Everyman

'No alcoholic voluntarily does anything about his or her problem. What we're up against is a disease, and a disease that is not curable.' To dry out in Detroit you go to the Sacred Heart Rehabilitation Centre, one of the biggest treatment centres for alcoholics in the United States. It was founded by Fr Vaughn Quinn. For an alcoholic, the path to self-knowledge and sobriety is a rough one. No one knows this better than Fr Quinn himself. His exuberant style conceals a first-hand . knowledge of his clients' despair: he is, in his own words, 'just a recovering alcoholic'. This film follows the personal struggles of both clients and counsellors through the precarious business of alcoholic rehabilitation: from Quinn's search for drunks in his 1925 hearse on the streets of Detroit, through painful therapy groups, to three intensive days for a small group of residents on board The Mighty Quinn - a 38-foot yacht skippered by Quinn on Lake St Clair.

Figures show that crime is rising year by year. Fear of crime seems to be growing even more rapidly: police forces encourage neighbourhood watch groups, alarmed individuals train in techniques of self-defence and security guards now outnumber police officers. Jeremy Paxman asks where the rising tide of fear will end, and discovers that in some areas citizens are already taking up arms because they believe the state can no longer protect them.

"The city is like Niagara Falls. The closer you live to the brink, the more likely you will be swept over the edge. We like to live a long way upstream.' The old Mennonite communities of Canada are descendants of European Protestants who fled from terrible persecution in the 17th and 18th centuries. They have retained a separate identity, avoiding the modem world and preserving a 200-year-old way of life. But at the fringes compromises are being made. Everyman visits the farming communities where the old values of peace, humility, hard work and brotherhood are still the priority. What happens when the modern world gets too close? 'There's lots of room, we just move a little further out.'

'You need people who are prepared to commit themselves to each other, to their workforce, in order for this country to prosper. That is a Christian thing to do, if it is done on a basis of equality.' Half our waking lives are spent at work. And for most people work means routine laced with competition - a sort of nerve-wracking drudgery. Given our highly developed and sophisticated economy, could our life at work ever be different? In the past ten years there's been a huge growth in enterprises formed by people who believe it could. Inspired by the example of Ernest Bader , who gave his business to his workforce and started the modern Common Ownership Movement, they have founded nearly 1,500 workers' co-operatives. By the year 2000, at the current rate of increase, there could be a quarter of a million coops in Britain. But can co-operatives provide jobs that are more than 'just a job'? And can they still be viable businesses at the same time?

The Virgin Mary appears on a hillside in a remote village in Yugoslavia. Six children see her, touch her and hear her voice. She says she has come as the Queen of Peace. She urges believers to pray, fast and do penance. She says that the West has lost God and that Russia will come to glorify the Lord. The local clergy dismiss the children's story, but soon huge crowds are gathering on the hill. The police move in, fearful that the religious stirrings are a sign of counter-revolution among the Catholic population. Gradually the testimony of the child visionaries wins over their families and friends. The parish priest becomes a believer. Supernatural signs are seen in the area; healings are reported and the crowds keep coming. Within six years Medjugorje shows signs of becoming another Lourdes - with the differences that it has all happened in a Marxist country, and that the apparitions are still going on to this day.

The Sanema tribe is one of the most remote, independent and feared of all the Amazonian Indians. It was only in 1973 that Pastor Hernan Artigas came to Majawana and carved the first mission out of the rain forest of the Upper Orinoco. For the majority of the Sanema, little has changed since the Stone Age. Life revolves around hunting, story-telling and contact with the forest spirits. But now they are meeting the 20th-century world of Hernan. It is a culture shock from which they may never recover.

Friday night fever in the cities of Brazil is not so much about disco-dancing as spirittrancing. It is when the 30 million practitioners of Umbanda, a voodo-like cult that started this century, perform their strange rites. Umbanda, a synthesis of African and Amerindian gods with Catholicism, is Brazil's fastest-growing religion. At spiritist centres, like those run by Abraham in the slums of Rio, or Marilda or on luxurious Governor's Island, possession states are used to grant favours, cure illness or lift curses. The Catholic Church, once vehemently anti-Umbanda, now tolerates it. But for the new evangelical churches, toleration is an anathema: their Friday night services are a spectacle of mass exorcism, a battle between God and the Devil.

During the past ten years 9,000 people have 'disappeared' in Peru's Ayacucho province, victims of the conflict between the Maoist guerrillas, Sendero Luminoso, and the military. This violence now threatens the neighbouring province of Puno, home of the Aymara Indians who have cultivated the banks of Lake Titicaca since pre-Columban times. The church in Puno, unlike in Ayacucho, has actively pressurised the government to enact land reforms, hoping to limit Sendero's appeal to the Indians. Branded communists by the right and reactionaries by the left, the Peruvian church is divided. Filmed around Lake Titicaca and in the slums of Lima this concluding episode reveals the church at a crossroad in its history.

For four years, Michael Buerk reported on South Africa for BBC Television News. He saw the country at its best and at its worst. He made many friends, black, white and coloured; he was also shot at, gassed, beaten, locked up, censored, and finally expelled. He cannot go back. But now, using material some of which has never been shown, he tells us what it was really like to live and work on the edge of a racial battleground. This first programme in a new series of Everyman goes behind the news for a personal look at the country and the people for whom there is 'no easy road'.

Caring for people in the last stages of cancer requires more than medical and nursing skills. It involves accompanying patients and their relatives through fear, anger and mourning to acceptance. In this moving film shot in St Luke's Hospice, Plymouth, a husband and wife share the faith that sustains them through ravaging illness. A mother and daughter find a new closeness as they come to terms with a cruelly mishandled diagnosis. Dr Sheila Cassidy , the medical director of St Luke's, explains her approach to the care of terminal cancer.

Over the past ten years, Guatemala has been the focus for the most aggressive evangelisation process since the Spanish conquistadores came to Latin America. Today, nearly one third of the population are 'born again' Christians - mostly Pentecostals like the American TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart , whose crusades have become one of the country's most popular television programmes. For Swaggart, Guatemala is in the front line of a battle between good and evil, with the Roman Catholic Church and the Communists cast together in the role of Satan. This religious conflict now threatens further divisions among the Indian communities, already the worst sufferers from a decade of bitter civil war.

First broadcast: Sun 8th Nov 1987, 22:20 on BBC One London 'I had found a way of life that elated me: I tasted briefly, the nectar of the Gods ...' But when the round-the-world motorcyclist Ted Simon got back from his four-year, 64,000-mile journey round the globe, he found it impossible to settle in Britain. To the eye of a man who had immersed himself in the cultures of 45 different countries, the British seemed to have sold their soul to materialism. His best-selling account of his trip, Jupiter's Travels, mapped the different, inner road he had found while riding his bike. To try to preserve that vision, he fled to a remote valley in North America. Now Everyman has brought Ted Simon back to make a new journey, from London to the Scottish islands, meeting the readers who've responded to his book and its insights.

'You can't express the pain that I go through being married to Geoffrey ... there's no finality about my pain - it's every day. It's going on and on for years and years.' Rhona Prime , wife of GCHQ spy Geoffrey Prime , explains the dilemma she faced when she 'shopped' the husband she loves, and the cost of standing by him since his conviction. Loyalty is said to be the holiest virtue in the human heart, but is there virtue in the popular idea that a woman, no matter what, should stand by her man? Jenni Murray talks to four women who have been loyal to husbands who have been involved in robbery, rape, murder and espionage. Why do they do it when loyalty means sharing the punishment for someone else's crime?

Three years ago, Joe and Eileen Connolly left St Louis, Missouri for Central America in search of Eileen's brother, a Catholic priest. Fr 'Guadalupe' Carney had disappeared in mysterious circumstances in the jungles of Honduras. Their search was to uncover a tangle of political intrigue and secrecy which stretched back to Washington, but it was also to leave many important questions unanswered. David Jessel 's film on the Connollys won the Royal Television Society's International Current Affairs award in 1984. Now he reports on new evidence which sheds important light on Fr Guadalupe 's fate, and on the extraordinary journey of faith and discovery which the Connollys have made.

In 1984 the Indian Army invaded the Sikhs' holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Soon after, Sikh gunmen assassinated Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister, and thousands of Sikhs died in the riots that followed her death. The violence has had a traumatic effect on many Sikhs living in Britain. It has provoked some of them into a political and religious crusade for an independent Sikh homeland: they say they are trying to revive Sikh culture and religion. Others strongly disagree. This bitter conflict has led to costly court actions and even to fights inside temples. A number of prominent British Sikhs have been shot. Rosemary Hartill investigates what lies behind these divisions, and asks what the turban and the sword mean to Sikhs in Britain today.

On his visit to West Germany earlier this year, the Pope pronounced the beatification of Sister Teresia Benedicta, a Carmelite nun murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz. Sister Benedicta had been born a Jewess, Edith Stein. Thousands of Catholics rejoiced at the ceremony, and welcomed the pronouncement as a sign of reconciliation between Catholics and Jews. But many Jews were indignant. In their eyes not only had Edith Stein betrayed her faith by converting to Christianity, but she died because she was Jewish, not as a Christian martyr. For them, the attempt at reconciliation failed. Why are relations between Catholics and Jews so difficult and sensitive, and what hopes are there that a better understanding can be achieved?

At the New Testament Church of God in Brixton Pastor Vernon Nelson makes a passionate appeal for a return to the traditional values of the Protestant ethic - hard work, high moral standards and the honest rewards of material success. His church is packed with obedient young people, joyfully proclaiming the truth of the Gospels and busily making progress with their careers. But are the increasingly popular black-led churches really answering the needs of Britain's black community? With songs and sermons the church members say yes; outsiders, many of them church drop-outs, are not so sure.

When he visited Fiji last year, Pope John Paul called it 'a symbol of hope in the world'. He found 'people of diverse cultures ... living in harmony and peace'. Now this peace has been destroyed by two military coups; religions and races are divided. Brigadier Rabuka, the man behind the coups, is a Methodist lay preacher. Why has this devout Christian wanted to deny over half the population their political rights and restrict their religious freedom? And what prospects are there for harmony in the future? Martin Young talks to Brigadier Rabuka and other Fijian political and religious leaders, and analyses the significance of what's been happening.

In the past 150 years there have been thousands of reported appearances of the Virgin Mary , usually to children. The visions warn of disaster and call to prayer. The Pope, a keen visitor to the shrines where the visions are commemorated, has declared 1987-88 a Marian year. Many women in the Church are troubled by the cult: they say it has gone hand in hand in the Christian tradition with the subjection of women and the fear of sexuality. Yet it remains magnetic. The Virgin Mother still draws thousands of sick and despairing to her shrines in search of wholeness and hope.