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Private Notes
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.
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.
