40 Minutes

Darren Lillywhite was 17, mischievous and high-spirited. He and his mates were a lively lot, always getting into scrapes around the village of Cranleigh, where they grew up. Darren had owned his prized Vauxhall Astra for just a few weeks. One August evening in 1987 he drove it into a roundabout and was thrown from the car. Now he is paralysed from the neck down and can do nothing for himself. Darren has been at Stoke Mandeville Hospital for ten months, but his family is determined to get him back home. Terry and Marilyn Lillywhite have built a special extension to their house. If Darren makes it, his family, neighbours and friends will all be joining in the celebration. No one can help liking Darren. 'I don't feel bitter about it at all,' he says. 'It's like being born again, really....'

A journey by Intercity into the world of the supernatural. Do you believe in ghosts? Helen McCormick does. She found an ancient crucifix in her cellar - and then saw a medieval monk walk past her kitchen window. Ambulanceman Ken Lobley rescued his aunt after a warning from an apparition. Nichola Thompson, aged 13, was reading, looked up, and saw her grandmother - wearing the pink shroud she'd been buried in two years earlier. Rev Jack Richardson investigates spooky Harnham Hall in Northumberland. He blesses the earthly remains of Kate Babington, who died a prisoner at Harnham in 1670. Eddie Burks, a 'clairsentient', is summoned to an RAF base to contact the ghost of an airman. Eerily, he describes how the man died and why he returns. And four nurses spend the night in 'the most haunted house in Britain' - with strange tales to tell the following morning....

It's said that 2,000 dogs and 4,000 cats are destroyed in Britain every day. Celia Hammond was a top fashion model. Now she's so furious about the destruction of healthy animals that she's given up her career, even her personal life, to rescue as many strays as she can. She prowls the wastelands and alleyways of London to save frightened, injured and lost cats. Her ultimate aim is to set up her own low-cost spaying and neutering clinics.

A real life soap opera is unfolding in Cardross Street, West London. A Royal Ballet star, a man who owns a share in a race horse, and a peer's daughter now live side by side with old folk who have rented their houses all their lives. Once the street was filled with families. Now it's being taken over and tarted up by the young rich with no children. 'Funeral today - skip tomorrow' is how the locals describe what's happening. Had they been able to afford it, the old timers could have bought their homes for £200. Now unmodernised two-up two-downs with outside loos are snapped up at £150,000. 'For the old people the street is a way of life,' says the Hon Henrietta Roper-Curzon . 'For us it is just a transitory thing. When they leave it's in a hearse. We leave in the removal van'. With John Pitman.

An insight into the first few months of Britain's first purpose-built AIDS hospice. London Lighthouse is an experiment. The building is striking. The approach to nursing is radical. The project could provide a model for the health care of the future. Beatty King, 26, is one of 15 nurses working at Lighthouse. On night shift, she spends the small hours gently negotiating with Colin, who's desperate to smoke, and sitting with Christopher, who is close to death. The patients appreciate having as much say as possible in how they are looked after. But as relationships develop, emotional pressures increase. Beatty admits, 'I don't think I realised what I was letting myself in for....'.

Ten of the most dangerous and disruptive men in the prison system have been brought together in an experimental unit at Hull Jail. A new softly-softly regime is being tested on inmates like Fred Low, who is serving three life sentences - one for killing a fellow prisoner - and Patrick Mackay, serving five life sentences for manslaughter and robbery. 40 Minutes gained access to the unit as the prisoners started to reveal themselves to the hand-picked staff, and as conflicts began. The most serious clash was over the only woman working full time in the unit, and it involved David McAllister, serving 19 years for armed robbery and assault, who later escaped from the unit and was on the run for five days. This film tells the story of the most controversial unit in our prisons.

This acclaimed observational documentary by BAFTA award winning director Molly Dineen is set at London’s Angel tube station in 1989, three years before its desperately needed renovation. The programme provides a humorous account of 48 hours in the life of the tube station, from the daily round of fraught commuters, overburdened lifts and cancelled trains to the nightly activities when 'fluffers', women who clean human hair and rubbish of the tracks to avoid a fire hazard and ‘the Permanent Way’, gangs of men who work with pickaxes in almost pitch-black conditions to renovate parts of the track, spring into action to prepare the line for the following day.

At least one in every five children in Britain suffer from bullying. In our schools the problem is worse than anywhere else in Europe. 40 Minutes reveals what's really going on in the playground.