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Private Notes
Spike Milligan is a very funny serious man and a very serious funny man. For him life's problem is to tiptoe through the chaos he sees around himself. When it all becomes too much for him he retreats to a tiny workroom in Bayswater. Most of this film was made in that room, sallying out to face the world when the mood took him. And it took him to some unexpected places, looking for, among other things, a doughnut, a blind bird and buried treasure in the Thames.
Allan Prior is a writer of fiction - novels, films, TV plays - but he is probably best known for his scripts for Z Cars and Softly, Softly. He portrayed policemen and criminals as he found them. Some people said his brand of truth was too harsh. He says that the real thing is always worse, that the professional criminal is on nobody's side but his own, that his only concern is to have a good time at somebody else's expense. To illustrate his theme Prior has written two scenes of life in a criminal 'family,' contrasting fiction with fact. He also talks to victims of criminal greed and violence; and, ten years after his visit to write the original Z Cars scripts, returns to Kirkby's Newtown - where, most of all, he finds evidence that 'the real thing is always worse.'
In our so-called 'Permissive Society', discipline is an unfashionable concept. The emphasis on personal freedom and the pressure for abolition of all restraints are, Lord Soper believes, dangerous and destructive because they are divorced from any sense of religious or social purpose. In this film Lord Soper, preacher, pacifist and socialist, looks back over his own life and times and makes an urgent plea for a new sense of discipline without which true freedom is not possible.
Lady Antonia Fraser is the best-selling biographer of Cromwell and Mary Queen of Scots. To her, biography is a special and important art, with unusual responsibilities and dangers. One single book can easily change the attitudes of a generation to a great public figure. In re-creating her subjects, she leaves her stamp on the pattern of history. Yet at the same time she is a biographer who has a never-ending love affair with her art.
Alan Garner, the brilliantly successful author of books that dazzle and haunt children - and haunt adults, too - is a man obsessed by violence; in the universe, in the ground, most of all, in himself. This film was made in Cheshire, the countryside in which Alan Garner was born and where his family has lived for generations. He shows how he came to terms with his own personal violence; and in a series of unusual film sequences attempts to show how violence, once understood, can be put to creative use.
During the lifetime of most of us Britain has moved into the ranks of the second-class powers. The decline in our power and influ. ence continues. You could say we're on the road to Ruritania.
In the latest in this series of highly personal films, Paul John son - journalist, broadcaster and author of a widely acclaimed history of England - gives his views on our latest dilemma. He believes we can only understand the present if we examine our past: 2,000 years of English history provide clues to our present-day difficulties over the Common Market and the economy.
The historian A. J. P. Taylor , as well as Michael Foot M.P., Anthony Howard, and J. B. Priestley contribute to the programme. But the overall view is very much Johnson's own.
