Man Alive

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?

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?

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?

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.

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 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.

... 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?

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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?

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?