comics, science fiction magazines, television puppet productions and Hollywood extravaganzas. Since the beginning of time men have seen strange objects in the sky, which there have been men of science and authority ready to refute and explain away... but never completely. There is always the 10 per cent of 'sightings' that cannot be explained. The Ministry of Defence investigates every UFO report made to them. Now they have allowed Man Alive to film what, they believe, may be an explanation. But the ufologists are not convinced. On film and in an outside broadcast from Banbury in Oxfordshire - the scene of nearly 1,000 UFO sightings since last August - the sceptics, the scientists and the saucer spotters come together.
More than 40,000 people a year - nearly one third of all the people who appear before the courts of this country - are remanded in custody. And more than half are not eventually sent to prison - either because they have been found innocent, or their crime does not warrant prison. Too often, say critics of the system, magistrates unquestioningly accept objections to bail and remand in custody, on what is described as 'a nod from the police.' But those concerned with law and order say: how do you ensure the bringing to trial of those prepared to ignore the law? How do you protect the public? So what are the conditions for those who find their application for bail refused? - and what ether system could serve instead?
Divorce was, in the past, a matter of social stigma as well as legal judgment. The action of ending a marriage, as often as not, involved damage to reputations, the open washing of dirty linen and - sometimes - children caught in the middle of a recriminatory tug of war. Twelve months ago the Divorce Reform Act was brought in to change all that. Designed to remove hypocrisy, inequity and publicity from divorce it still had a stormy passage through Parliament. For those who hailed it as a long overdue reform there were as many who condemned it as a 'Casanova's charter.' Since then the number of divorces has soared. Is the new Act a complete answer? Who are the men and women who have sought freedom in the last 12 months? How fair has it been for them? - And what do their experiences indicate about the future for divorce - and marriage?
We can keep people alive these days longer than ever before. Advances in medicine enable us to prolong the existence of old people for years, even those who are infirm, incontinent and incapacitated. New techniques enable doctors to hold on to badly injured patients where previously death would have been a certainty. But how many times should doctors cure - only to prolong a dwindling existence? And should it be doctors who have to decide? There are those who demand what is known as voluntary euthanasia, claim the right to decide when they, or their loved ones, shall die. Some doctors agree with them. Most doctors will admit that huge doses of pain-killing drugs, used in cases of terminal disease, can have the effect of 'shortening life.' But is that just another phrase for 'killing the patient'? Do any of us have the right to decide when it is time to die?
In Loughton a demonstration against demons; a Pentecostal minister's protest against the spirits who help Harry Edwards at his spiritual healing meetings. In Hove a medium goes into a trance; through her - she says - a Chinese doctor who has been dead for 500 years carries out 'psychic' surgery. In a darkened room in Belgrave Square spirits manifest their faces and voices through a medium, or so he says. In a Birmingham suburb an ex all-in wrestler lays his hands on a spina bifida victim and claims she is beginning to walk, because of him. This country has become the world centre of spiritualism, faith healing, and 'making contact' with the dead. Americans even organise 'psychic' package tours to London, the new international capital of the occult. Jeremy James and a Man Alive team have been looking at the business of faith, the critics of the whole thing and those who believe the spirit is willing.
The Government claims that its new Housing Finance Bill is the most important housing reform of this century and will mean a decent home for every family at a price within their means. Opponents say it will double rents and send house prices soaring; split the nation into the 'haves' and 'have-nots,' with millions having to face the indignity of a means test. The first of two programmes on this controversial legislation illustrates on film both sides of the coin - the effect on council tenants, private tenants and potential house buyers; the thinking of the landlords who welcome the new Bill; and looks at the mounting opposition from local councils and rent payers.
The new Housing Finance Bill is claimed, by the Government, to be the most important housing reform of this century. The aim of this legislation, which concerns both the private and the public sector, is to provide 'a decent home for every family at a price they can afford.' But opponents, both in and out of Parliament, have called it Government-sponsored inflation, say that it will double rents, send house prices soaring, split the nation into 'have' and 'havenots' - with millions having to face the indignity of a means test. In the second and final programme on this troubled subject, Man Alive invites to the studio landlords and tenants, as well as Government spokesmen in favour of the legislation and opposition critics.
Four boys aged between 11 and 14. The landmarks of their world are the lingering slums of yesterday, new blocks of flats that aren't being built quickly enough, the warehouses and docks along the river in London's East End. Already they have fallen foul of the law for truancy or stealing-or both. They're in trouble and they're aware of it, but it hasn't dimmed the vitality and optimism of boyhood. There are people who care about them: probation officers, social workers, schoolteachers. But in the end they may be powerless.
A little boy is killed falling off a roof in Islington. The parents of children in the area get together in anger and despair - because their children have nowhere safe to play. There is a council-owned site which, they think, would be ideal for an adventure playground, but the local borough council seems indifferent. It is impossible, they say. They need the site for a new block of flats, a car park and a scout hall. The mothers and children become militant. They decide to occupy the piece of vacant land, to build themselves an adventure playground, to defy the council. The council sets out to crush the rebellion. They send in bulldozers and ask the police to arrest the parents. This week's Man Alive is Jonathan Power's day-to-day record of their remarkable battle. And in the studio we ask: is law-breaking and defiance now the only way left in which progress can be achieved for people like the mothers of Islington?
Justice in the United States is different. At least, there it can be filmed. In this programme, specially presented by Man Alive, a CBS reporter and a film team waited in a mid-western town, Indianapolis, for the results of a night of patrolling and arrests by the police. They followed two cases. A black man accused of a small robbery at a service station, and a white man also accused of robbery - in a bar. Through the process of arrest, bail-bonding, trial and eventually, sentence, the cameras followed. The result is a fascinating anatomy of two cases of small-town law and justice.
The old age pension goes up. In future a single pensioner will live on £6.75 a week - and married couples on £10.90. Is money all that is needed? The old face problems which the rest of us, too often, push to one side - while we live in the Welfare State that their generation built. In almost every country they are respected as 'senior citizens.' Here they are, usually, just 'the old' and often made to feel a nuisance. Jeanne La Chard looks, with old people, at 'Life on the Pension' and in the studio Desmond Wilcox discusses with them, and others, what, perhaps, it ought to be.
Covent Garden market is moving out leaving nine acres of fiercely congested London quiet-for the first time in several centuries. The departure of the market has opened the way for the planners and property developers eager to 'redevelop' not only the market itself but 90 acres of Covent Garden. Sunken motorways, an international conference centre, luxury hotels, expensive offices, tall apartment blocks. The benefits, many would reasonably argue, of 20th century development. It has been the same with the Barbican; the Elephant and Castle; in central Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester; Exeter and Plymouth. It brings a new style to our city centres and, indisputably, profit to potential developers. But at what cost to 'villages' like Covent Garden and the people who live in them? The planners seem confident and promise responsible behaviour. Jim Douglas Henry and a Man Alive team have been listening to the planners and the people because what is happening in Covent Garden is important
There are a number of ways to report for television. George Plimpton is an American television reporter who goes about it in a somewhat unusual manner. He doesn't observe - he joins. Tonight Man Alive hands over to a George Plimpton report: in which, as a reporter, he becomes part of the industry he intends to observe - this time a Hollywood western.
Nothing seems to attract bad publicity quite like a pop festival. Drugs, nudity and violence make sensational headlines at any time, but when they can be found simultaneously within a single small area, then they command column inches on a gigantic scale. But to the hundreds of thousands of young people for whom a pop festival is a peaceful celebration of their own life-style, this publicity seems totally at variance with their own experience. Now, the proposed Night Assemblies Bill will place restrictions on pop festivals and its critics believe that it could stop them altogether. Tonight all the interested parties will discuss the purpose and possible dangers of the Night Assemblies Bill.
5.30 am and Major Dan Bonar, pacing the roof of his house, greets the dawn with a skirl of his bagpipes. Another day in Malta has begun; a day when a retired colonial policeman will play golf with a retired shop-keeper; a retired Kenyan farmer will play polo; one retired businessman will hoe his marrows and another will play with his collapsible motor-bike. For the bronchial, asthmatic and arthritic as well as the plain hard-up, Malta is a place in the sun where it is still possible to live well, if not extravagantly, on £1,000 a year. Also, for those who have lived and worked in what once were called our colonies, Malta can seem the nearest place to home where the sun does still shine. This is not a film about politicians or the British military presence; it is not even about a representative cross-section of the British in Malta. It is about some of the English abroad. Fifty years ago they would, perhaps, have been destined to govern outposts of our Empire. Today there is no Empir
In the five years since the Beatles made their pilgrims' progress to the Ganges in search of the meaning of life, thousands of their fellow-countrymen, disillusioned by the orthodox Christian churches, have turned to the East seeking spiritual comfort. All over Britain people are meditating; there are long waiting lists for Yoga lessons; and sects whose inspiration comes from Eastern mysticism have mushroomed. Jeanne la Chard looks at three mystic sects in Britain: the Divine Light Mission, who worship a 14-year-old boy God; the Sufis, originally a secret Islamic society; and Krishna Consciousness, whose saffron-robed followers believe that by chanting the Hare Krishna mantra about 2,000 times a day they will achieve enlightenment.
For the first time ever, an oil boom has come to an established British city. Aberdeen is proud to boast that it was a University town at the time England only had Oxford and Cambridge. One in four Aberdonians works in the fishing industry. Today there are new riches to be won from the sea - oil rigs are being towed from all over the world to take part in what is being called the greatest oil search ever. Oilmen promise Aberdeen the rewards of a boom town -new jobs, new investment and perhaps even the sort of bonanza that made Texas rich. Many Aberdonians welcome the prospectors with open arms but some are more cautious, especially trawler owners and local conservationists. Is there room for the new boom and the old life style both to survive?
Schoolchildren are bewailing their lot, challenging the system. A new militancy in the classroom is evident and many teachers feel that it may totally undermine their authority. Last month, over 2,000 schoolchildren truanted for a day of marching and protest in central London. They claim that their radical demands represent a challenge to the principles and structure of the entire educational set-up in this country. But who are the playground activists and what are the reforms they seek? Who supports and helps them? And who is against them? Tonight Man Alive invites teachers, pupils and their supporters, as well as parents, to the studio to discuss, with Desmond Wilcox, what, if any, lasting influence the pupil protest movement may have on our schools.
Margaret and Willy have helped to make a film about love - their own story. They made it for the sake of others like themselves - spastics. Intelligent, but handicapped. Sensitive, but misunderstood. Spastics like Margaret and Willy believe they have a right to challenge the rest of us to recognise their emotional needs. They claim the right to love like others do. Are we in danger of allowing handicapped people fewer rights than the rest of us? The story of Margaret and Willy is moving. It may also cause controversy and upset some people. Margaret and Willy know it and believe, with other spastics, that the time has come to do just that. It is easy to see why they love each other. But can they be helped to live with that love, or is it too much for them - and others like them - to hope for? The film raises difficult issues. In the studio those most involved discuss, with Desmond Wilcox, a problem that few people may previously have recognised - but hardly any of us now dare to ignore.
Maytime in Chelsea. English summertime arrived - as usual - with howling wind and gusts of rain. But the Chelsea Flower Show must go on. So 150,000 gardeners crowded into the biggest marquee in the world. They inspected everything, from orchids to aspidistras, and spent £280,000 in orders in four days. Esther Rantzen and a Man Alive team were there behind the scenes - and well before the scenes: with the man who froze his daffodils, and the General who grows dwarf pomegranate trees. They saw the Queen - and an East End Parks superintendent. They found mystery, drama, excitement and suspense - and the largest strawberry in the world: all at this year's Chelsea Flower Show.
Movie men talk about the Cannes Film Festival. Time was when the Festival was a prestigious showcase for the world's best films. Now, 25 years on, it is almost irrelevant. Today Cannes is the place people go to wheel and deal. At this year's Festival John Pitman and a Man Alive team follow the fortunes and misfortunes of a young girl producer; two men - one English, one American - who spent £200,000 of their own money on a feature film; and the men, with millions to play with, who could make or break them. Stars like Peter O'Toole, Gina Lollobrigida and Princess Grace still came and the Festival itself went on somewhere in the background. But money - big money - is really what it's all about.
Men may go to sea for adventure and romance but the appeal doesn't usually last very long and the shipping world is worried about the wastage. One out of three merchant seamen leave the life within the first year and nine out of ten return ashore, for good, before they have served ten years. For some men, life at sea represents an escape from the rat race of shore life, or from domestic responsibility. And, behind a man's decision to leave shipping and return home, there is usually a wife. At sea on two very different ships - an old passenger boat and a new container ship - seamen talk, to Harold Williamson and a Man Alive team, about their love - and hate - of life on board. And, back home, the wives have their say.
The Wimbledon crowds used to call Billie-Jean King 'Little Miss Moffitt.' They laughed both with her and at her as she snapped and snarled around the Centre Court. But later the crowds turned sour. They thought the game was the thing and what they saw as 'gamesmanship' was bad sportsmanship. They objected loudly to her behaviour and tactics and suddenly they liked - and even wanted - to see her beaten. We all know what happened at Wimbledon this year, but 1969 was a decisive year for Billie-Jean. Man Alive looked behind the scenes then at the girl who hates to lose and goes to such extraordinary lengths to win.
In the bad old days of mass unemployment, they used to say that love went out of the window when poverty came through the door. Today, when it seems that no one's job is absolutely secure, what would the romantics say in a world of money-worship and hire-purchase commitments? The dole can mean more than material hardship-the soul can be damaged, the spirit corroded. When no one knows if he - or she - will be next to join the dole queue, what happens to the quality of marriage, the atmosphere of family, a man and his children, wedding plans for two, a blossoming courtship? When the bread-winner gets the sack, can love survive on the dole?
Four years ago Man Alive made a report about a young English-man living in Spain. Henry Higgins - a bullfighter. Jeremy James talked to him in his moments of triumph and despair as he struggled against massive and dangerous odds to become a bullfighter whom the Spanish would admire. Now he has succeeded. He has become a matador and a biography has been written about him. Tonight's Man Alive shows Henry Higgins in his struggle to the top and asks him now whether it was all worthwhile.
George Plimpton is an amateur of many worlds. He has driven a racing car in the Italian Grand Prix. He has even played a bit-part in a John Wayne movie. George Plimpton is familiar to American viewers for his have-ago-at-anything approach. Tonight, Man Alive hands over to Plimpton as he joins 'The Flying Apollos,' a trapeze act with a travelling circus. After 10 days' training, George Plimpton, in a packed big top, himself has a go on the flying trapeze.
Man Alive follows firefighters from a fire house in the South Bronx: Battalion 27, Ladder 31 and Engine 82. It chronicled the appalling conditions the firefighters worked in with roughly one emergency call per hour, and the high rates of arson and malicious calls.
Dole queues in Britain's depressed areas are getting younger as thousands of teenagers released from school join the unemployed. In Sunderland, where unemployment is more than twice the national average, Jim Douglas Henry found 2,000 school-leavers chasing 100 jobs. From Sunderland Desmond Wilcox invites the young unemployed and their parents to talk about a way out for the future with industrialists, union leaders, councillors and education experts.
Once Stepney was a community. Then the war came and knocked most of it down. As concrete blocks spring up where the door-step families used to be, the sense of community seems to have vanished. So the people of Stepney decided to do something about it. They staged their own festival. Result: a huge success for thousands of people. Rose, born in Stepney 40 years ago, commented, 'What was lost is back again, but it's took a long while.'
When a marriage breaks it is the children who suffer and legal disputes over custody can be drawn out and bitter. But when the parents are of different nationalities the aftermath can be even more distressing. Jeanne La Chard and a Man Alive film team have been following the trail of missing children-and parents - from London law courts to Italy and southern Sardinia. In the studio Desmond Wilcox with the parents and the lawyers discusses the future of these unhappy children.
It's not very long since respectable parents thought of fashion modelling as being a step on the road to ruin for their daughters. But the swinging 60s changed all that, and today there are over 80 model agencies in London alone - and a rash of model schools - which cater for the dreams of girls ambitious to earn fame and fortune with their figures. What is the truth? Man Alive looks at the chic fagade and the seamy side of the world where model girls are fashioned.
A child born into a world he will never see needs special love, and care. The number of children born blind is much smaller than it was; but, nowadays, a high proportion suffer other handicaps as well. Man Alive shows a film portrait of the Sunshine Home in Northwood, Middlesex, where blind children learn to prepare themselves for the outside world. Is enough being done to provide work and facilities for them to lead reasonably independent lives when they leave school?
In the first programme of this two-part enquiry, John Pitman and a Man Alive team look at the problem and, next week, examine some of the answers. When grandparents get too old to look after themselves, the family must decide what to do. An old person, who may also be sick, needs much care and nursing: may become the cause of over-tiredness and bad tempers within the family. Yet the alternative, to send a much loved grandparent to an old people's home, may seem callous and cruel. For old people too, it can be a difficult time. On the one hand they don't want to be a burden on the family: on the other hand they are frightened of being 'put away' and forgotten. Do we care for our parents as well in old age as they did for us as children?
Last week Man Alive looked at the problems for elderly relatives and their families. This week Desmond Wilcox looks for some of the answers. Do we care for our parents as well in old age as they did for us as children? When grandparents get too old to look after themselves they can become an intolerable strain on the family. Yet the alternative, an old people's home, may seem callous and cruel.
George Plimpton will try his hand at anything. First he played a bit part in a John Wayne Western. Then he chanced his arm on the flying trapeze at the circus. Now he tries the loneliest job in the world: stand-up comic. Alone on a stage in front of an audience, he has only his jokes between him and disaster. Bob Hope, Woody Allen and Buddy Hackett all have advice for Plimpton. Laugh-In's comedy writers provide the material. But on the big night at Caesar's Palace at Las Vegas he is out there alone in front of 1,200 people, an audience used to the best entertainment the world can provide.
All over Britain the traditional industries are declining. Coal mines, shipyards and steelworks close; men and women are thrown out of work. The drift to the south east and to the cities continues. It is a familiar pattern, one which faced Dartington in Devon in 1925. But one man, Leonard Elmhirst, believed that by bringing industry to the countryside and efficiency to agriculture he could halt the rural decline. He believed too that a job is not enough - that everyone had a right to 'the abundant life.' Now Dartington is reaching out again. This time to help the mining town of Conisbrough in Yorkshire. Gordon Snell asks 79-year-old Leonard Elmhirst what lessons can be learned from his experience. Is the Dartington way a lesson for the future?
Child cruelty cases provoke strong reactions. But it is now accepted that while protecting the child is paramount, understanding the parent is better than punishment. John Robinson went to prison for attacking his 18-month-old son. Since his release he's been taken to court because, it was believed, he had again attacked the child, now aged 5. Robinson denied the charge and believes he is being victimised, blamed for every cut and bruise his child suffers. Harold Williamson follows the court case and also sees how some London mothers, who live in fear of repeating attacks on their own children, are being helped in an experiment run by the NSPCC.
There are over 2 million secretaries in Britain. Almost all of them are women; almost all of their bosses are men. Very few of the bosses have ever been secretaries; very few of the secretaries will ever be bosses. While men look for jobs with good prospects, good salaries and job satisfaction, most women are destined for monotonous jobs with little chance of getting to the top. Jeanne La Chard looks at the role of the secretary in the commercial world; and in the studio Desmond Wilcox discusses with secretaries and bosses why it's always seemed a dead-end and almost exclusively female job.
Over 8,000 men sleep rough in London on park benches, in derelict houses and railway sidings. No one knows the total for the whole country; how many will spend Christmas alone this year, out of doors? These men weren't born homeless. Many of them had good jobs, a home and a family and they thought they were secure. Ending up jobless, without a roof and alone, is a gradual process, but those who've dropped to the bottom rung on the ladder say you get there almost before you know it-once things really start to go wrong. Harold Williamson talks to men who admit they brought it all on themselves; some who are trying to fight their way back and others who've accepted life on the doss-house circuit at a time when hostels for homeless men are fast disappearing in property development schemes.
When Captain Cook landed in Hawaii the natives clubbed him to death, but the blood spilt on that beach didn'deter other white men. Every year millions go to the Pacific islands, to Hawaii, Tahiti and Fiji in search of the sun, surf, grass skirts and free love: the world the ad-men tell us is paradise on earth. But it is a changing world. Land developers and international hotel chains fight to keep pace with the tourist boom. Military bases and warships mean a juke-box in every port. Atomic testing, islanders claim, is a health hazard. Jim Douglas Henry and a Man Alive film team joined the rush to the South Pacific in the hope that theirs was not the last trip to paradise.
George Plimpton has made a name for himself as the try-anything-once adventurer. This week he goes to Meru National Park in Kenya on a photographic safari for an American magazine. His assignment: to shoot pictures of Ahmed the elephant, believed to be the largest animal in Africa. George Plimpton learns the secret of elephant trading, techniques of wildlife photography, and a lot about the inhabitants of Africa both human and animal.
Every day of the week, except Sunday, from November until April, farmers, squires, lords, ladies and, on occasion, even Princess Anne all ride to hounds. During the past year, Man Alive has followed the South Dorset Hunt where Jeremy James talked to those who hunt and those who don't. He has discovered that in this year of 1973, hunting is a booming sport: for those who do, for those who watch, and for those who protest against it all.
Every year hundreds of workers contract - even die from - illnesses which they can't understand, let alone pronounce. Yet people continue to work with substances that can subsequently prove fatal. Some do it because they're ignorant of the dangers; others because they want the money and are prepared to take risks. This week a Man Alive film team looks at the hazards, and in the studio Desmond Wilcox asks: why it is so difficult to establish who is to blame - who is to compensate the victims?
The modern home is usually bombarded with words - television, the telephone, radio and newspapers. Yet families often find it difficult to communicate on a personal level: husbands and wives who live under the same roof sometimes don't, won't or can't talk to each other. They may share their children, meals, even the same bed, and yet one partner has nothing to say to the other. How do two people with so much in common get to a point where there is no verbal communication? What keeps these silent couples together? Jeanne La Chard and a Man Alive film team have been talking to the husbands and wives who are not on speaking terms.
A report by Man Alive and French Television on the New Hebrides in the South Pacific. In a tropical paradise miles from anywhere lies this tiny chain of volcanic islands. By a unique accident of historical convenience they are jointly governed by Great Britain and France. This condominium - a colony of beer and beaujolais, chips and camembert -has two of everything. There are bobbies and gendarmes, lycees and grammar schools, Douanes and Customs, pubs and bistros. Yet this strange mixed-marriage of government still seems to work - at least for the Europeans. Jim Douglas Henry and a Man Alive team make their own entente with Dominique Viard and French Television.
Two people on your bus to work every day may be criminals. And your teenage son or daughter, perhaps just starting at college, may be breaking the law or sharing rooms with someone who does. The crime? The possession or use of cannabis - better known as pot. These statistics are not dramatic journalists' headlines either; they're revealed in a government report. Two million people, in this country, have smoked pot. With so many people flouting the law - it is perhaps surprising how little is really understood about pot. Is it bad for one's health, and in what way? Is it addictive? Will it lead to other drug usage? And is the present legislation satisfactory? With Desmond Wilcox in the Man Alive studio tonight are those anxious to discuss the prejudices and the facts about pot.
In the middle of the Second World War Sir William Beveridge produced his blueprint for peace: a Welfare State 'from the cradle to the grave.' In this specially extended edition, Man Alive reviews the successes and failures of the Welfare State through two families. Erlend and Clare Copeley-Williams live in an Essex farmhouse with their three children. They are middle-class and comfortably off. Fred and Muriel Wadsworth live in a Manchester council house with their two children. They are working-class and struggling to make ends meet. Jeremy James and a film team compare the families in four key areas: income, housing, education and health. In the studio Desmond Wilcox examines how much we have achieved - 30 years on.
Throughout the country slums are being torn down and replaced with new and better council housing. But the cost of higher living standards often means higher rents. The authorities who set the rent must face the possibility that the homes which they build to free people from the tyranny of the slum are imposing on them another tyranny - debt. The problem can affect all new council estates and new towns. When one third of a town is behind with the rent something must be wrong. Tonight Man Alive is at Thamesmead for a filmed report by Jack Pizzey and an outside broadcast discussion chaired by Desmond Wilcox between the GLC, who collect the rents, and the people who live there and say, 'We like it, if only we could afford it.'
The cost of higher living standards often means higher rents. Man Alive at Thamesmead.
You used to be lucky to get bread and cheese or a pie with your pint in the pub. Today, along with booze, they serve up go-go girls, topless dancers, strippers, female impersonators and music, music, music. Right now the local is in danger. Big cities are being swamped with disco bars, ideal for those who don't want to talk to each other; popular 'mine hosts' are being replaced by managers; old pubs frequented by old men in old villages are being closed down. Some people are making a lot of money out of the changes. But a lot more are sad - and angry. Dr Johnson once said: 'There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.' Man contrived it. Is man now destroying it?
Five years ago this week Mauritius, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean, celebrated its independence from British colonial rule. Behind the fun of the festivities, a retired British Army colonel was in reflective mood. Colonel Eric Hefford had organised the independence celebrations for eight different countries. Mauritius was the end of the road. The pink bits on the map had all but run out. Five years ago Man Alive followed Colonel Hefford as he brought military precision to the pomp and protocol of Independence Day. Today John Percival meets him again and asks what his plans are now with so few colonies left, fewer still that can afford the de luxe celebrations Colonel Hefford provides.
A woman shares her bed with her husband-and a ghost who makes advances to her; a man is clutched by a ghostly hand and sees a fire engine drive through his room; a woman is haunted by a presence - sometimes friendly, sometimes not; a boy dabbles with the ouija board and sees the devil. Today, faced with the complexities of modern technological life, people are once again turning towards the mysteries of the occult. The result-an increasing demand for exorcisms and cures performed by churchmen, witches and psychiatrists. Jeremy James has talked to the possessed, clergymen, a white witch, doctors and a ghost hunter to try to find out if there are those haunted from beyond the grave - or if it's all in the mind.
When it comes to National Hunt Racing most people are only concerned about which horse is first past the post. Spectators can often be heard urging the leading horse to fall. You need to be tough to be a jockey. It means riding at 30 mph over fences that can send a horse flying - and a jockey to the ground with a broken back. The risks are great; the financial rewards not so great. In Grand National week Man Alive finds out why jockeys do it; why they risk their necks for £15 a ride when compensation is poor if they're injured - or killed. Richard Pitman, favourite for this year's Cheltenham Gold Cup, sums it up like this: 'Getting hurt is far less important than the glory, the enjoyment, the thrill. It's eating you. It's part of you. We love it.'
Tonight Man Alive comes from Farringdon in Berkshire where heavy lorries thunder through day and night. The residents say the big lorries should not be allowed through. The transport men say that unless they are, distribution costs will rise and so will prices. Jack Pizzey and Desmond Wilcox ask if we should keep the lorries off the roads that aren't big enough for them. Why can't the railways do more to relieve the traffic on the roads? Are we building new roads fast enough to cope with the juggernaut explosion?
Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music is a big production. The feature film has become the biggest money-spinner in the history of cinema musicals. The Sound of Music opened -at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre in New York on 16 November 1959. The London production at the Palace Theatre started on 18 May 1961. On 12 February 1973 The Sound of Music opened in Herne Bay-an amateur production. Jack Pizzey was there with a Man Alive team to chronicle the birth-pangs of this ambitious enterprise.
It's little more than a form of slave labour; doing the dirtiest, the most menial jobs in the affluent societies of Europe today. As prosperity and affluence increase so does the need to import a labour force to do the jobs that the newly rich will no longer consider. The situation is thought by some to be an international scandal. It's an open secret, for instance, in Germany that the 'guest workers' shipped in from poorer countries are used to do all the dirty jobs. For legions of women there are higher wages than they can earn in Korea, the Philippines and other Third World nations - but at what human cost? What is life like for these women in the cities of Europe who wash the dishes in hotels, change the bedpans in hospitals, scrub the floors in the homes of the middle-classes? Jeanne La Chard and a Man Alive team have looked at the situation in Germany, Italy and this country: and in the studio Desmond Wilcox meets those responsible.
Social Work is a growth industry: each day thousands of social workers, some professional, some voluntary, attempt to unravel the lives of their 'clients.' Some critics say they are merely papering over the cracks. Should they be more involved? Social workers themselves are becoming unsure of their role. They know they are needed, but to do what? Social workers inside and outside the formal system, self-confessed revolutionaries, lecturers in sociology, are among the people with Desmond Wilcox in the studio tonight to discuss the issues raised by last night's Tuesday's Documentary on BBC1.
You are innocent until proved guilty - the jury reaches a verdict, and if they acquit, you leave the court without a stain on your character. But sometimes you leave with a hole in your pocket. The innocent person is often ordered by the judge to pay his own legal costs - which can be very expensive. And there can be no appeal against the judge's decision about costs. Is this justice? Esther Rantzen talks to three people about crimes they did not commit - but for which they must now pay. In the studio, with Desmond Wilcox, lawyers and laymen look at the issues raised.
George Plimpton is familiar to American viewers for his have-ago-at-anything approach. He has chanced his arm on the flying trapeze at the circus; in Las Vegas he has tried his luck as a stand-up comic, and in Africa he has stalked the world's largest elephant. This week he enters the Mexican 1,000-in a dune-buggy. In preparation for this gruelling race he consults Jackie Stewart and helps him in the pits at the Monza Grand Prix.
Mothers bringing up their children on Social Security, without husbands, find many things to complain of. They do not know their rights, or what help is available to them; they are watched and spied upon; they feel that society resents having to support them. Deserted mothers feel they are treated differently from widows, who get their money as of right. Four women tell their stories to Jim Douglas Henry; and in the studio Desmond Wilcox discusses with Social Security officers, Prof Peter Townsend and the mothers themselves what needs to be done.
On a Saturday morning last September Sarah [text removed], aged 14, packed a bag, hitch-hiked to Taunton - and disappeared. On a morning in February 1972, Kevin [text removed], aged 14, caught a train from Dartford to London - and disappeared. Three years ago Susan [text removed], aged just 14, took all the money she could find from her home in Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire - and disappeared. Two years later she went home - taking with her the boy she was living with. No one knows how many children run away every year. It could be as few as 2,000 or as many as 6,000. In terms of numbers, not perhaps a very serious problem; in human terms, a tragedy. Jeremy James talks to the girl who came home and to her parents; to the parents of children who have run away; to the police and welfare workers to find out where the children go - and why.
In every British passport it requires that the holder be afforded 'such assistance and protection as may be necessary.' It's eight months since the dramatic airlift of Asian refugees from Uganda hit the headlines in Britain. The fate of these 28,000 British passport holders expelled by General Amin is something most of us have forgotten; but a Man Alive film team have been following the refugees since they arrived last October. Tonight, we look at how they have fared. What problems they have met finding homes and jobs; and whether or not we have made them feel welcome-given enough assistance and protection? In the studio Desmond Wilcox discusses with those responsible how well we handled this emergency.
Last month, thousands of angry men, women and children marched across Canvey Island to plant home-made crosses on what is left of their countryside. They believe their island is about to be crucified. The land has been bought by two oil giants to build refineries and permission to build has been granted. The Government says it's all 'In the interests of the national economy.' But the people of Canvey say: 'Why pick on us?' Jim Douglas Henry and a film team have been looking at the protest and Desmond Wilcox with an Outside Broadcast unit, in the local school, brings planners and people together.
This is the story of three boys - Philip Ramocon, Dabs Edun and Leburn Rose. They are ambitious, talented, and black. The stories we normally hear about boys like this are concerned with their special problems - bad housing, unemployment, the violence of the ghetto. But many are conquering prejudice and defying prophecies of doom. Esther Rantzen meets three boys who are, each in their own way, breaking out of the ghetto. Philip is a musician. Dabs is a boxer. Leburn is head boy of a comprehensive school in London and his ambition is to become a teacher; to succeed simply on the strength of his character and intelligence. All three are determined to make good lives of their own; all three believe they have at least a fighting chance.
American history doesn't go back very far - at least for the white man. It was only 100 years ago that the West was tamed, and the heroes of the legends are still with us - the buffaloes, the broncos, the Indians and the cowboys. This is a story from the most famous legend of all, the Wild West; the story of a part Indian, part Canadian cowboy - Kenny McLean, the most successful cowboy Canada has ever bred. Kenny McLean is as famous for busting broncos, wrestling steers and roping calves as Bobby Charlton is for scoring goals and Geoff Boycott is for scoring centuries. In 13 years of risking his life in the rodeo ring Kenny McLean has earned $100,000 - not much more than Jack Nicklaus might hope to win for four afternoons' golf - but enough to make him a legend in his own lifetime.
Years ago when Judy Garland sang "You Made Me Love You" to a pin-up picture of Clark Gable, she was expressing on film the real-life sentiments of thousands of film fans. Most of us at one time or another have had crushes on stars; most of us get over them. But some people never have - and never will. These days it's the adolescent Donny Osmonds and David Cassidys who come in for the hero-worship. But will the dedication last for them as it has for some of the superstars of the past? John Pitman has been to see a tailor and cutter who is still devoted to the late Errol Flynn; a widower who worships Valentino; and a housewife who reckons that any time she devotes to anything other than the memory of singer Jim Reeves is a waste of time. Fortunately she has a very understanding husband.
The case for London's third airport is based on several praiseworthy assumptions. That it will relieve the noise around London's airports; that Britain is running out of runways and terminal space. The case against Maplin is that the best way to reduce airport noise is to exploit the new quiet engines; that Maplin and all that goes with it, motorways, rail links, a new town, an industrial zone, a new port, all add up to an environmental disaster; that Britain is not now short of and may never run out of runways or terminal space; that Maplin is an economic folly.
Tourism is Britain's largest dollar earner. Our culture and heritage are one of our most important invisible exports. Although the number of Australians and Europeans coming to England rises every year, the majority of visitors are American, in search, perhaps, of a past they feel does not exist in their own country. What they want to see is Changing the Guard, Stratford, a couple of castles and with any luck, a living, breathing earl or marquis. Jeremy James has been looking at the new tourist boom - at the package tourists who do Europe in a fortnight and Britain in three days, and can go off the beaten track with a stage coach and a country weekend.
Nothing succeeds like excess in the Indian film industry. In Bombay, Hollywood of the East, a new, noisy, colourful feature film is churned out every three days. Heroic heroes battle furiously with villainous villains - everything is larger than life, including Rajesh Khanna, Bombay's superstar. Jack Pizzey and a Man Alive film team watched Rajesh dancing through love scenes beneath the Himalayan snows, plotting his way through the intrigues of the Bombay film world, and at home with his 15-year-old wife: when he married in March millions of Indian girls were heart-broken.
It's almost 30 years now since the British left India, but if Rudyard Kipling had gone with Jack Pizzey and a Man Alive film team to the once-fashionable hill resort of Ootacamund in Southern India, he would have felt entirely at home. Seven thousand feet above the heat and turmoil of India, it was known to generations of expatriates as 'Snooty Ooty' and is still jealous of its reputation as queen of the hill stations. Ooty's summer social season is a major attraction for people wanting to escape the stifling plains below, and a handful of British people have chosen to make Ooty their home; still live much as Kipling's characters did. Many of them have been there so long and England has changed so much that they have nowhere else to call home.
Peper Harow, an old country house set in fine grounds, provides a splendid if unexpected setting for its new residents - group of disturbed adolescents, most of them potentially violent. All the boys at Peper Harow have taken some kind of a beating from life. But at Peper Harow the beating has been stopped. There is no regimentation, no system of rewards and punishments to encourage conformity. Instead the community offers to the boys a chance to try out the experience of ordinary life again; to take responsibility for themselves, for others, for the community. To some this would seem a case of sparing the rod and spoiling the child. But to the boys of Peper Harow the task of facing up to the realities of themselves and their circumstances is - as several of them put it to Jim Douglas Henry-tougher than punishment.
For the men and women who own Britain's 11,000 racing greyhounds there's a dream of winning a fortune in prize money and gambling. Some pin their hopes on a single dog cosseted at home as one of the family, fed on a secret diet and trained when few people are about. Others kennel 70-80 dogs in the expensive hope of finding a world-beater among them. Some use professional trainers. It's exciting, heartbreaking and sometimes shady. It draws bigger crowds than horse racing, attracts more gambling money than the football pools, and it's split under two codes. One is governed by a 146-page rule book; the other is an unwritten, free-and-easy game of bluff and counterbluff. Harold Williamson has been with the dogs, the owners, the winners and the losers.
It didn't take the British record companies long to notice they were missing out when the Americans invented the weenybopper singing star. The latest to join the race to manufacture a British little Jimmy Osmond is EMI, the world's biggest record company. Their product, 12-year-old Darren Burn, seems to have all the right ingredients: he's pretty, he can sing and his dad's an executive at EMI. John Pitman has followed the marketing of Master Burn, Ricky Wilde and the James Boys, and talked to their families.
The shortage of council housing and the plight of the homeless are familiar problems. But solutions are not so easy. Escalating land prices in all our inner city areas mean that pressure to build in outer areas is increasing all the time. And many residents of pleasant suburban areas don't want vast council housing complexes - and the people who live in them - on their doorsteps. Man Alive tonight comes from the London Borough of Hillingdon where house-owners are up in arms about proposed new council housing. Desmond Wilcox chairs a town meeting with the people of Hillingdon and asks what the solution is when people protest: 'Do it somewhere else.'
What happens to a marriage when the wife unties the apron strings, goes out to work and then earns more than her husband? How does a man feel when his wife who has always washed his socks, fed his children and shared his bed suddenly becomes a tycoon? What happens to the children when Dad becomes the housewife? What do they tell their friends? In the first of two programmes, Jeanne La Chard talks to families where Dad stays at home and families where the wife is the major breadwinner.
Today Mark Phillips, an acting captain in the British Army, earning around £2,500, married Anne Windsor, a Princess of the British Royal Family, who has an income of around £35,000. Last week Man Alive looked at five families, where the wife had become the-major breadwinner, to discover its effects on the traditional roles of marriage. Good luck, this day, to acting Captain and Mrs Phillips who are just one of thousands of couples who have to face this problem. Tonight Desmond Wilcox examines the implications of this change of roles in a marriage; the implications for the children, for industry and for the society we live in. Among those taking part in the discussion will be the families on film, Marjorie Proops - herself a successful working wife - sociologists, a psychiatrist specialising in marriage, and marriage guidance counsellors.
The Costa Brava might be just as cheap these days, but for a lot of people, there's still nothing to beat the good old traditional holiday camp. In the week John Pitman visited a holiday camp at Selsey in Sussex, the place was booked out - 1,200 gathered together, all out to enjoy themselves. Well, most of them. You can't please all the people all the time. There were boys looking for girls, girls looking for boys. Confident people who mix easily; shy people who don't. There were families who come every year and those who had never been before - and some who won't come again. And always there, ever ready to make you smile, were the Blue-coats, personality-plus people: stars in their own little galaxy, but always hoping that some day someone will spot them, give them a break and take them away from it all.
Scratch a modern millionaire and underneath you will probably find a property developer. Since 1954 the boom in commercial property development has spawned oblong office blocks by the thousands and new fortunes by the bank load. To amass their private fortunes, the property tycoons must enlist the willing co-operation of local government councillors - some of the hardest-working, unpaid public servants in modern Britain. For it is in the power of local authorities to grant, or to withhold, the necessary public permission to speculate on making a private fortune.
Of all the events which use sport as an excuse to ease out the champagne corks and have a social junket-Ascot, Wimbledon, Lord's, Cowes - the most exquisitely English is Henley Royal Regatta. The course is English to the point of idiosyncrasy: it doesn'conform to international standards for one inch of its beautiful length. Yet every oarsman in the world wants to row on it. Even the Russians send their best men to heave and sweat past the Stewards' enclosure, where the English upper classes relax in deck-chairs, wear dazzling boat-club blazers and caps, sip punch and champagne, gossip, and clap politely.
Legal aid is the most remunerative thing that has happened to the legal profession since the invention of sin. (ANON) If all men are to be equal before the law, all men must have equal access to advice and advocacy. The legal aid system has been developed over the years to reduce the gap between the high idealism and the everyday reality. Tonight's extended Man Alive examines the gap that still exists and asks how far a fair hearing is still determined by the thickness of your wallet. On film JACK PIZZEY reports, on cases where denial or restriction of legal aid may have led to injustice. In the studio DESMOND WILCOX introduces a discussion between judges, lawyers and laymen : their views range from those who maintain that ' British legal aid is the best in the world' to those who see it as ' the feeble Cinderella of our social services.'
Blackburn in Lancashire is twinned with Peronne in France and Altena in Germany. At the end of Britain's first year in Europe, the children of Blackburn have invited their European twins to join them in a festival of music and dancing. Today the children, les enfants and die Kinder come together in Blackburn to show the world that they all share the joy of celebrating Christmas with music -all in their very different ways.
Stuntman Bob Woodham has ' died ' for a living countless times in films like You Only Live Twice, Adam's Woman and Fahrenheit 451. He works with. a team of stuntmen. If it's not Cleopatra or The Guns of Navarone, it's the latest Western, war film or action movie: a 100ft jump from a cliff on to rocks below; a motor bike smashing sidelong into a car at 30 mph; a horse dragging a ' cowboy ' along the ground by his foot at 20 mph; a car crash and two men are thrown through a windscreen ablaze.
John Wise, Manchester signalman, has had a lifetime of dull, boring jobs. At school his abilities largely escaped notice and he was written off when he failed the 11-plus. Now, 31 years later, he has proved he deserved a better chance - he's won a place at university. Jimmy May left school just two years ago. He wanted to be an artist and some of his drawings were published in a book about London's East End. But he's ended up in a butcher's shop and he hates every minute. They say that everyone, these days, has the chance to get ahead. But the Jimmy Mays of the world still fear they are born to fail.
On the north coast of Anglesey, construction has already begun on a super-tanker oil terminal for Shell. It is a £50-million development which promises unexpected wealth, new jobs and financial security. But there is a price to pay for this hope of a rosy future. The Anglesey Defence Action Group claim that the price is too high; that there is a grave risk of oil spillage on holiday beaches; that an area of outstanding beauty will be destroyed. The oil men say the terminal is ' in the nation's interest '; that it is necessary to meet the increasing need for oil products in the Midlands and the North West. Harold Williamson examines the arguments for both sides, and Desmond Wilcox chairs a town meeting with oil men, planners and the people of Anglesey.
In just over three years, the cost of the average house in Britain has doubled from £ 5,082 in June 1970 to f 10,423. At the same time, the cost of a mortgage to pay for that house has rocketed from just under E32 a month to over E82 a month, before tax relief. These are vital statistics which have shattered the dreams of millions of young married couples. Now many people who stretched themselves to buy a home of their own, three years ago, are having to lower their standard of living, sell off the family car or have the telephone taken away to pay the mortgage. Twenty years ago Harold Mac millan said that every family in Britain was entitled to a chance to own its home and heralded the birth of Britain as a major property-owning democracy. Today that democracy is crumbling. What do the next 20 years hold? Desmond Wilcox talks to the people in trouble; to those who believe they know ithe answers and to those who should know.
There were 18,000 murders in the United States in 1972. More Americans were murdered in three years than were killed in combat in Vietnam in ten years. A remarkable film report by NBC examines the reasons for these terrifying statistics. It examines how the seeds of violence germinate and grow in the poor areas-the ghettos; why it is that murder is spreading to the middle-class suburbs; why the murder rate is nearly twenty-five times greater than in this country. Jim Hartz reports from Denver, Colorado, a city the size of Manchester, on the homicide division -the murder squad.
Sometimes today seems just too much: mid-winter, industrial disputes and the fuel crisis may seem to conspire to make the 20th century most unattractive. Some dislike it so much they take every opportunity to escape into the past and spend their Sunday afternoons at Newbury, Worcester or Edgehill re-fighting the battles of the Civil War. On a good weekend as many as 2,000 troops and 10,000 spectators turn out. The Knights and Ladies of the Round Table of Camelot prefer their escapism even further back. JEREMY JAMES and a Man Alive team go back with them all to the good old days.
In this, the first of a two-part enquiry into prisons and the alternatives to prison, JEREMY JAMES talks to the men who run Lincoln to find out why they do the job; how they measure success. If you are sentenced to a term of imprisonment it is to a local prison - like Lincoln - that you will probably go first. There you will meet violent men, petty thieves, those looking for warmth and shelter and the people serving the longest sentences of all, the screws - prison officers.
Prison is the traditional and simple answer to a big problem. Yet, as last week's programme showed, because of overcrowding and under-staffing prison seldom encourages inmates ' to lead a good and useful life.' No one denies that for many of the 37,000 men behind bars there must be a better solution and now there are a few cautious experimental alternatives under way. In the second of two programmes JOHN PITMAN looks at some of these alternatives, including a hostel for men who have been in trouble most of their lives; an experiment in which boys - some with records of criminal violence -are working with disturbed children; a scheme sentencing convicted criminals to social work. In the studio JEREMY JAMES discusses other alternatives which are available and asks how many prisons could be closed if there were sufficient alternatives.
Nearly 1,000 bikes used to leave the Triumph works at Meriden, near Coventry, every week, most of them for export. They represented 80% of the British motorbike industry and were a massive dollar earner. Then management decided to close the factory and 1,700 men and women lost their jobs. But more than half of them refused to go. They staged a sit-in, organised a 24-hour picket and began a fight to take over the factory and run it themselves. For five months they have held out, their savings gone, their redundancy pay ended. What makes factory workers take desperate measures to save their jobs? How is their morale affected as the weeks drag on? Harold Williamson and a Man Alive film team went behind the picket lines, into the now silent factory.
No self-respecting dog would dream of missing Crufts. And so it was that 7,877 of them, with their owners, came together at Olympia last month for the 78th show -and ' Burtonswood Bossy Boots,' the St Bernard, beat them all. JOHN PITMAN was there, too, with a Man Alive film crew following the trail of owners and their dogs in the week leading up to the big show. The ' doggy people ' - as they call themselves - are a mixed bag. There's a retired company director and his wife who live in a big house with Great Danes; two bachelors who breed Cavalier King Charles spaniels; a little lady with a big poodle; and a pretty teenager who, for the moment, prefers Afghans to boy-friends. But they all have one thing in common: an incredible love of dogs and dog shows. ' Other people think we must be mad,' says one. ' And I suppose we are.'
An occasional series of interviews in which Desmond Wilcox talks to the men with power behind the scenes. Sir William Armstrong , KCB, MVO, Head of the Home Civil Service and Permanent Secretary to the. Civil Service Department. His decisions vitally affect the man in the dole queue and the man at 10 Downing Street. Recently there has been much discussion about who runs the country. Many believe that much of that power lies with anonymous civil servants; critics believe too much power, both in major policy decisions and in day-to-day contact with members of the public.
FINBARR NOLAN is the seventh son of a seventh son. All his life people have believed he has miraculous powers of healing. Their belief has lifted him from a rain-sodden Irish village into a world of Jaguars and Jensens. His income has been assessed by the Irish tax authorities at half a million pounds in four years. JACK pizzey and a Man Alive team went to the village where Finbarr began healing almost as soon as he was born 21 years ago, and accompanied him to London for his first healing clinics outside Ireland. He set up shop in a West End night club along with a show biz PR man and a business manager and the sick came to him with everything from catarrh to cancer.
If the planners announce tomorrow that next door to you is the ideal spot for an international airport, a six-lane motorway, or an oil terminal, what can you do about it? The official answer is that there are safeguards. In an investigation into the effectiveness of these safeguards Man Alive looks at public enquiries which have found in favour of objectors, only to be overruled by the Government. JACK PIZZEY and a Man Alive team also go to the Highlands of Scotland, where the oil boom is threatening to turn quiet lochs into factory sites-and examine the anatomy of another dispute which has just ended: a dispute over a new runway at Edinburgh's Turnhouse Airport. Objectors to the plan invoked all the safeguards and overthrew the plan at a public enquiry. But still the plan is going ahead and they believe it was a case of 'heads they win and tails you lose.'
It could happen to anyone. It has to 26 people at Danesbury Hospital. All of them once lived normal, active and healthy lives until illness or accident paralysed them. Most of them are still young. All know they will never get better; most know they can only get worse. Diseases like multiple sclerosis destroy marriages, break up families, bring financial disaster. Yet despite the anger and resentment at the unfairness of it all, there is a mood of courage and tenacity - even optimism.
Twenty years ago this week, on 17 May 1954, the first shot was fired in the American blacks' war for civil rights, not on the riot-torn street of some northern city but in the United States Supreme Court. In what has become known simply as the Brown Case, Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled that segregation was unconstitutional. It was a shattering blow to the Deep South, leading directly to the freedom riders, murder, riots and the rise of Martin Luther King. Now, 20 years later, to the wry delight of many Southerners, the civil rights battle has moved through the scorched ghettoes of the mid-60s race riots to the northern cities in general and Detroit in particular. This summer, the Supreme Court will pass judgment on a case in Detroit that will be as significant in 1974 as Brown was in 1954. Jeremy James has been to Alabama in the Deep South and Detroit in the Deep North to examine the first 20 years of American civil rights and asks - how far have the blacks really come and how far ha
There are many immigrant communities in Britain today. They have brought with them to this country their own gods, their own way of life. Should they retain their cultural identities or should they become absorbed into the wider community? Enoch Powell believes that integration means ' To become, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable.' Do people have the right to be different? How different? Even at the cost of offending others? In America, as last week's Man Alive showed, Martin Luther King's dream of the lion lying down with the lamb - and whites being brothers to blacks - is still only a dream. Is it nearer being fulfilled here? JEREMY JAMES talks to three boys who are determined to be different-a Jew, a Sikh and a West Indian - and also listens to the reactions of white British students.
With the raising of the school-leaving age, more and more children are taking part-time jobs. At the last count there were over half a million children at work. Many children benefit from the experience work brings - and the extra money. But others are exploited by thoughtless employers in jobs which are potentially dangerous - even lethal. As a safeguard every child of school age needs a permit to work. But few parents know about work permits - fewer still care. A jumble of local byelaws - and a shortage of those whose job it is to enforce them - adds to the confusion. JEANNE LA CHARD talks to parents, to the children who have the jobs and to those who try to enforce the law.
In the first of a two-part enquiry into the treatment of mental illness - the 'Cinderella of the Social Services' - Gordon Snell looks at Middlewood Hospital and its staff, struggling to provide some sort of psychiatric first-aid. Next week's programme looks at new approaches to the definition and treatment of mental illness. Middlewood Hospital on the outskirts of Sheffield was built 100 years ago as the South Yorkshire Lunatic Asylum. Today it is a typical psychiatric hospital: too big, understaffed, housing many patients, who are only there because they have nowhere else to go. There are 1,300 patients in Middlewood, many of them living in 50 bed, long-stay wards, staffed only by two overworked nurses. Each year over 150,000 people are admitted to mental hospitals. Most will be treated in institutions like Middlewood.
A growing number of psychiatrists and patients are turning their backs on traditional concepts of mental illness. They are asking: Who is mad? What is madness? Many believe that big psychiatric hospitals, like Middlewood Hospital in Sheffield - the subject of last week's Man Alive - are not the answer. This week Gordon Snell talks to the people who are working inside and outside the National Health Service to find new ways of treating patients and to those who are going out into the community to tackle people's problems in their homes.
The sinking pound and fuel surcharges mean fewer people going abroad, and the new motorway marching steadily westwards from Bristol makes Cornwall that much more accessible to weekenders from London and the Midlands. The result is ringing cash registers and prosperity for some. Others believe that Cornwall is being destroyed.
In the Republic of Ireland, women who have played a traditionally passive role are beginning to rebel. They believe it's a myth that all Irish eyes are smiling in a land of happy families. They point to mothers of enormous families who are denied the Pill, unmarried mothers who are forced to have their babies adopted, deserted wives who have little redress. One of the leaders of the campaign, journalist Nuala Fennell , has just written a book Irish Marriage, How Are You? It takes a hard, bitter look at the way women have to suffer in a male dominated society.
Cathy is 19 and lives in derelict houses ... Kevin, 21, shares a dormitory with strangers in a government reception centre ... Pat, 25, sleeps on the floor of a disused factory with down and outs ... John is 17 and a male prostitute ... and Bill and Phoebe, newly married, spend every day looking for odd jobs and anywhere to sleep. When you're young it's still possible to believe that the streets of London are paved with gold. All of them came to the capital expecting a very small miracle-a job and a place to call home. All met disillusion. Harold Williamson and a Man Alive team investigate the growing problem of young hopefuls in London and the pitfalls that can make them destitute-and worse - in a few weeks.
By law, anyone who looks after a child for more than two hours a day and gets paid for it must be registered by the local authorities. But because there aren't enough registered minders, every morning something like 100,000 babies are delivered into the care of illegal back-street minders. Registration, however, is no longer the main issue. What is now being questioned are the long-term effects of the baby-minding system. John Pitman has talked to both legal and illegal minders and working mothers whose children are at risk because they can't afford to be too choosy about who minds their babies.
Truancy has become an alarming problem. No one knows how many children ' bunk off' school. Some experts put the figure as high as half a million a day. The teacher shortage, raising the school leaving age, overcrowded classrooms, difficult family backgrounds, all contribute to the problem. In the London borough of Tower Hamlets - where more than 600 schoolchildren are absent every day-two teachers have set up an experimental school for truants aged 8-15 in a crypt under a church. Experts who realise that the juvenile court is not an answer to the problem are watching with interest as this tiny experimental school grows. Already there is a 100% regular attendance; now the children are pleading for the school to stay open at weekends.
When 27-year-old Alexa Scott-Plummer's father died in a hunting accident leaving to his only daughter a Scottish baronial mansion and 1,000 acres of land, there was a problem: Alexa preferred living in London. So Sunderland Hall was put up for sale. The asking price: half a million pounds. A buyer was found, so Alexa's mother and grandmother must leave the Hall. And the servants, and the farm manager, and the groom; and the shepherd and the tractor driver - all now stand to lose their jobs and their homes. For a whole happily feudal community it is an end to a 300-year-old way of life.
With the collapse of Court Line filling the headlines, few people have noticed that a life assurance company has also gone down -the first in 100 years. Nation Life was just one of the companies run by WILLIAM STERN , now in trouble; part of a £200-million empire which stretched from banking to property, built up with borrowed money-perhaps from your bank, life assurance company, or pension fund. Paul Griffiths , for Man Alive, looks at what happened and asks William Stern what went wrong?
The day at the seaside is a living British tradition celebrated by millions of city dwellers every year on cheerful expeditions to resorts all round the coast, from Brighton to Scarborough, from Bournemouth to Rothesay. The name in the lettered rock changes from one place to another, but the flavour is the same. Jack Pizzey , and a Man Alive team, have been at Margate observing that British institution - the Day Trip. For the family with kids -the youngest hadn' seen the sea before - it's the beach; for the pensioners it's the pub. the deckchair and the memories; for the teenage working girls it's bars, discos and big-dippers.
Every week more than 30 million people read their ' local rag.' Jeremy James and a Man Alive team evaluate the changes with a look at two weeklies. The Bedfordshire Times is now technologically more advanced than most national papers and its former reporter FRANK BRANSTON won the Provincial Journalist of the Year Award for his investigative Stories. The Craven Herald and Pioneer celebrates its centenary at Skipton, Yorkshire, this week. It is the traditional weekly: still with adverts on the front page, a corps of voluntary correspondents and its editor, JOHN MITCH -ELL, at 75 has been with the paper for 50 years.
Every Sunday brings a fresh crop of newspaper headlines about 'football hooligans.' Society is outraged and perplexed. Parents are concerned for the safety of their children. Kieran Prendiville charts the rise and fall of the ' bovver boys' and, at Queens Park Rangers' training ground DESMOND wilcox attempts to find reasons for the violence.
Dr William Masters and his wife Virginia Johnson , the pioneers of sex therapy, estimate that 50 per cent of married couples in America have sex problems which could lead to divorce. In Britain there are no statistics but, say Masters and Johnson, ' even if it's only a tenth as high, you'd still have a major problem.' Sex therapy is now big business in America. And since anybody can call themselves a sex therapist, clinics are mushrooming - much to the concern of reputable doctors who are worried about charlatans cashing in and causing more harm than good. John Pitman reports on 'the newest profession' and asks what we can learn from the American experience as sex therapy arrives in Britain.
Lower Broughton, a derelict area of Salford, housing nearly 800 families, is one of the worst slums in Britain, according to 'Shelter.' But in this country more than a million families exist in housing officially classed as unfit. A further three million homes lack basic amenities. Harold Williamson reports from Lower Broughton on the struggle for human survival against inhuman odds. Is the problem too big for local government to handle?
Until recently the dockside area of Pillgwenlly in Newport, South Wales - known locally as ' Pill ' - was a proud and colourful working class community. Now the council is committed to demolishing ' Pill ' as quickly as possible. A recent Government White Paper drew attention to the ' massive and unacceptable disruption of communities' brought about by comprehensive redevelopment. Jeanne La Chard talks to the residents who feel that many of the old streets could and should be saved.
In the United States only one beauty contest really matters-Miss America. JOHN PITMAN for Man Alive looks at American competitions beginning with the La Petite Miss. This year the winner was quite old - five. She confidently explained to the judges what she wants to be when she grows up: Miss America. Miss America isn'just another bathing beauty competition. Miss America is beautiful, truthful and wholesome. Miss America is the symbol of all that America possesses. All the good things that is.
Earlier this year, in a remarkable film about Danesbury Hospital in Hertfordshire, HAROLD WILLIAMSON looked at the plight of 26 people, all once active and healthy until illness or accident paralysed them. The courage of these patients was extraordinary, but the film could offer little hope. However, it did evoke an enormous response from people anxious to know what more can be done. Now DESMOND WILCOX talks to leading research scientists, Alf Morris mp, Minister for the Disabled, and the disabled themselves with strong views as to how their lives could be improved.
Ever since the first council tenants moved into the first tower blocks there have been growing noises of disappointment, even shouts of protest. But still there are more tower blocks under construction; and there are two million people already living high above the ground. It has now been established that the young mothers ' up there' tend to be depressed; tranquillised; imprisoned with frustrated children, cut off from play space; frightened by the vandalism and crime. What's to be done about it? On film, JACK PIZZEY goes up to the 20th floor to meet some of the families, and DESMOND WiLCOX brings them face to face with planners and politicians to see if together they can find some answers.
Eighteen months ago, a two-man team clandestinely shot a film in South Africa and smuggled it to this country. The result, Last Grave at Dimbaza, was labelled a ' spy' film by the South African Embassy; but neverthless it aroused great interest at the National Film Theatre and at Cannes. This year it won the Committed Film Award at Grenoble. Tonight, for the first time in this country, its message reaches a wider audience; and in response to an invitation from Man Alive, the South African Embassy shows a film of its own in reply: Black Man Alive-The Facts. The two films represent remarkably different viewpoints on the conditions for black people in South Africa. In the last few weeks South Africa has felt the threats of expulsion from the UN and a new regime in neighbouring Mozambique. Prime Minister Vorster has promised dramatic changes in the next few months and Dr Kaunda has hailed a recent speech by Mr Vorster as ' the voice of reason for which Africa has been waiting.' Tonight Man
"You can't put talented children in the same category as others. They have to give up so much to achieve their ambitions. It's a terrible dedication." So says the music professor teaching 11-year-old Alison Baker, a would-be concert pianist who has sacrificed the life of a normal child in order to become a star. John Pitman talks to three talented children - Alison and two 12-year-olds: Craig Maitland who wants to be a champion skater and Fiona Coull who wants to be an Olympic swimmer. All three are completely dedicated and have great potential. But, as the experts point out, talent in children so young can burn itself out. And not for some years will they know whether the price they are paying is going to be worth it in the end.
For 16 months men and women workers at the Triumph motor cycle factory at Meriden, near Coventry, have occupied the premises in a bid to run the place themselves as a workers' co-operative. The old management, Norton-Villiers-Triumph, closed the factory in a rationalisation scheme and sacked 1,700 men and women. But half the workers refused to go. They closed the gates on their bosses, set up a 24-hour picket, and occupied the factory. Man Alive was there then. Ten months ago the company offered to sell them the factory. Then, six months ago, the Government announced it would grant loans of £5m to their co-operative to help them. But the sale has not been finalised, the Government offer and money hasn't come to anything, work never started. But still 300 workers, whose hopes have been raised; and then dashed time and again, man the picket line. Their severance pay is spent; their life savings gone. Harold Williamson returns to Meriden and tells the story of their long struggle as they
It is, perhaps, the nearest man will come to having wings. Gliding: flying without power, silent, awesome, seemingly miraculous. The 14th World Gliding Championships were held last year at Waikerie in South Australia. In a cloudless sky, 67 pilots, from 22 countries, swooped and soared as they competed, at the fastest speeds and on the longest course - ever. Pilots like American school-teacher (and world champion) George Moffat, trying again for the championship in his glider 'Nimbus 2'; pilots like Adele Orso, the only woman competitor, flying for Italy. This film is not only about the pilots but also their wives, their ground crews, the tensions and the jealousies as they go through the 11 days of the championship. Australia's leading aerial cameraman John Haddy captures the joy of gliding - a sport which has already inspired ten thousand glider pilots in Great Britain.
This year nearly half a million couples were married. And almost a third of them will end up divorced. New law has made divorce more common - but certainly not easier. Too often the apparently detached calm of the divorce courts may be the calm of exhaustion at the end of years of fighting over property, money - and children. Too often, those getting divorced seem to be encouraged to fight for what are termed their rights; too often, solicitors draw up lines of battle instead of peace terms. Barristers are sometimes accused of earning princely fees for posing ritual questions so that the divorce shall be seen ' to be legal. Divorce costs the taxpayer 17 million in a year in legal aid. Jeremy James has been talking to those who have suffered the anguish of the prolonged battles of divorce; to a solicitor who believes although the law may be right, the administration is certainly not, and divorce should be totally removed from the courts and lawyers; and to others who believe that men '
' If rates go on increasing like this,' calculated a ratepayer at a meeting with his local authority, ' the £130 I paid in 1974 will be £1,000 by 1978.' Last spring, local government was reorganised: hundreds of councils were swept away and a rash of new names appeared on the map. Jack Pizzey and a Man Alive team went to one of these new creations, Kirklees - made up from Huddersfield, Batley, Dewsbury and other parts of the West Riding - to find out where the money goes and why so many ratepayers think it's wasted. Desmond Wilcox brings the ratepayers and the rate spenders together in the studio to ask whether there's a fairer way of paying for all the things local government provides.
Mexico has a 1,200-mile border with the United States. Every year nearly two-and-a-half million people illegally enter the United States in search of a better way of life, mostly from Mexico. The US Border Patrol uses aircraft, seismic detectors, radar and infrared to try to stem the flow. It is estimated that between six and eight million Mexican immigrants are living illegally in the USA.
' I think for the man in his 40s to become unemployed is the ultimate in personal tragedy,' says a man who used to earn 15,000 a year as the managing director of an oil subsidiary. He spent six months on E15 a week social security money, wrestling with debt and humiliation. That was in 1971. The experience changed his life completely. 1971 was a year of high unemployment. At that time James Burke met redundant top executives to find out what it is like to be a boss with no prospect of a job. Now, as the unemployment figures soar again, there are more unemployed executives than ever. JAMES BURKE returns, with a Man Alive team, to look at the long-term consequences of executive unemployment. How did the people he met in 1971 oope after they had reached rock-bottom? How drastically have their experiences affected their lives?
On 7 January, Clifford House Adolescent Unit opened its doors to 13 boys and girls in care of the Local Authority, Westminster. Most of them had been rejected by other children's homes; most had been in serious trouble with the police; few had parents to support them. One man, Derek Garner , and four house-mothers undertook to look after them. Their aim is to change attitudes in child care; to banish the unquestioned authority of the social worker - the ' do as I say or else ' attitude; to treat these adolescents as friends and give them the love and support they need.
The Children's Charter - that was how the 1944 Butler Education Act was heralded in post-war Britain. For the first time the State would provide free secondary education for all. The aim was ' Equality of Opportunity.' Thirty years on Desmond Wilcox leads an investigation into the fairness and effectiveness of our state schools; and examines the controversies which surround the changing ideas, structures and teaching methods experienced by two generations of Butler children. Jeremy James , with a film team, reports on the educational experiences of three families in Leicester, Sheffield and Coventry.
Showbusiness has a uniquely cruel side to it: you can be right at the top one moment and right down the next. Jeremy James , with a Man Alive team, talks to three top people who have fallen. Comedian BILL MAYNARD was forced to sell hearth and home when his career collapsed ten years ago. He's made it again now, but it isnt so easy far film star ANTHONY STEEL, heart-flhrob of the 50s. With 60 films behind him, he suddenly found himself with a broken marriage to Anita Ekberg and a broken contract with the Rank Organisation.
For 16 years MAJOR GARDINER has been running a soup kitchen in one of the poorest parts of Calcutta. With support from charities in England, Australia and Calcutta he feeds 6,000 people every day. The hungry and the starving who can come to his kitchen are given a midday meal. For those living further away, Major Gardiner sets out every afternoon on a 35-mile drive round the city giving food to the most needy. Harold Williamson went to Calcutta to talk to Major Gardiner about his work and ask him why he chose to dedicate his life to feeding the starving: in 16 years he has never missed a day - they even had to pin the MBE on him in his kitchen.
MIKE TAYLOR , a successful art historian at the British Museum, has turned his back on London to seek the simple tranquility of a croft on the Isle of Skye. PETER BRADBURY and his wife have started a commune with 11 other families in a former Suffolk friary. Kieran Prendiville and a Man Alive team. have been talking to people who believe they have found a richer and more rewarding way of life. Not by opting out but, they believe, by pioneering the way more of us could - and should - live.
A fire in a high rise block of flats and on the top floor a man forced by the flames on to a balcony cries for help. But no fireman's ladder can reach him and rescue from inside is hampered by an out of order lift wrecked by vandals. Before the fireman could reach him the man died. It happened recently in London. Can it happen again? Can worse happen? How safe from fire are buildings we live in and. work in -the flats, the office blocks and skyscraper hotels? Are the building regulations strict enough? Always obeyed? The recent film Towering Inferno focused attention on a real problem. Men and women who have been involved in such fires talk on film to Harold Williamson , and in the studio Desmond Wilcox discusses ways of making our lives safe from the danger of towering infernos.
A glance at any movie guide reveals the bare facts. They rarely make nice pictures any more; nowadays it's all naughty films about naughty people doing naughty things. Who's to blame? ‘The public’ say the filmmakers. ‘These are the films they want and therefore these are the films we have to give them.' As John Pitman discovers, it’s a scene which saddens many people in the business. ‘Serious’ actresses find they have to strip if they want work, and writers and directors who would rather make family films must churn out titillation and terror. With the result that there are some surprising characters behind x-ploitation, including a university student reading English and a granny who use to write Mrs Dale's Diary
Henderson Hospital in Surrey is a very unusual mental hospital. The patients live in a jungle where they must make their own rules for survival and face up to what happens when they behave like children - whether it be failing to wash up or smashing the place to pieces. Somehow they've all failed to absorb deep lessons that most of us learn as children - the lessons of give and take which enable us to love, keep jobs and friends: to belong to society. The result is officially known as ' personality disorder,' and it turns talented, energetic and often charming adults into spoiled, sometimes aggressive and foul-mouthed kids. Some are so aggressive that they've spent much of their lives in prison; some are so desperate that they've overdosed repeatedly and drifted in and out of psychiatric hospitals; most see Henderson Hospital as their last chance. Jack Pizzey and a Man Alive team have been filming the Henderson answer - a crash course in living.
It has been called Bermuda without the sun, the Bahamas without the Mafia. The Channel island of Guernsey, a rock in the middle of the English Channel, is not exactly sun-kissed, but it does have a climate favourable for tomatoes, tourists - and tax; an island where the Chancellor does not surface annually with new implements to make the pips squeak; where the tax rate is steady - a modest 20 per cent. Unlike neighbouring Jersey, Guernsey does not have a quota system and income regulations for its immigrants. But there is one small hurdle: only certain houses in what is called ' the open market' can be bought by would-be emigres. They are few and bieathtakingly expensive. Jeremy James has been talking to those who bought relief from taxes; about the morality of going; the cost of tearing up roots and trying to buy peace of mind.
We are making more toxic waste than we can easily get rid of. Drums of cyanide have been washed up on beaches, poisons have been fly-tipped near water supplies and although Parliament has brought in safety measures, many are still disturbed. Meanwhile, we're piling up another form of waste with uniquely alarming potential - radio-active waste from our nuclear power stations which could remain dangerous for tens of thousands of years. Jack Pizzey reports from Pitsea, the centre of the toxic waste industry, and from Windscale, where our radio-active waste is stored and monitored while scientists try to discover a way of getting rid of it. Scientists inside the waste business are optimistic but others are less sure. In the studio Desmond Wilcox discusses the issues with those most concerned.
In the last ten years the number of pistols and revolvers in the United States has risen from 10 million to 40 million. What was a problem of the urban ghetto areas has spread throughout the country. Shopkeepers are arming themselves against violent robberies. Families are buying guns to protect themselves from armed burglaries. Teenagers are carrying guns as status symbols. This report, made for NBC television, shows the frightening escalation in small arms - estimated at 21 million a year. Forty-two states require no licence. In the other states a gun can be obtained by filling in a form which is easily falsified. Gun manufacturers have successfully opposed stricter legislation and delayed the broadcast of this film in the United States.
In the summer of 1973 Gary Todd was asleep in bed when he was disturbed by an intruder. He pulled a gun from under his pillow and shot his friend, Nancy Conley , dead. Nancy Conley 's death would never have happened if guns in the United States were better controlled. This second part of Man Alive's report on the 10,000 Americans killed every year by pistols and revolvers is a filmed record of a one-day murder trial in Richmond, Kentucky. The defence lawyer argues that Gary Todd believed he was protecting himself from an intruder. The prosecutor claims that he shot Nancy Conley in cold blood. The film is a unique and remarkable insight into the workings of American justice.
'It was a violent entry into the minds of the people of the world but what is important to us is that it was an entry' - a Palestinian guerrilla talks to Man Alive about the dramatic multiple hijacking in 1970 he helped to mastermind. The programme traces the origins of the apparently illogical acts of violence, the skyjackings and the political kidnappings. Jeanne La Chard talks to some of the men and women behind them, including Leila Khaled, who gives her first ever television interview to the West, and to men like Chancellor Kreisky of Austria and General Dayan of Israel who have had to make the agonising choice between whether to sacrifice hostages or give in to blackmail.
5 Oct 70: James Cross , British diplomat, is kidnapped in Montreal. 8 Jan 71: Sir Geoffrey Jackson is kidnapped in Uruguay and imprisoned for eight-and-a-half months. The conventional forces of law and order face an agonising dilemma when confronted by the urban guerrilla. Jeanne La Chard talks to James Cross and Sir Geoffrey Jackson. The programme includes rare film of srR GEOFFREY in his prison cell with a Tupamaro member explaining the reasons for his imprisonment. And the New York police, in the holt-seat over so many hostage situations, are shown in training as negotiators. But it is the question of whether to ' deal with terrorists on which world opinion is most divided, and it is in Germany, recently, that the dilemma has been most clearly speit out
In Belfast it is always easier to remember than it is to forget. The voodoo of party tune and rebel ballad make sure of that. But never has there been such a revival of old songs and the writing of new ones as there has in the past six years since the modern ' troubles ' began. Dates, battles, tribal scores still to be settled in the fulness of time - all, it seems, have to be rushed into verse and, frequently, the same tunes are employed by both sides. Alongside the records and the broadsheets stand the ' souvenirs,' from the Maze Prison, Long Kes.h - plaques and carved guns.
1975 is International Women's Year; the year when Equal Pay becomes law. But behind the paper promises lies the bitter experience of women who work in small factories in places like Inkersall, a village in Derbyshire. There, a strike by women workers over a wage increase has split the community. It has left many of them with a deep sense of betrayal against their fellow men trade unionists. They claim that no one took them seriously, with a show of solidarity, because they are women. Harold Williamson talks to the women on the picket line; to trade union officials and management, experiencing their first real taste of determined industrial action by women.
A jury consists of 12 persons chosen to decide who has the best lawyer. (ROBERT FROST) The ancient institution of the jury, and the system of trial built around it, is coming under increasing attack - from lawyers, from policemen, from jurors themselves. They say that the acquittal rate is too high; the average juror often doesn'understand what is going on; the system is haphazard and prevents an effective appeal procedure; it is high time to replace ' this apotheosis of amateurism' with something less dated and less fallible. While, according to some, our system of criminal justice - founded on the jury-is the best in the world, to others, this means no more than that the alternative systems are appallingly bad. On film with Michael Molyneux , and in the studio with Desmond Wilcox , Man Alive looks at the criticisms and asks the lawyers, policemen and laymen to suggest alternatives.
The city of Swansea is alive with allegation and rumour. A radical magazine is publishing regular ' Corruption Supplements ' and an anonymous leaflet has been circulating in South Wales linking a group of local property developers with members of Swansea Council. ' Grossly defamatory,' say two of the named men insisting that, if allegations against them are to be investigated at all, the job should be done only by the police. Why so many rumours? Are they facts or smears? Why has Swansea become a place threaded with suspicion - where many make accusations in private but seldom in public? Jack Pizzey and a Man Alive team investigate.
John Pitman and a Man Alive team follow the fortunes of the officers and their clients in West Yorkshire where probation officers are confronted with the dilemma now facing most of the 4,500 men and women in the service. Should they ' care ' for their clients and try to rehabilitate them? Or should they use their powers of control to keep a large section of society happy by helping to ' lock them up and put them out of harm's way?
After ten years and more than 400 programmes, Man Alive looks back, in a short season, at some of its more memorable moments in the last decade. Desmond Wilcox comments and also explains how the new lightweight camera equipment available in 1965 enabled Man Alive to get away from the pundits to people - ordinary people. Neighbours who rowed with each other; the men who cheat their bumper-car customers at the fair; the election candidates who were a hundred per cent sure to lose; and Cousin Brucie the New York disc jockey who advised nine-year-olds on their sex problems - ten years ago.
The second in a short season of memorable moments from earlier programmes, introduced by Desmond Wilcox In its pursuit of ordinary people, Man Alive quickly learned that there was no such thing. GILLIAN STRICKLAND discovered nudists near Jodrell Bank; JOHN PERCIVAL talked to a woman in love with her cat; ANGELA HUTH to a man who was terrified of rhubarb; JEANNE LA CHARD tackled the problems of mixed marriages and HAROLD WILLIAMSON reported on the dangers of fireworks in the hands of children - a shocking programme but one which caused a dramatic reduction in the number of fire-work accidents.
The third in a short season from earlier programmes introduced by Desmond Wilcox To look back now on the many programmes Man Alive made in the United States during the late 60s gives a remarkable insight into the crisis of those times. It was the time of the Vietnam war; of doves and hawks; of families put asunder: the hippie generation and draft dodgers confronting patriotic parents bewildered by the generation gap a mile wide. Reports by DESMOND WILCOX : Protest in the Ranks and Daughters of America
The fourth in a short season from earlier programmes. Gale was beautiful, intelligent and - according to everyone who knew her-had much to offer; everything to live for. At 19, a drug addict, she was found dead in the basement of a derelict house in Chelsea. The Man Alive team first met her in 1969 when making a programme about people who had been brought up in children's homes. After she died the people who were in her life and those who cared for her in and out of various institutions examined the short and hopeless life of a girl who many tried to help but in the end felt she belonged to no one. They asked: need she have died?
Just over half a square mile in the centre of overcrowded London. One of the most unusual parks in the world. A place for eccentrics. A place for speakers and lovers, winter swimmers and yoga fanatics, brass bandsmen and amateur horsemen, children and dogs, policemen and pop protesters-and even ex-actresses exercising their pet ducks. A park which needs its own police station and has its own pets' cemetery. A royal park, where monarchs hunted wild -boar and gentlemen duelled. A report by one film crew, with one reporter, JOHN PITMAN , and one director, JENNY BARRACLOUGH , of one day in Hyde Park. It wasn't a day of demonstration or protest or pop concerts - nothing special about it. Except that, perhaps, any day in Hyde Park is special-if you're there.
The sixth in a short season from earlier programmes. Child cruelty cases provoke strong reactions. But it is now accepted that while protecting the child is paramount, understanding the parent is better than punishment. HAROLD WILLIAMSON talks to JOHN ROBINSON who went to prison for attacking his 18-month-old son and sees how some London mothers, who live in fear of repeating attacks on their own children, are being helped.
The seventh in a short season from earlier programmes. Rodgers and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music is a big production. There is a cast of children, nuns, novices, postulants, neighbours of Captain von Trapp and assorted Nazis. There is thunder, lightning and special moonlight effects. The feature film has become the biggest money spinner in the history of cinema musicals. The Sound of Music opened at the Lunt-Fontanhe Theatre in New York on 16 November 1959; the London production at the Palace Theatre started on 18 May 1961. On 12 February 1973 The Sound of Music opened in Herne Bay-an amateur production. JACK PIZZEY was there with a Man Alive film team to chronicle the birth pangs of this ambitious enterprise.
The last in a short season from earlier programmes. In the United States only one beauty contest really matters - Miss America. Miss America isn't just another bathing beauty competition. Miss America is beautiful, truthful and wholesome. Miss America is the symbol of all that America possesses. All the good things, that is. John Pitman for Man Alive looks at American competitions beginning with the La Petite Miss. In 1974 the winner was quite old - five. She confidently explained to the judges what she wants to be when she grows up: Miss America.
Jeremy James, Jeanne La Chard, Jack Pizzey and Harold Williamson discuss the issue of torture in Chile.
Jeremy James, Jeanne La Chard, Jack Pizzey and Harold Williamson present the programme analysing a particular topic in detail. In this edition, the issues surrounding homosexuality are discussed.
GERALD AUSTIN GARDINER has Spent the best part of his life campaigning for a more humane world. His passionate commitment to law reform and his campaign for the abolition of capital punishment, took him right to the top. He was appointed Lord Chancellor to the Labour Government from 1964 to 1970 and was responsible for setting up the Law Commission, a permanent body which reviews British law and proposes reforms to it. Today he is still an active campaigner. He visited Greece under the Colonels' regime, on behalf of Amnesty International. He sponsored the Rehabilitation of Offenders' Bill. He is President of the Howard League for Penal Reform and leads an international campaign to preserve freedom of speech and expression for writers. In 1973 he was appointed Chancellor of the Open University where, remarkably, at the age of 75 he has also enrolled himself as a student.
A look at whether the age of consent should be lowered from its present 16 years. Schoolchildren and teenage parents give their views.
The British people are on the fiddle to the tune of at least £1 million daily - according to a recent survey. Office workers pinch the stationery, supermarkets cheat their customers, even bus conductors and deckchair attendants iron out used tickets, reissue them, and pocket the profits. Some of us call it the perks of the trade: others say it's a symptom of a corrupt and immoral society. Certainly no job seems to be without its perks: fiddling extends from the workman pocketing his paintbrush to the managing director having his home painted by the firm's maintenance man. Tonight we learn just who is on the fiddle - and how. And we ask if anything can be done about it.
Some mothers do have 'em-babies who won't sleep, demand constant attention, go to school and disrupt lessons. Sometimes these children are also highly-sensitive and exceptionally bright. But if they are not allowed to develop at their own extraordinary pace they can be a problem to everyone including themselves. Plato called them ' children of gold'. Surprisingly, these days some parents and teachers readily confess that the fastest learners are often a source of heartache and unhappiness. Yet these are the children who, in theory, should be the country's greatest asset.
Jack Pizzey chairs a studio discussion about the Home Office detention centre in Harmondsworth and the wider issue of immigration control.
What do you do if the treatment your doctor prescribes is not working? More people than ever are turning to practitioners of ' alternative ' medicine. Business is booming for osteopaths who relieve agonisring backache, herbalists who dispense Nature's remedies, naturopaths who believe special diets can cure. This programme examines the arguments for and against accepting some of these ' specialists ' into the NHS.
We've been told it endless times - with industrial growth lies th( promised land of full employment a healthy balance of payments prosperity for all. But some industrialists are holding back. Why? Because, they say, the rewards are negligible - and highly taxable; the ' disincentives ' make the risks not worth taking. As one company chairman puts it, ' No Minister is going to bail us out with L4 million if something goes wrong.' Tonight, Man Alive asks three successful firms why they are standing still. If their attitudes are typical, it is worrying news for all of us - and it will take more than exhortation to get Great Britain Ltd going.
If all goes well for a handful of local prosecutors and for 71 per cent of America's electors, the United States is about to reaffirm its belief in the ultimate penalty. One man, Gary Gilmore , was shot dead in January at his own request. Today, over 350 men, women and teenagers on America's death rows await their turn to die. What happens to them may have implications for Britain and the rest of the world. Nick Ross and a Man Alive Report film crew have travelled to the American mid-West, and report on the revival of the death penalty in America, together with the results of a Gallup poll on capital punishment commissioned for the programme in Britain.
Join Jeremy James, Nick Ross and their audience for a discussion focusing on global human rights abuses, with a special level of attention paid to: The butchering of Ugandan citizens by Idi Amin, who had such a loose grip on reality he fancied himself as leader of Scotland. Rhodesia, where an entire race is subjugated before Mugabe brought the equality of everyone's lives being destroyed. USSR political prisoners force-treated with jabs of untested drugs, destroying bodily autonomy in a scandal we wouldn't see again until?
The film shows the confrontation between Lifers at the New Jersey State Prison and four boys from suburbia. The boys are white and middle class. The prisoners are 85 per cent black. Prison suicides, murders and rapes are commonplace, say the Lifers. A Lifer knew that his teenage son was getting deeper and deeper into crime. He believed that the only way to stop him would be for him to see prison life in the raw, to see the real tragedy of caged men. This was the beginning of a scheme where youngsters are brought into prison and are confronted - shattered some people hope - by the horrors of prison life.
007 turned secrecy into a money-spinner, but for many ordinary people it's a costly reality. The Official Secrets Act was rushed through Parliament in 1911 as a reaction to the scare about German spies dropping out of the skies. Now, say the critics, it's too often used against the man in the street. On film, Man Alive reports on a wide range of examples of how secrecy can work-from the residents of one town who discovered too late that a road was coming through their houses, to the case of Freddie Laker who found that secrecy nearly stopped Skytrain from getting off the ground. In the studio are people who say that there are times when silence is the bureaucrat's favourite weapon, and there are others who argue that a little knowledge can be a very dangerous thing. Government periodically reviews the working of the Official Secrets Act - but with little effect. What's happened to all those promises about ' open government'?
They would prefer to keep it to themselves, but in the small town of Methil, on the Firth of Forth, they're quietly arguing about what went wrong-at a local yard for building North Sea platforms. Seemingly, it is a tale of opportunities lost - with all those classic allegations of poor management, fractious unions, low productivity and delayed deliveries. Can Methil, with its yard now undercut by an apparently more efficient French competitor, and its people on the dole arguing the reason why, tell the rest of us anything about that much bigger industrial concern: The United Kingdom Ltd?
A woman's death in the operating theatre sparks off a two-months' row between two top consultants - a brain surgeon and an anaesthetist. Patients are prepared for operations that do not take place. Administrators cannot control the consultants. The area health authority's internal inquiry at first fails to satisfy the Minister of Health, and even today disturbs many who claim the truth has not come out. In this investigative film, Jack Pizzey looks at the implications which can arise when consultants, for whatever motives, try to fulfil too many commitments
How good or bad are our comprehensive schools compared with those in other countries? This programme sets out to throw some light on this urgent subject.
Mostly they are young girls on the brink of adolescence. They begin to diet and for a while are happy to be fashionably slim. But they don't stop there - they can't. They eat less and less until they are skinny, then emaciated, and ultimately skeletal. The girls who are not caught in time, in one of the strangest ironies of our affluent age, can die of starvation. What is this strange obsession that turns intelligent articulate girls into obsessive non-eaters? Doctors have a name for it-anorexia nervosa. But do they have a cure? Tonight's programme investigates and talks to some girls who are victims of this bizarre disorder.
Just a Rumour put about by Those with no Homes. That might sound cynical, but according to a Building Society there are 800,000 more houses than households in this country and according to Shelter nearly half of those houses have been empty for more than six months. At the same time there are 50,000 homeless, and that doesn't include those in sub-standard houses or those like young marrieds compelled to live with their in-laws. It's become increasingly difficult to rent privately; small landlords particularly are selling rather than letting flats because, they claim, of the effects of the 1974 Rent Act. But local authorities too own thousands of houses standing empty. Jeremy James examines the paradox of empty houses and homeless families with the homeless themselves, councillors, social workers and Shelter and the Minister responsible for housing.
Boys and girls in our society are brought up differently - different clothes, different toys and, almost always, different attitudes to life. So, what's wrong with that? Dr Benjamin Spock , author of Baby and Child Care - a book second only to the Bible in world sales - says that this is sexism and is harmful to both boys and girls. Children should not be made the victims of ' gender conditioning ' which labels certain areas of life
Fred Wadsworth is a hospital porter and lives with his wife and family in a council house in Manchester. His wage is E40 a week. Erlend Copeley-Williams negotiates assurances and he and his wife and family own a country house in Essex. His salary is £9,500. Five years ago we looked at the lives of these two families and asked how far down the road we were to the Utopia of ' bread for all before cake for any'. The answer was we still have a long way to go. Now, five years later, we ask are the Wadsworths better off and the Copeley-Williamses worse off? Or are they both worse off? It seemed a straightforward question, but, as Jeremy James discovered, the answers were far from simple - and far from what might have been expected.
Glorified social workers ... underpaid lobby fodder ... chained-up watchdogs. Back-bench mps in their more frustrated moments are inclined to use these dismal phrases about themselves. Has the Cabinet - in effect, the government - become too powerful? Has the Civil Service become too secretive? Is there any way forward for the back-bencher who wants to ask awkward questions? Or is it simply that mps under 20th-century pressures are forced to use a 19th-century machine? Millions of pounds of tax-payers' money are spent by the government on the nod without time for debate. Many mps complain that their £6,270 basic salary is too low, and that backup facilities are inadequate. Legislative pressure, guillotine motions, organisation of committees - all have evolved from old procedures. Are they the best that our ' mother' of parliaments can devise? On film, five of the youngest mps in the House give their views. So too do six ordinary voters who, at the request of The Man Alive Report, have
So what is this strange power that one person has over another person's mind? The ancient Druids called it ' the magic sleep' and Mesmer called it ' animal magnetism '. In tonight's Man Alive Report, NICK ROSS and JACK pizzey explore this strange phenomenon and question its uses and abuses. The programme examines some of the old misconceptions and demonstrates some of its modern practical applications.
' Only the very rich, the very poor, or the masochist can think about going to law today.' Justice is a human right. But what do you do if you have a strong legal case and can't afford to take it to court? Just going to court can be so expensive these days that, in a number of civil disputes, the only people who have a real chance of justice are the very rich. Or the very poor; they at least qualify for legal aid - the state fund that was introduced some 30 years ago to give everyone who needed it a chance to take a case to court. But legal aid has not kept pace with the times. Now, far from covering everyone in need, in civil cases it covers only a quarter of the families in the land. This Man Alive Report meets people who have good cases but can't afford to try for justice, meets some of the lawyers they can't afford, hears about methods that can cut round the full costs of a legal action and considers how we could reform our system.
Recent headlines like these have turned public attention again to one of medicine's most poignant problems - deciding when treatment has to stop. The use of life-support machines is just one area where doctors have to make crucial decisions. Specialists sometimes have to decide how to deal with the chronic difficulties that occasionally develop in old age; and the fortunately rare but often appalling congenital deformities that are on occasions discovered at birth. And yet there's little dispute amongst doctors about the medical decisions involved; what they actually do is probably not realised by most of us. Why is their role so widely misunderstood and misreported? Tonight, with Jack Pizzey and Harold Williamson in the studio, some doctors explain their approach, and next-of-kin give their views. Others, detached observers like Lord Soper and Marjorie Proops , will be listening carefully in an attempt to penetrate the misunderstandings and to suggest what, if anything, should be done
The only borstal in Britain where girls are kept behind bars - Bullwood Hall -is tucked away in the Essex countryside. For the girls sentenced to time here, it's the end of the road. Every other form of treatment has failed. Crime amongst young girls has tripled in the past ten years so Bullwood must cope with a wide cross-section of offenders - violent and non-violent, normal and subnormal, teenage mothers, burglars and prostitutes. Bullwood has many critics and, four years ago, the Younger Committee recommended it should close. It just wasn't suitable. All that's happened since is that the number of inmates has increased by 60 per cent. John Pitman and a camera crew were allowed to film in Bullwood for seven days and to meet some of the girls who talked openly about their lives.
Nick Ross investigates drug addiction. There was a time when drug abuse was big news: back in the 60s LSD, purple hearts and heroin advanced like a tide in Britain. Ten years ago this month the government responded: addicts were made to register, while the police, the courts and Customs clamped down on illegal trafficking. The tide was turned. Or so it seemed. This film inquiry now reveals a new and even more alarming threat, one that affects the old as well as the young. The Fix shows how people in Britain are falling prey to highly addictive medicines.
In Victorian England corpulence was the thing. The rounded belly and the swollen haunch implied prosperity and good health. Today fashion models starve themselves in order to maintain greyhound thin figures. For them, slim is beautiful. Other women submit their bodies to the cosmetic surgeon in order to have their buttocks rounded and their breasts enlarged. For them, buxom is beautiful. There's nothing new in physical vanity; what is new is the power for change. Today, if you don' like your body you can change it: by scientifically controlled dieting, by violent body-building, by surgical sculpturing, and by subtle disguise - which is where fashion comes in. Body Beautiful considers the human figure, male and female, slender and muscular, skinny and obese, elegant and ridiculous, from classical times to the present day, from Venus de Milo to Fred Emney. Michael Dean and Harold Williamson ask what ever happened to the divinity that shaped our ends? And is physical vanity the new road t
Do animals go mad in zoos? Do performing dolphins die of boredom? Can domestic pets go insane? These are some of the questions asked about the way we treat animals in captivity -in zoos, in safari parks or in our own homes. We've come a long way from medieval menageries with lions crowded into stinking pits, but even in the zoos of 1978 animals are kept in what appear to be cramped conditions. One answer seems to be our latest innovation in the field of captivity - safari parks. These give the animals more freedom, but do they give enough? Are captive bears who pace constant figures of eight going mad? On film, we visit zoos and safari parks to see what evidence there is of animal madness. And in the studio. Jack Pizzey talks to animal men of all persuasions - a safari park operator, a conservationist, a pets psychiatrist and an RSPCA vet - and asks the question: is keeping animals a crime, a necessity or just a harmless and sometimes lucrative pastime?
However much she has longed for a baby, however supportive her husband and family, however uncomplicated her labour, a new mother may find herself inexplicably tearful and depressed. Sometimes called ' The Baby Blues', it doesn't usually last for long. But for one in every ten mothers it becomes a serious problem - so serious that she needs help. And for some women (one in every 200), childbirth triggers off a severe illness called puerperal psychosis. Jeanne la Chard and Nick Ross ask doctors and psychologists about the causes of post-natal depression and how it can be treated. Also in the programme are those who've had first-hand experience of post-natal depression.
In this investigative film Jack Pizzey asks whether, as taxpayers, we are getting value for money from our civil servants. One town council builds much sought-after council houses quicker than usual and saves £500,000 on the approved official plans - yet the Department of Environment blocks other councils making similar economies. In another town, computer schemes from the Department of Health and Social Security result in waste costing over £30,000. Nobody knows how much goes down the drain each year. A senior civil servant singlehandedly saves £3 million a year. Three Government Ministers want his savings applied nationwide, yet other civil servants frustrate them. A cover-up begins. Little has changed in ten years according to two Parliamentary Committees. Indeed, a former Civil Service head admits to being highly-selective about which reforms should be carried out. And, of course, the Official Secrets Act is always there to prevent embarrassing information leaking out to the pub
A well-known Victorian engineer once stepped down from the carriage in which he was travelling to supervise the repair of a damaged wheel. When he climbed back up his fellow passengers all ignored him. By showing that he knew how things worked he'd shown that he was less than a gentleman. His status-sensitive travelling companions were suffering from a peculiarly English disease that 100 years later is still with us. Even in 1978, if you want ' to be accepted' in England you must be seen to be doing the right kind of work-work that's as far removed as possible from the means of production. All the evidence shows that not enough of our cleverest people are going into industry, the very place we need them. MICHAEL DEAN talks to a number of people who, quite independently, have been studying our strange and potentially fatal social disease.
Are our laws on incest essential and effective - or should they be changed - even abolished? At this moment the Criminal Law Revision Committee, at the request of the Home Office, are considering ' whether it is necessary or desirable to retain the offence of incest as at present defined.... In our society incest has been a taboo subject for longer than most of us can remember. But since the law is now under review, many people feel that the time has come to learn the facts and look again at the reasons for the taboo. On film, people who have been directly involved reveal how the present law has affected them: in the studio Michael Dean and Harold Williamson try to find out from psychiatrists, social workers, legal experts, and others responsible for dealing with incest cases just how far they feel our present law should be changed - if at all.
Programme image Inventions are increasingly coming from research teams in large industrial firms, though there are still a few lone inventors out there. But does Britain care enough to encourage and back them with private or public funds? Harold Williamson meets inventors who have spent years trying to convince manufacturers, while Nick Ross talks to financiers and industrialists about the problems inventors face in the commercial world.
The prisoners walk arm-in-arm, gaze into each others' eyes, behave like lovers. Then suddenly there is a flash of binoculars at a distant window. The strolling couples are being watched. The warden at Fort Worth Cocorrectional Prison in Texas explains to new inmates, ' You can hold hands, or walk arm-in-arm. But below bench level there'll be no physical contact at all.' The violence and tension of single sex prisons are replaced by new, but not unexpected, undercurrents. Reporter Jeanne la Chard and a Man Alive team have filmed a brave American experiment - men and women in prison together.
More than five million animals are used in experiments in Britain every year. At the end of the experiments the animals are killed. It's claimed most of them are used to make sure our environment is safe - what we eat, what we breathe, what we take when we are ill. But that assertion is challenged by an increasingly vocal animal-rights lobby - which says most experiments are unnecessary, cruel or trivial. Man Alive has filmed in laboratories round the country to find out what we do to animals. And, in the studio with reporter Michael Dean will be people who perform experiments and those who say it's time they were made to stop.
'Amoco Cadiz, Eleni V, Christos Bitas - so far in Britain we've been lucky. But a really major oil disaster is inevitable - another Torrey Canyon. You can see it coming.' So say experienced seamen, and they should know. It's only a matter of time before somewhere along our coast, another supertanker Mts the rocks - or another tanker. The cause may be bad equipment, or bad training, or bad navigation, or plain bad seamanship. But the result will be certain: a thick black tide bigger than anything we've seen so far. And then who cleans up the mess? In tonight's programme, on film around our coast and from the studio in London, Jack Pizzey asks why have tankers been allowed to grow so huge, so clumsy, and so threatening, and asks if we will be well enough equipped to protect our beaches when ' the inevitable' happens?
'This was the only way we could get children - and we would gladly pay twice as much.' So say one American couple who, after ten years of trying to adopt through registered agencies, finally turned to a 'baby-broking' lawyer and bought a boy and girl for $16,000. Jeanne la Chard talks to girls who supply the baby market, couples who have bought babies, surrogate mothers who conceive born-to-order children, and the middle men - the baby-brokers. And the problem is not confined to America - it exists in this country too.
Harold Williamson reports from the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, where a team of surgeons have developed new techniques of neurosurgery from the violence of Ulster.
Almost everyone has irrational fears - of mice, aeroplanes, dogs, sex, spiders, or the dark ... But, for some, these fears are crippling. Drugs and psychotherapy often help, but all anxiety states are very difficult to cure completely. In the last few years a growing number of people have been treated with a relatively new technique: behaviour therapy. It's vehemently attacked by its critics for being simplistic and reducing the status of human behaviour to that of laboratory rats. But its supporters claim that it's more rational in theory and more effective in practice than traditional techniques. Nick Ross follows and talks to three people as they try this treatment for fear.
Why is it that so few women make it to management level where decision-making and responsibility lie - and even fewer to the top? ' They are their own worst enemies - they lack confidence.' ' There is always the risk they'll leave, have babies - and not come back.' ' Many men wouldn't be happy working for a woman.' Those are just a few of the reasons offered by employers. Are they to blame, or is it the women themselves? On film Yvonne Roberts talks to three women managers and their bosses. They explain how they made it, and discuss whether it is possible to combine a career with a family, and whether there is too high a price to pay for success. Not every woman necessarily wants to become a boss, but all want the right to choose - and to succeed or fail on their own merits.
Nick Ross investigates the hidden story behind drug abuse in Britain. A new look at a growing problem based on a film shown 18 months ago to much acclaim.
The hidden story behind drug abuse in Britain - the search for a solution. Nick Ross investigates how the old as well as the young have become victim to drug addiction on an alarming scale. While heroin, cannabis and LSD claim the headlines, thousands of families are falling prey to everyday medicines or common household products. This, the second of two programmes, questions the responsibility of doctors and drug companies, and looks for ways to reduce the menace.
They seemed like a marvellous idea at the time - the New Towns of Britain, conceived in the 1940s as a cure for the nation's housing ills. But today, as local authorities take over the administration, they're finding that there's a severe price to be paid for inadequate design and shoddy workmanship, for houses built on the cheap. Now, the housing solution of the 1970s, ' rehabilitation' (doing up old houses), has begun to show similar cracks. Houses re-modelled only a few years ago are already beginning to decay. And some of the new public housing estates face gigantic bills for putting right faults in design and construction. Who is to blame-the architects? The builders? The politicians? Man Alive presents a filmed investigation and a studio debate on the housing scandal.
The garbage dump of Middle America '- that's what they call Chicago's ghetto. It's a vivid and desperate place where the murder rate is far higher than Northern Ireland's, where half the population is on drugs or alcohol, where the most common fatal complication of pregnancy is gunshot wounds - and where the only free hospital is facing closure. Cuts have already shut down three of America's surviving free hospitals, more are under pressure, now it's the turn of Cook County - 'County' as everyone calls it. In this filmed report, Jack Pizzey and a Man Alive film team go to the threatened lifeline of tne ghetto and meet the people who are fighting to keep it open, the patients who have already been rejected by other hospitals because of the darkness of the r skins or the thinness of their wallets, and the doctor who says ' I call it murder
It will take the laugh off their faces - and about time. It's just red meal thrown to the blue rinses. Two reactions to the Home Secretary's recent proposal to restore, experimentally, the punishment known as ' short, sharp shock '. Its aims are simple: for a short time life is made so tough that young offenders will be both punished and then, deterred for life. But will it work? The plan's opponents say that if you put a teenage criminal behind bars (and the number has trebled in ten years) you will neither reform nor deter him - between 60 per cent and 80 per cent will be back again within a year. So what's the answer? On film and in the studio. David Calder , Michael Dean , Jack Pizzey and Nick Ross put that question, to both sides.
On the night of the 13 and 14 of August this year, the great flotilla of yachts taking part in the Fastnet Race were overwhelmed by a storm in the Western Approaches. By morning five yachts had sunk to the bottom, another 20 had been abandoned and 15 competitors had lost their lives. Was there adequate warning of an approaching storm? Was it simply the storm's ferocity that caused so many failures-in boats, gear, safety equipment? Or were there faults in organisation, yacht design, seamanship? Why, above all, were so many lives lost and others placed in peril? Jeremy James questions the issues arising from the official inquiry, scheduled to be published today, and gives some of the survivors a chance to tell their own stories of disaster and rescue.
In the last 100 years, some 2,000 of our stately homes have disappeared, together with the armies of servants that once maintained them. But the world of Upstairs, Downstairs still lingers on in some of our remaining great houses where it can take a silver steward 18 months to clean all the 1,000 silver pieces, and a gamekeeper works all year to provide just a few days' shooting. In One of the Family, Jeanne la Chard looks at life behind the green baize door and talks to the men and women who enjoy their jobs and who are proud to be called servants, as well as some of the Dukes and Duchesses who employ them.
Every year nearly half of an women in Britain are persuaded to go on diets. But are they being conned or are they perhaps simply conning themselves? The business of slimming has become a boom industry; more than £l50-million a year is spent on slimming foods alone. Jenny Con-way questions psychiatrists, manufacturers, media-people, models and. above all. would-be and sometimes desperate slimmers. Why the obsession?
Should parents of a girl of 15 be told that she asked to be put on the pill? Should a criminal who seeks help from a doctor be reported to the police? Should cancer patients be told they are being used in experiments? Should employers be shown the medical records of employees? Every day doctors, nurses and administrators have to make difficult ethical decisions. In the past they have often jealously maintained that they are the only people qualified to make these judgments. But now the British Medical Association has published an ' ethical-handbook' available to patients, and has invited Man Alive to debate these dilemmas with those who face them, and those who are affected by them. Nick Ross questions members of the profession and Harold Williamson talks to patients and their families.
Trooper Keith Thompson, aged 18, and Second Lieutenant Paul Currell, 22, were almost given up for dead when they were blown up on security patrols 18 months ago. Their lives were saved by surgeons and nurses at Belfast Royal Hospital using new techniques that have become the envy of the medical world, and Man Alive followed their return to consciousness in the much-acclaimed film, Fighting for Life. Since then hospitals have been battling to restore both men to health and independence. Lieutenant Currell, who had a leg blown off has had to learn to walk again and is still in the army. Keith Thompson, who suffered severe head injuries and has had to learn to read and write again at the age of 19, has left the army and found a job despite partial paralysis. Harold Williamson follows their determined fight to make a fresh start against impossible odds.
Trains are cancelled because of staff shortages; manufacturers lose orders because of a lack of skilled workers. Why is it, that with over one-and-a-quarter million people unemployed, there are still thousands of unfilled jobs up-and-down the country? Is it that people won't or cant move from one region to another? Is it that there's a shortage of particular skills? Is it that employers and unions sometimes demand unnecessary skills? Is it that, for some, there is just not enough incentive to find a job? Can they get almost as much on the dole?
In the studio, a mother confronts the private detective hired by her foreign husband three years ago to seize their son. She is still searching for the boy. As more ' international' marriages are made and broken, so increasing numbers of tug-of-war children are caught in the middle of complicated custody battles which rage across national frontiers. Nick Ross and Jeanne la Chard follow the trail of some of these 'missing' children and ask if there are changes in international Jaw which might cut through the muddle and the heartache.
And what those cellarmen are doing is engaging in private resale price maintenance, at I 2 expense of the shopper and shopkeeper. ' Pile it high and sell it cheap' is the motto of the supermarkets. But some manufacturers won't sell to supermarkets who say it's because they sell too cheaply and don't play according to the manufacturer's rules. Because of the price-fixers, not only are some prices too high, but so are our rates, and maybe even our taxes. A secret battle is being fought in town halls to hit back at price-rigging by contractors, but with little success.
Raoul Wallenberg - a Swedish diplomat in Budapest in 1944-saved tens of thousands of Jews from being sent to death in the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. Russian forces occupied Budapest in 1945 and Wallenberg disappeared. For a long time people thought he was dead, but it is now known that he was arrested by the Russians. John Bierman reports in this investigative film the amazing story of this modern Pimpernel's rescue exploits and the mystery of his disappearance. Today, inescapable evidence shows that he could still be alive somewhere in the Gulag. If he is, he's been there ' forgotten ' for 35 years.
Why are there so few truly British films these days? Why is it that the French, the Swedes, the Germans and the Australians all have thriving indigenous film industries while British film-makers are reduced to turning out movies for the moguls of Hollywood? In the 1960s, British films were box-office hits around the world, and American investment flooded the studios. Then the economic tide flowed in the other direction and for most of the 70s the British film industry was high and dry. Now it's picking itself up again and going for the big time. But what will the industry of the 80s produce? Gavin Scott has been talking to the producers, the money men and the studio chiefs who decide what happens when the cameras start to turn.
Dyslexia, medically recognised tor 80 years, is the inability to read and write in children of normal to high intelligence. Ten per cent of our schoolchildren have trouble learning to read and write. But the Department of Education does not accept the existence of dyslexia, so how many of these slow learners are dyslexic is arguable. Michael Dean examines the controversy and reports from the only dyslexia clinic run entirely by the Health Service, at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London. He follows the fight for help for just two children: Adrian, aged 8, from Norfolk, and Judith, aged 6, from Berkshire.
A children's theatre in Islington, North London, that began as an out-of-school experiment 11 years ago, now has a waiting list of over a thousand. Middle-class parents queue up to enlist their children, but it's a theatre that stays close to its Cockney origins. Anna Scher , was invited to take a small group of her Islington charges to Belfast. They took over a hall in one of the city's toughest areas and played host to 70 children from all over Ulster. For three days this small army of children, Catholic and Protestant, took a first exhilarating plunge into improvised drama, acting out their own scenes-scenes that had emotional roots in their daily lives. This is the film and story of that dramatic weekend in Belfast - and its interesting sequel.
At present, enormous quantities of gas are burnt off above North Sea oil rigs. With government encouragement, Esso and Shell plan to pipe it to a handling plant in Fife, where it will be stored as a liquid at more than minus 100 degrees centigrade. Thus, energy now being wasted will be utilised, and jobs desperately needed in the area will be provided. But evidence gathered by representatives of the several thousand people who live within a mile or two of the proposed plant shows that their lives could be at risk. For, if there is a serious accident, the resultant ' fire-ball ' would be catastrophic. How far should the well-intentioned interests of multi-national companies and Whitehall override the passionately-held and well-researched stand of local people? This film examines what is wrong with the present system of official safety studies, public enquiries and ministerial processes.
Among the many splits and divisions in Northern Ireland is educational apartheid. It runs so deeply through schools that Catholic and Protestant children are rarely found under the same roof. Public opinion polls show that a majority of people want that changed - that they believe bringing children together right from the beginning in school might be a step towards eventual reconciliation and peace. In this report, Jack Pizzey and a Man Alive film crew travel across the battered province asking who is against it And why? One parent talks of reprisals by her church when she refused to send her children to its school. Catholic and Protestant teenagers, who rarely meet, talk about what might happen if they did. In an experiment in one town the two sides do meet and - even more extraordinary in Northern Ireland -they discuss the gap between them and how they might brid
From earliest times, people have longed to be sure they will have a baby of a particular sex. There are innumerable ' old wives' tales' offering advice on how to have a girl rather than a boy or vice versa. Now science is entering the field with gels to apply, advice on timing, methods of sperm separation and, in the animal world, the pre-sexing of embryos before implant. In the USA there are even some mothers who have tests to find out the sex of their baby and then seek an abortion if it's not what they want. What are the ethical implications of such procedures? How well do they work? What are the risks? If the use of some methods becomes widespread, will this upset the balance between the sexes? Would more people choose to have boys than girls?-Man Alive has commissioned a special poll to hnd out. Jeanne la Chard and Nick Ross investigate.
The price of a colour licence has risen to a record nine pence a day - almost as much as a newspaper. And yet, they say, it's not enough. The BBC faces the worst crisis in its history. While ITV is making handsome profits, the Corporation is cutting back programmes, making do with old equipment, losing and laying-off staff. And next year it will get worse. In a special report, Man Alive examines some facts about television advertising, commercial efficiency, BBC bureaucracy and public attitudes to the box. It asks whether other ways should be found of paying for the Corporation, or whether it is just up to Auntie to improve her housekeeping and content herself-and the viewer - with a much reduced service.
If distances by air from London were measured in money rather than miles, then the Shetland Isles would be further than Boston and Geneva would be only a little short of New York. Why is it that air travel in the United Kingdom and in Europe costs two, three and even four times as much per mile as it does over the Atlantic or in North America? Is it lack of true competition? Is it lack of sufficient passenger volume? Is it perhaps just inefficency? Jenny Conway and Nick Ross investigate. Will an alleged system of ' price-fixing ' among European ' state ' airlines be declared illegal - under the Treaty of Rome? Will the day come when one will be able to fly to Stockholm or Naples (1,000 miles) for appreciably less than one can fly all the way (5,500 miles) to Los Angeles today?
Elderly victims of violence are confused and bitter; more and more they are being mugged - often in broad daylight-by teenage and even younger children. The attack frequently seems motivated by a need to release violent aggression - the pickings from a pensioner's purse or wallet are almost always pretty meagre. And though it's bad enough to be mugged, it's even worse to realise that, apart from medical care, the victim can expect little other help. Compensation applies only to physical injuries - and for every £1 we spend on offenders we devote lp to their victims. In other cases, when their savings are stolen, pensioners' bills run irretrievably into arrears. For some, growing old becomes a lonely nightmare, and peace of mind is replaced by fear and mistrust.
They'll tell you that they are there as part of a balance - balance of fear. If these pilots of a front-line Phantom Squadron in Germany can convince the other side that they and their aircraft are primed and ready to fight, then, so the theory goes, they may never have to. NATO is committed to deterrence; the aircrews stake their lives on it - because if it fails they don't expect to survive. When the exercise sirens sound across RAF Wildenrath, Jack Pizzey takes off with the aircrew for a nightmare preview of the Phantom that haunts us all - the Third World War.
When should the freedom of the media be limited by other, perhaps wider, responsibilities? Should, for example, viewers be told unvarnished truths about cancer? Should terrorists be given the opportunity on television to air their views? Should the film Death of a Princess be allowed to disrupt Anglo-Saudi trade? In short, how far should programme-makers go in pursuit of their stories? Tonight, Man Alive debates these and other ethical issues. And Nick Ross and Michael Dean talk to people who sometimes allege, ' It's all very well for you TV people, hut you arenpvpr aroundthp next morning to pick up the pieces
And anything else they can lay their hands on too! The popular image of gypsies is one of a trail of old iron and rubbish, thieving, drunkenness and violence. A raggle-taggle people who are disliked for the mess they leave, distrusted and even feared for their powers of foretelling the future and putting on curses. Is it any wonder then that ' authority' sees gypsies as a problem to ' tidy up ' - first into camp-sites, then into houses? But as Jeremy James found out, gypsies equally see us, the house-dwellers, as a problem and a threat. What is it that the gypsies really want? What is the way of life they so passionately want to protect? Why is there so much distrust of this minority - only 50,000 of them compared with 50 million of us - who ask for little more than to be left alone, free not to conform with our particular values?
Millions of people around the world would be very well nourished on what we, in the West, feed to our pigs. Britain stands accused of being one of the meanest nations on earth. We eat to excess and build mountains out of surpluses. Other western nations do much the same. While we are all preoccupied with our seemingly important economic problems, 450 million people elsewhere are starving; many of those that don't die will be permanently crippled - physically and mentally. Of them, 350 will die during the 50 minutes of this programme. Yet this fertile planet produces enough food for everyone. What's gone wrong?
When a mother discovered that her baby son was deaf, blind and spastic - and she was given the news piece by dreadful piece -she was gripped by despair. Denise Hennessy had committed herself to a child who would, apparently, never be able to return her love. ' No one', she said, ' ever comes to terms with having a handicapped child-it just goes on'. But then she discovered a group of women just like herself - all from Liverpool, all young, all mothers of severely handicapped children. They come from different backgrounds, different parts of town, drawn together by a common burden. They've made a pool of their own inner resources of compassion, resilience and guts. Denise and four of her friends in the Liverpool group tell Michael Dean how they have learned to live with and help their handicapped children - and each other.
John Bierman reports the amazing rescue exploits of Raoul Wallenberg , a 20th-century Pimpernel who saved tens of thousands of Jews from the Auschwitz gas chambers and who could still, according to some witnesses, be alive somewhere in the Soviet Gulag - forgotten ' for 35 years.
Five black women, fully aware of the risks they are taking, talk openly about their lives. A mother, living in the aridity of a black reserve, longs for the annual return of her husband from a caretaker's job in distant Johannesburg.... A maid working for a white family in that same city talks of her own children who are forbidden to live with her and must be boarded out with relatives ... A nurse in Soweto dreams of the day when the skills she has slowly acquired will be properly recognised and used ... A hospital cleaner allows a camera to follow her into an enormous barrack block where she lives with 4,000 other women ... A housewife in the illegal shanty town of Crossroads tells of police and bulldozers ... South Africa -from five very individual and rarely filmed viewpoints.
Last autumn Man Alive revealed the sorry plight of elderly victims of mugging on Merseyside. Response to ' The Old Can't Run Fast Enough ' was overwhelming; thousands of unasked-for pounds were donated and viewers wrote and phoned with offers ranging from secretarial help to holidays. One invitation in particular caused a stir: ' could 20 pensioners from Merseyside come to London at Christmas to see a show - all expenses paid? ' They could - and did, some for the first time in their lives. On film Michael Dean reports on this rather special ' awayday': on lunch in Belgravia with the Vicomtesse D'Orthez - the actress Moira Lister - on tea with Dame Anna Neagle and Tony Britton , on the view from the stalls at My Fair Lady, on a day which everyone - from the pensioners to the camera crew - will long remember.
Admiral Beatty's famous comment as he watched another battle-cruiser blow up at Jutland would, in the view of some authoritative critics, not be inappropriate today. For example, on a recent exercise in the North Atlantic, some destroyers had to refuel after only three days at sea - otherwise, without the weight of fuel in their bunkers, they would have become top-heavy and unseaworthy. For what roles has our Navy been built? And how well is it equipped to fulfil them? Are our ships over-sophisticated and thereby overpriced? Could they effectively fight a limited war? Jeremy James asks if the Royal Navy still remembers Admiral Fisher's famous dictum that ' he who strains at the gnat of perfection will swallow the camel of unreadiness
A mill that made the yarn that made the carpet that royalty steps on-gone bust after 100 years. A family firm with a worldwide market in toys - in receivership. A workshop that could make almost anything in metal, one-off jobs that were always in demand - liquidated. All over the country, the receivers are moving in. The businesses are sold off, hammered out of existence to pay the creditors. And the fact is that small firms employ more people than all the major companies put together. Harold Williamson goes to four small firms to ask what is going wrong? Why are some firms going under while others - often in the same line of business - survive and even prosper?
What would you do if you were told that you only had a short time left to live? Few of us, faced with a future like Jean Cameron 's, would be able to summon up the same courage and determination. She is one of the many people Harold Williamson talked to about this sudden and devastating bombshell - and how they coped. JEAN CAMERON is trying to write a book about finding herself just as terminally ill as those she's spent her own life trying to help; at the same time Tim Martys is trying to fight back death by striving for a new life out in the country; and Ken Thomas is trying to raise £2 million to buy a body scanner and save lives - even though he knows it is too late to save his own. Ambitions, it seems, don't have to be dramatic. The quiet resolve of some people can be just as strong as the lone oarsman rowing the Atlantic.
You can't insure against bad neighbours, but they can blight your home and peace-of-mind much more disastrously than a combination of mere dry rot and a leaky roof. A burning feud may be sparked by no more than a cup of sugar - never replaced - borrowed 19 years ago. Or early morning lawn mowing. Or the same piece of music played too often and too loudly. Nerves tighten, tempers flare. Threats, retaliations, even the law can follow. Neighbours have wound up in prison. Jeanne La Chard looks at these neighbourly wars - often amusing to outsiders, never so to the participants - and asks what, if anything, can be done to solve them.
Christine [text removed] was dying from a rapidly spreading cancer when she decided that, somehow, she would will herself better. She is one of three people in this film who have made extraordinary recoveries from illnesses diagnosed and confirmed as terminal. Can the mind -through faith or will-power or meditation - so affect the body that it can stop the progress of a normally fatal disease? The three women in the programme - and there are more such 'recoveries' among women than men - are convinced that the mind can triumph. After all, they point to themselves as living proof. Michael Dean asks doctors how did they do it? Was it medicine or miracle? Freak or faith?
At 7.30 each morning 5,000 Liverpool dockers queue for work; by mid-morning 1,000 are usually home again - watching television, walking the dog, cleaning the car. They will all be paid whether they work or not: not less than &78.50 per week. That was the bargain - 'jobs for life' - which the union leader Jack Jones negotiated with British port employers back in 1972. It ended a crippling national strike, cleared the way for full-scale containerisation, and has kept the docks fairly peaceful ever since. But at what cost? Many dockers feel trapped and demoralised - but, in a time of high unemployment, they dare not risk giving up a sure but limited pay packet. Meanwhile the docks of Merseyside contract and they lose big money - most of it in labour costs. Man Alive follows Jack Jones as he meets dockers and employers along the waterfront where he himself once worked. How, today, do they all view the consequences of that 1972 'for life' agreement?
Most people would call it a crash; airlines and their cabin-staff talk of 'the unlikely event'. And indeed, for 20 years the aviation industry and its governing bodies have concentrated on preventing plane crashes altogether - with great success. The statistics show that you would probably crash only once in nearly 1,000 years of daily flights. But crashes still happen, and the chances of surviving them have not improved. The strength of modern jet bodies makes it possible to classify the majority of accidents as ' 'survivable'. Yet when survivors describe the plane's interior immediately after impact, they talk bitterly of collapsed seats and broken limbs, of blinding toxic fumes and burning upholstery, of coat racks blocking the emergency exits, of escape chutes that don't inflate. And all of this when speed of evacuation - officially 90 seconds - is vital to save lives. In short, the problems and dangers occur after the crash. Using unique film, Jack Pizzey examines the regulations
A badly damaged baby is ' allowed' to die. Is it mercy or murder? Some doctors hold that no matter how malformed a new-born baby may be, its life must be sustained at all costs. And parents will often accept damaged babies without resentment. Other doctors, and some parents too, take the view that a life severely limited by handicap can be a fate much worse than a quiet and painless death, and that love is not diminished in letting a baby fade away. Who decides? On what criteria? Where do the parents come in? Harold Williamson visits a Special Care Baby Unit where the mothers are encouraged to share in the life-or-death decisions - decisions with which the nurses and doctors are familiar but never at ease.
Cigars at 120 a time. Two thousand pounds a year on hair-dos. Gold-plated baths costing £5,000 each. Handkerchiefs at £10 a blow. A yacht at a quarter of a million pounds. Who is buying them? And, more intriguingly, how? Despite the worst recession since the 30s, there still seems to be plenty of money about - in some pockets. Is it that a lucky few are simply born with a rare ' get-rich ' gene? Or is it that they have got themselves the advice of extra-sharp accountants? Can anyone get rich? Man Alive looks at the lifestyle of some big spenders. And asks how they do it. Could it be that there are really two tax systems in Great Britain and that some people are always going to have it easier than others?
A woman dies and her husband gives up his job to look after the children. A war wound pushes another man into unemployment-then theft. An asthmatic mother with a handicapped child can't move out of a damp and fungus-ridden council house. All are getting ever-deeper into debt, scraping by on social security survival money. It could happen to almost anyone. The official system doesn't seem to help. Through the winter thousands of families, unable to meet their heating bills, get their electricity cut off. Increasing numbers of people have to live in unfit accommodation. And the more they try to improve their lives, the worse their plight becomes. They're trapped. Jack Pizzey reports.
Astonishingly, our chances of being killed on the roads have stayed the same for half a century-it is almost as though we have decided to tolerate 6,000 dead each year. Why do we so meekly assume that the carnage is inevitable when patently it is not? In a specially extended film report, Man Alive hears from doctors, police and accident investigation teams who are angry and bewildered that so little is done to stop the killing.
Three young people give a heart-warming example to us all in their fight for independence. Alison is 17 and in her last year at college. Born spastic, she can run now, and she speaks with halting eloquence. But how will Alison cope when she leaves the shelter of family and friends? Billy, who is 19, will never leave his wheelchair. Born with spinal atrophy, his body is almost powerless. Yet he hitch-hikes around Britain, writes his own songs and has now embarked on an autobiography. He lives in a radically designed home for the disabled and dreams of the day when he'll have a place of his own. Steve, a 29-year-old barrister, soon to marry, runs his home from a wheelchair. Severely spastic, he is helped day and night by Community Service Volunteers, who work in shifts. Now he is working to bring his own kind of independence to other disabled people.
Bare bosoms may have boosted some newspaper sales, but there has been another, more subtle result'of that and other naked displays. Only a few of the thousands of women who, every year, have breast operations need them for truly medical reasons. For the rest, it is cosmetic surgery, ' I feel I am a boy dressed in dresses,' says Susan, a National Health patient wanting her breasts enlarged. Susan is one of two women who undergo cosmetic surgery of the breast in this film profile. The other, Ruth, has a private operation to lift and reduce her breasts. The film explores the reasons which leads two attractive women to ' correct' what they feel to be ' wrong ' with themselves. It also underlines the risks involved in this sort of surgery, Michael Dean discusses the implications of the film with a plastic surgeon, a psychiatrist and the two women themselves,
It is no respecter of persons: monarchs have had it, statesmen have died of it. And although it's been called ' the wages of sin', innocence doesn't guarantee protection - the sexually faithful can get it from a partner who strays even once. VD or, as it's now called, sexually transmitted disease, was on the retreat 30 years ago. It looked then as though penicillin and other drugs would banish it from our lives. But today STD is spreading again and with alarming speed, especially among the young. This year something like half-a-million cases will pass through British clinics. Doctors will treat people from every social class, not just for syphilis, gonorrhoea and NSU (the infamous three), but for more than 20 other sexually transmitted diseases, including genital herpes, the incurable virus that is already an epidemic in America. Man Alive visits the clinics where the war against the sexual diseases is being fought and Michael Dean talks to the doctors and to some of the casualties.
They plan where we will live and where we will work. They decide which buildings will be pulled down and which will be put up. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they get it wrong. They are that amorphous group we ignore until they want to put a motorway, a pylon or whatever at the bottom of our garden. They are The Planners. Are they visionaries or vandals? How well do they do their job? Do we have too much planning or too little? How much say do we, the public, really have in the planning decisions that affect our lives?
Every day the shops are open they lose over £l million to theft; it has been described as ' a great train robbery every 36 hours'. And of course, we all pay higher prices to cover these losses. For some, shoplifting is an almost full-time occupation. They regard the risk of arrest as an occupational hazard. For others being caught leaves an indelible mark on an otherwise blameless life. Why do they do it? Michael Dean talks to the innocent and the guilty, to store managers and the police. He examines some of the myths - for example that most shoplifters are women — and asks how can we stop a crime that is costing all of us more each year.
It's not all gloom and doom even though unemployment is mounting. Redundancy need not spell disaster -it can be a spur to better things; to achieving a lifelong ambition, even to making a dream come true. Like the Gloucester woman who carved out a business of her own in a man's world when her job disappeared ... like the new enterprise in Manchester that tests entrepreneurs and the chances of their business ventures ... like the Leeds furniture factory that got back on its feet after going bust because the workers took a big gamble that is paying off. Harold Williamson meets people who believe in themselves and are building their lives anew.
Too much alcohol doesn't do anyone any good. But women come off even worse than men: they get drunk on less, they are more likely to contract liver disease, they can damage an unborn child -with serious risks for its future mental development. Yet women in Britain now drink more than ever before and start earlier. Supermarkets sell drink along with breakfast cereal, and women's magazines are saturated with advertisements which some claim glamorise alcohol. Certainly, sales have doubled in less than ten years ... Man Alive meets women with drinking problems, and asks doctors and researchers if more should be done to warn people of the risks they run.
In Switzerland, almost every mp is on the board of a bank or a sizeable company, often both. Jack Pizzey examines connections between the state and big business. An executive of a multinational reports his company to the EEC for breaking its trading laws; he is arrested by the police and imprisoned. An English woman working in Africa buys a Swiss-made medicine banned in the West; she nearly dies. The methods of a baby-food firm selling milk substitute in the Third World break World Health Organisation codes. Could these things happen if the directors of the companies did not sit in board-rooms one day and in parliament the next?
Is it murder or mercy to ' allow' a badly damaged baby to die? The dilemma was highlighted in a trial at Leicester Crown Court in November when a consultant paediatrician was found not guilty of the attempted murder of a baby. In the Special Care Baby Unit at Whickham General Hospital, mothers - and fathers - of badly damaged babies are encouraged to live in the unit, to share the life-or-death decisions with the nurses and doctors. The film follows three babies and their parents. Should the artificial feeding be stopped? Should the parents allow their baby to die? Can a mother be taught to love a baby she couldn't even look at?
When Ian Coulter was Director of Information at British Steel he witnessed the closure of the steel plant in Ebbw Vale. Later, he too was made redundant. This evening he returns to tell an audience at the Ebbw Vale Leisure Centre that the days of their town's prosperity and full employment are over; they must be prepared to move to find work and not expect work to come to them. With him is ec3nomic planner Professor Nat Lichfield who spells out the choices facing Ebbw Vale, and give his views about the town's future.
It's 100 years since Darwin's death, but at the Institute for Creation Research at San Diego, California, they believe that in time his theory of evolution will become as extinct as the flat earth theory of the Middle Ages. They believe that the account of creation in the first chapter of Genesis is true and they claim they have scientific evidence to prove it. What's more, this month they are contesting a court case in Louisiana to have 'scientific creationism' taught in schools. Professor Michael Ruse, author of "Darwinism Defended", and The Rev Lord Soper are appalled. Confronting an audience of students and staff they maintain that 'creationism is bunk'.
The National Council for Civil Liberties has frequently clashed with the Police Federation, which represents the views of 116000 ordinary policemen and policewomen, over police powers and citizens' rights. But the two sides rarely meet to thrash out their differences. In this second programme Patricia Hewitt and Paul Boateng of the Mm. visit the Police Federation's annual conference in, Scarborough to put their
Martin Webster is a founder member of a consortium of doctors seeking to build Glasgow's first major private hospital. He is also a National Health Service consultant at the Cannisburn Hospital, Glasgow. This evening in a lecture theatre at Glasgow's Royal Infirmary, he tries to persuade fellow consultants, hospital doctors, nurses and ancillary workers who are opposed to his scheme, that private and National Health Service hospitals should exist side by side. With him is Dr Stanley Balfour-Lynn , European Director of American Medical International, which owns or manages 120 private hospitals around the world, and would like to expand into Scotland.
It's the contention of the Glasgow Media Group, re-stated in its latest book, Really Bad News, that TV news is biased against the left. It has been called a ' shadowy guerrilla force on the fringe of broadcasting ', but this evening its spokesman, Greg Philo , with Michael Meacher , mp, emerge into the spotlights of a Lime Grove studio to argue their case against an audience of BBC and ITV news-men, reporters and producers.
While the Peace Now movement in Israel protests against Prime Minister Begin's politics, two British Jews - Rabbi David Gold-berg and The Rt Hon Reg Freeson , MP - visit Kibbutz Tirat Zevi overlooking the West Bank, to argue that peace will not come to the Middle East unless the Palestinians are eiven the homeland they deserve.
According to Susie Orbach it is. She claims that as a result of her bestselling book, thousands of women have stopped being compulsive eaters and thrown away their diet sheets. According to Weight Watchers, fat is not a feminist issue; fatness is the same problem for men and women and dieting is the best way to cope with it. Susie Orbach, with Clair Chapman and Katina Noble of the Spare Tyre Theatre Group, meet Weight Watchers from the Midlands and North in the Grand Hotel, Manchester, to argue their case.
'The unique character of our countryside is being destroyed by a far-reaching agricultural revolution,' says Marion Shoard , author of The Theft of the Countryside. She and Lord Melchett, farmer and conservationist, believe that this is a national scandal. Farmers, they say, are one of the most subsidised sectors of society; destroying hedgerows, wetlands and woods in their search for greater productivity. Tonight they meet farmers from the Midlands to argue that planning controls should be extended to cover the countryside and that the whole community should have a say in the future of the land.
The Marquis of Douro is a Euro mp, and a direct descendant of the Iron Duke of Wellington. With Spain in NATO and wanting to join the EEC. he believes that Britain cannot keep Gibraltar to itself. The Rock should be ruled jointly by the kingdoms of Britain and Spain. He is supported by Senator Fernando Moran , a major foreign affairs spokesman for the Spanish Socialist Party, which is strongly tipped to win the forthcoming general election. Is Gibraltar the last colonial outpost in Europe? Do some 28,000 Gibraltarians have the right to self-determination or must they pay the price for European unity? Lord Douro and Senator Moran will put their case to an assembled group of Gibraltarians who have just won a long battle to gain British citizenship.
Talks to doctors, police and accident investigation teams about the distrubing n umber of fatal road accidents in Britain every year (road accidents are the sing le biggest killer of people between four and forty-four-, and explores some of the technical improvements that could be made to improve road safety
Man Alive was the 60s documentary series which brought homosexuality, death, adultery and VD into people's front rooms for the first time. In this specially made programme, the Man Alive team talk about their methods, motives and dilemmas in persuading the public to reveal raw emotion on television. Among those interviewed are Desmond Wilcox and David Attenborough.
A year of Man Alive One man's personal view of 1966 A year in which so many of us failed to communicate... A year of tragedy, suffering, and human weakness - and from time to time a year of characters who made us smile ... Using the material shot by the film teams and reporters of Man Alive during the past 52 weeks, James Cameron takes a personal look at the old year.
Every New Year's Day we tell ourselves, as we face another 365 days, that we'll change this; reorder that; be different or better. But the resolve is one thing and the fact is a very different matter. In the last twelve months of Man Alive programmes we've heard a great deal of resolve, seen a great many promises and good intentions demonstrated. There have also been a number of fascinating characters whose future was a question-mark which would certainly bear looking at again. What happened to the people? How did things work out for them? Have promises been kept or have all those middle-of-the-year resolutions gone the way that most New Year's resolutions do?
