Man Alive

It is ten years since Cuba became Castro's Cuba and this week, as the government-inspired ceremonies celebrate the tenth anniversary of the ' Glorious Revolution,' refugee planes from Havana will land in Miami twice a day-as they do every day. Miami-American playground: a frightening combination of golden sand and blaring architecture-and, for a quarter of a million Cubans to date, gateway to a new life. The United States is a country founded on a concept of taking in those who have fled from other places. The latest ingredient to be added to this multi-racial melting-pot is the confused, penniless, Spanish-speaking Cuban refugees. Within a year or two the young, adapting as they always do, reach for all-American clothes, ideas, and behaviour. But for their parents the adaptation sometimes seems impossible. The American government struggles to cope with the problem. Some American people have found a new focus fer race hatred, and still-twice a day -a refugee plane lands in Miami with families who have been stripped of everything but the clothes they wear before they were allowed to leave Cuba - for the land of coke.

The organisers confess modestly that the Miss World contest is 4 one of the biggest publicity gimmicks in the world.' The BBC cheerfully brings the pulchritudinous finals to 27 million viewers. Fifty-four sets of vital statistics. Fifty-four national hopes burning beneath swimming costumes, carefully inspected for artificial devices. It all adds up to eight days of near hysteria; rows, tears, chaperones and a babel of interpreters. Big girls, small girls, olive girls. Girls who care, and girls who don't. Girls who cheat, and girls who won't. The contest is planned with military precision. The result is a crown, £ 2,500, and a handful of golden ' perks.'

Every year their numbers increase. Report after report has been produced on the problem created by nearly 70,000 illegitimate births annually. And yet the unmarried mother is, today, as badly off as she has ever been. Much of the care of unmarried mothers and their children is left to voluntary organisations-in particular the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child. At the end of last year the N.C.U.M.C. called a press conference-because it was going bankrupt. If it goes out of business society will have to decide what responsibility it owes to the unmarried women who each year have illegitimate babies. Is it right that such social responsibility should have to be left in the hands of voluntary organisations? Do we profess liberalism on the one hand and stigmatise the unmarried mother on the other? Now both Parliament and society may have to decide.

Close on 10,000 of our children-the vast majority of them boys-are now in approved schools, but what good does it do them? They're aged between eight and nineteen years, and they will be kept there for anything up to three years at a cost averaging £ 23 9s. 6d. a week. And within a short time of their release two out of three of the boys will be in trouble with the law again. There are 121 of these schools in Britain, often in isolated country mansions far removed from the environment the boys knew and imposing a way of life quite different from the life many of them have known and will return to.

The country's approved schools are under the spotlight of publicity and no one knows exactly what is going to happen to them. They are condemned as junior prisons, places where the not-so-innocent learn the tricks of the trade of the hardened criminal. They are defended as schools which achieve success with the failures of every other educational and social service; the end of the road that leads back to a normal way of life. Under new legislation the schools will become part of a new system of community homes run by local authorities. But how will they change? Will the present regime alter significantly? Will the present staffs remain in control?

In this country, for the first time, real moves are being made to give our cities one-man-rule-not just rubber-stamp mayors for a year, but leaders with full executive authority. In Canada, Montreal was once a roaring vice-ridden city until a little French-Canadian lawyer named Jean Drapeau set to work. He helped write a newspaper series that exposed the vice. Then he was co-prosecutor at the enquiry into the police force that followed. The city had found a champion. The people immediately made him mayor-and he has been back to the City Hall four times, the last time with an incredible ninety-four per cent of the vote. Mayor Drapeau has given Montreal the modern metro it had argued over for fifty years, a concert hall shelved for twenty-five years, a vast underground shopping complex - and Expo 67, the world fair that won him international acclaim. But now the bills are due. Man Alive caught up with Mayor Drapeau as he faced a city deficit of nearly$30 million - and the first real questioning of his poor record on housing and social welfare. Have we in Britain anything to learn from the policies and actions of this feudal man with a near dictatorial authority, or is he, as one newspaper charged, ' high on prestige, low on compassion'?

If you break the law, no matter if you have murdered your wife or forgotten to pay your TV licence, the chances are that the first court to which you are summoned will be presided over by an amateur-a part-time magistrate. Out of nearly 20,000 magistrates in England and Wales, less than fifty are paid for their vocation. The vast majority are lay Justices, worthy members of society who give up part of their spare time to sit in judgment on the rest of us. They work for nothing more than the honour and the responsibility. The way they are appointed is a mystery even to them, because the selection process is shrouded in secrecy. But the majority of them, even today, are middle-class people of mature years, because they are the people most likely to have the time to spare. It is these men and women who deal with ninety-eight per cent of all criminal cases, let alone all the petty offences like parking in restricted areas, which almost all of us commit at some time or another. The odds are that one day you will appear before a Justice of the Peace. What kind of people are they? What sort of qualifications do they have? Are they the right people for the enormously responsible job they have to do?

You are our American ambassadors. It is through your actions that the British people are able to judge us Americans as we really are and not as some people think that we are ... So spoke the United States Air Force officer at this month's briefing when thirty airmen learnt the realities of being foreigners in Britain. The subject was ' Host Nation Irritants': in peacetime learning to live at peace with the natives is the main concern. There are 52,000 American servicemen and their families in Britain. Eight thousand of them are stationed at two nuclear alert air bases within five miles of Woodbridge (pop. 6,650), a Suffolk market town. Those who cannot face the strangeness of it all never leave the base-an island of America in Constable country: gas stations and air conditioning, canned beer and bowling, clothes care coin-ops, and big American cars. American schools, American hospitals, even the meat is flown in from Washington D.C. Those who brave the outside world, the country pubs, the thatched cottages, the world of the village bobby, see the England the tourist learns about. How different from the ad-man's dream do these uniformed American ' ambassadors ' find us? How different do we find them?

Half a million people go to Football League matches every Saturday, and for every one who goes ten watch a game on television. Association Football is more than a game, an industry, or a way of life. It is an institution. Players become heroes, winning teams become symbols of national pride. But a football team Ls only as successful as its manager, and in football only the successful survive. If the team wins, the players get the credit; if it loses, too often the manager gets the sack. Already this season nearly half the ninety-two Football League managers have lost their jobs. Since the war more than 700 have been fired or have resigned. Two years ago, when Arsenal were an indifferent middle-of-the-first division side, the club physiotherapist, Bertie Mee , was appointed manager. Now they are in the final of the League Cup, and are challengers for the League Championship. For the last two years, Bradford Park Avenue have been at the bottom of the fourth division and this season have to seek re-election for the third successive year. Their hopes rest on the new appointment of player-manager Laurie Brown , formerly an English amateur international, centre-half with Arsenal, Tottenham, and Norwich. What does it mean to be a football manager, to have one of the most precarious jobs in show business where success is measured in goals and failure means almost certain dismissal?

In 1945 Britain was investing £ 150 million a year in education. By 1968 the sum was £ 2,000 million. Every tax-payer can feel proud of his share in this rise in the education budget. But not every voter is aware of the appallingly low standard of education that prevailed in 1945. Nor is it widely known that today six children in ten leave school without an 0-level and that to reduce classes in Primary Schools to forty and in Secondary Schools to thirty we lack 42,000 trained teachers-now. Every child in Primary and Secondary School has a chance-sometimes it's an outside chance -of getting an education. It is only one chance in a lifetime. The present year, 1969, will be remembered as the year of the cuts; when for the first time in a quarter of a century, critics say, the government budgeted for a decline in educational standards -in a time of growing population in schools, colleges, and universities. This week Man Alive examines the arguments for and against the educational cuts with the Secretary of State for Education and Science, Edward Short-and those who seek to question the wisdom of the government policies.

Men with long hair, caftans, and sandals; girls without make-up, fierce with ideals, vocal with conviction. Beards and passion-sitar music and beads. Some of the symbols of revolution in 1969. People who want to opt out of the society most of us unquestioningly conform to. Men and women who reject the suburban life, the nine-to-five values, and the acceptance of governmental rules and social laws that the majority of us hardly ever challenge. But opt out to what? If they reject society as it is today, what would they have in its place? There are communities all over Britain, little bands of fervent believers who have rejected and are attempting to replace. The idea of escaping from the general rat-race is not new. Groups of people have been trying it for years. But in 1969 the way people go about it is sometimes different. With those who are trying today and those who saw it all happen yesterday Man Alive looks at the whys and wherefores of another way of life.

demonstrating-arguing with the police and authorities. The Squatters are a militant group, growing in size, who put homeless families into empty buildings-then barricade them in. They usually pick target property belonging to local councils to draw attention to their cause-the plight of the homeless. Cathy Come Home may have stirred the conscience of the nation, but more than two years later the situation has grown worse rather than better. Council waiting-lists have lengthened, the army of homeless has increased in size. Nobody denies the acuteness of the problem. But is the Squatters' way the best way to do something about it? Militant action certainly makes headlines but will it cure the condition? In the first of two programmes Man Alive examines the Squatters and how they operate.

Men and women prepared to take things into their own hands in order to get to grips with the increasing problem of the homeless. They make headlines for newspapers, noisy footage for news bulletins, and headaches for local authorities and police forces. They don'care. It's what they set out to do. They believe and hope that their activities will mushroom all over the country and they won'stop until they're satisfied that enough is being done for the homeless. But is their way the right way? Last week's Man Alive saw how they operate, who they're doing it for, and who it is they're fighting. This week the programme asks: can they hope to achieve success this way?

The first of three programmes about trouble in our universities Violence and shouting: waving placards and charging police-horses; headlines and loud hailers: the academic life sometimes seems more like a running riot. Puzzled parents, resentful taxpayers, worried university staff, and sixth-formers uncertainly facing an undergraduate future which may contain as many sit-downs as seminars. We hear the roar of student unrest, but does the noise make sense? Are there any words to listen to? What should a university education mean in 1969? With just a handful of parents, sixth-formers, students, and vice-chancellors (the men in the hot seats at universities) Man Alive tries to find out.

Second of three programmes about trouble in our universities Violence and shouting; waving placards and charging police-horses; headlines and loud hailers: the academic life sometimes seems more like a running riot. Puzzled parents, resentful taxpayers, worried university staff, and sixth-formers uncertainly facing an undergraduate future which may contain as many sit-downs as seminars. We hear the roar of student unrest, but does the noise make sense? Are there any words to listen to? What should a university education mean in 1969? With just a handful of parents, sixth-formers, students, and vice-chancellors (the men in the hot seats at universities) Man Alive tries to find out.

Last of three programmes about trouble in our universities Violence and shouting; waving placards and charging police-horses; headlines and loud hailers: the academic life sometimes seems more like a running riot. Puzzled parents, resentful taxpayers, worried university staff, and sixth-formers uncertainly facing an undergraduate future which may contain as many sit-downs as seminars. We hear the roar of student unrest, but does the noise make sense? Are there dny words to listen to? What should a university education mean in 1969? With just a handful of parents, sixth-formers, students, and vice-chancellors (the men in the hot seats at universities) Man Alive tries to find out.

If you're married with two children and with about £ 23 a week coming into the house you will already know all about the problems of spinning out money to make ends meet. And you are far from being alone in this-in fact, you're Mr. Average. The British national average wage is exactly ;E22 5s. 3d., the highest it's ever been. But this doesn'make you Midas, and living on it is nearly always a question of what can'be afforded, what has to go. How do you decide what it shall be? How do you sort out priorities? Man Alive looks at four families living their lives in very different ways and with only their pay-packet in common. When it comes to spending it they are poles apart, separated by attitudes and ambitions. Do you save, or live to the hilt? Would you consider HP? Is it moFe important to have a holiday or better clothes for your children? Can you ever own your own home? Is £ 23 a week a reasonable sum on which to bring up a family? What is the ' average ' life like?

A row has broken out about Commonwealth and immigrant doctors in British hospitals: an argument with all the overtones of being not so much about medicine as about colour. Critics challenge their competence as doctors and nurses in British hospitals. But senior medical men point out that Britain's elaborate health service couldn't operate on the basis of white manpower. More than a third of the doctors and nurses in British hospitals come from abroad. They come in search of training but have much to give as well as to receive. It would appear to be a fair exchange. But is it? Many training appointments in teaching hospitals seem closed to them and most must fill posts which white British doctors and nurses appear not to want. Is the row in our health service going to damage the relationship between immigrant doctors and British patients? Or is there a problem which should be brought out into the open and examined?

' We cannot blame anyone else, even the Government, if we drop each his own pinch of incense on the altar of Beelzebub ...' says Quintin Hogg-Member of Parliament, barrister, poet, and family man. Having condemned the individual as a sinner, he moves on to society: ' If the country lacks discipline, if it ceases to believe in decency, if it ceases to worship at the shrine of honesty and truth, if its women lack modesty and its men lack courage-it's no good laying the blame on ministers, or politicians, or parliaments.' Many, no doubt, would agree with the ex-Lord Hailsham. Others believe, no less firmly, that Quintin Hogg and his followers, though perhaps they are right in the diagnosis of society's ills, are wrong about the cures they prescribe. This week, in the MAN ALIVE studio Quintin Hogg discusses the morals, manners, and fashions prevalent in art and public and family life in Britain today -and explains the principles of Hogg's Honour.

Most people have a view of life in the country that doesn't match reality ... FACT: One farmworker in jour earns less than £ 13 a week (the minimum wage is only £ 12.8s.0d.) FACT: A peculiar wages permit system allows some farmers to have their workers' downgraded and pay them even less than this FACT: One-quarter of general farm workers with more than three children live below the official poverty level FACT: Because of the ' tied ' cottage system, some farm workers' do not even have complete job security and freedom (if a man loses his job he can lose his home, too) FACT: 35,000 men a year are getting out of farm work, leaving these conditions for jobs in the cities FACT: The National Union of Agricultural Workers frequently has its hands tied and seems helpless, partly because it has so few members and partly because its members are so scattered Tonight MAN ALIVE comes from the Old Crown Court, Dorchester, in which, 135 years ago, six men of the land who became known as the ' Tolpuddle Martyrs' were convicted for trying to organise a protest against farmworkers' pay and conditions. Their sentence, then, was transportation to Australia. And tonight MAN ALIVE asks: are farm workers still an oppressed minority a century and a half later?

The Hebrew word that means peace It's two years since the week of death and destruction in the Middle East now known to history as the Six Days War. But since the ceasefire nearly as many people have been killed in the shaky peace as during the war. And in the meantime Israel has entered her twenty-first year of independence-still fighting. As the politicians bargain and the death toll mounts, the strain on the ordinary people of Israel grows. If a nation is living with unease and fear, how do ordinary families react to the pressures? In Jerusalem the older children arrive earlier at school to search their classrooms for bombs. Shopping in city streets can end in disaster with a grenade explosion, a sniper's bullet, or a shell. On the border Kibbutzim armed patrols and dug-outs are still part of everyday life. No family has been untouched by death or casualty. But still the word you hear most is the daily greeting of the Israeli people—Shalom, peace. MAN ALIVE looks at the lives of Israeli families living under the stresses of that kind of peace today.

A third of the people who die in this country in the next twelve months will be killed by some form of heart failure or heart disease-200,000 men and women. The heart attack has become this country's biggest premature killer. More than cancer, bronchitis, and the other killers which we fear, death from heart failure is really the one we should consider now. It's the same story in all countries like ours where the pace takes its toll on the individual. In the United States more than a million and a half Americans will suffer a heart attack in the next twelve months. Six hundred thousand of them will die one a minute around the clock. Now there is hope that this toll can be reduced. New forms of treatment, if rushed into use immediately after the first attack, can save lives. In the States they are pioneering these new methods. But in this country we're not far behind (indeed, in some respects we may even be ahead). In two programmes MAN ALIVE looks first at the situation in America.

It's the biggest killer in the country. One-third of all the people who die do so from heart disease. In the next twelve months 200,000 people will become the victims of a heart attack. New methods are being used to try to cut the death toll, but the cost of saving life is high. In some hospitals in this country they have found a way-at a price. In one city they send the cardiac equipment to the victim by ambulance in order to cut down the delay that costs lives. It's become the safest place in the world to have a heart attack. The city is Belfast. But there are men—experts in medical investment-who ask: consider the cost. In the second of two programmes MAN ALIVE looks at the new methods and then, with the men whose job it is to save lives, asks: is it worth it?

At a reunion of No. 501 Squadron at RAF Kenley, surviving Battle of Britain pilots gather to swap stories and recall the events of 1940.

You see them in the street with their big boots, narrow braces and close-cropped hair - Skinheads. And their enemies: roaring into town on motorbikes, with German war insignia and swastikas pinned to their leather jackets - Hell's Angels. Two unorganised youth groups with one aim in common. They profess hate for the older generation and they're out to shock and disgust by any means. Both the press and the public condemn them as violent, antisocial and dangerous. Skinheads are blamed for football violence, train-wrecking and racial assaults; Hell's Angels for terrorising towns. Are such criticisms justified? Or are the wild ones of today the respectable family men of tomorrow? To find out, Man Alive met Skinheads, Hell's Angels, and their parents; listened - without condemning - in the hope that we all could learn. What they said was more than frank. (1969)