Man Alive

It can be the greatest pitfall of the social year. And it can be followed by a 12-month hangover. It's a month now since the paper-chains came down, but if your secretary hasn't spoken to you since, it's a fair bet that you had a good time at your office party. Traditionally, it's the one night of the year when the firm's hierarchical structure, that normally so rigidly holds sway, totters. Reporter Gillian Strickland and a Man Alive team took a typical office and filmed the preparations for the annual party, the spree itself, and the aftermath. Here is the answer to every question a stay-at-home wife has ever asked; and here is the party from differing points of view: the young secretary in her first job; the executive who doesn't want to drink with the people he works with; the lady in accounts who once knew a more elegant style of party giving - and the bosses who foot the bill.

A glimpse into the work of Radio One disk jockeys Tony Blackburn, Jimmy Young, Kenny Everett, Emperor Rosko and John Peel.

Wards are closing down - nurses are resigning - operating theatres lie unused - recruiting into the nursing profession has fallen dramatically. Symptomatic of the situation is a 20-bed gynaecological ward visited by the Man Alive team. In charge: one student nurse - 'There's only me there all night. I'm terrified; worried stiff in case something happens which I can't cope with.' Nursing is a vocation, but nurses today have to be technicians as well as angels of mercy. They may work for love, but they've had enough of platitudes. Now, they seek recognition in terms of hard cash.

It's where they have the TT races. It's where they use the birch on boys. It's been described as a wind-swept rock in the middle of the Irish Sea. From it, on one of its rare clear days, you can see England, Scotland and Ireland: the Isle of Man; in the middle of, but not part of, Great Britain. The Queen is the Lord of Man and is represented by a governor; Westminster looks after the foreign policy; but the Island is independent. It has its own language; its own people; its own traditions; and it makes its own laws. Income tax is 4s 3d in the pound; there are no estate or death duties; and it's a haven for tax dodgers and the retired.

One swallow doesn't make a summer, and one bad harvest can no longer be carried by a good one - or so the farmers say. Up to the end of the 1950s everyone thought that the farmer kept his pigs in the Rolls - that both animals and owners were fed with a silver spoon. Why now has the cacophony of the farmyard come to Whitehall? Is the farmers' protest a real one, or are they just joining the bandwagon of those demanding more money? Are there many earning fivepence an hour for a 100-hour week?

Did you know that one minute after midnight on your 18th birthday you can - without asking Mum or Dad - get married, sign a lease, raise a mortgage, buy consumer goods on H.P.? All because a number of middle-aged people - the Latey Committee - decided that 21 was much too late in the day for you to grow up. But how much does the Latey Committee know of the society you want to create - whether, indeed, you want any part of their adult world? Is it a privilege to be admitted or a pain in the neck?

We all pay lip service to good causes. We all say we want to help people less fortunate than ourselves. But if the chance presented itself on your doorstep, how would you react? What would you do if you heard of a plan to open a hostel for drug addicts or ex-prisoners in your road? People are often frightened-for their children, the old people, the value of their property-but at the same time admit that these people have got to live somewhere.

The film industry is in a state of crisis. The repercussions of the collapse of the American film industry has hit film production in this country pretty hard. Studios are closing, audiences are shrinking. In the middle of it all a few films are making huge profits - much to the surprise of the film industry itself. Films like Easy Rider have not only broken all the rules of how a film should be made, but have broken box office records too. Is the public voting with its head, choosing and discriminating among films it wants to see? Has the family entertainment film died? Are Mum and Dad sitting at home watching the telly while the youngsters go to the cinema to see only the films which reflect their own interests and concerns? Is the present crisis, in fact, a healthy shake-out leading to the production of better, more intelligent and less costly films

Half the children born now will be, sooner or later, injured in a road accident. One in 50 will be killed. For more than half a century the car has brought not only pleasure but also injury, death and untold suffering to millions. We are involved in a world epidemic of slaughter on the roads that every years kills 150,000 and maims five million people. The prevention of this carnage has become one of the major problems of our time. But short of making it a crime to own or drive a car, is there anything which can be done dramatically to reduce death and destruction on our roads?

Every year in Britain 370,000 people are injured or killed in car crashes - more than the population of a city like Bristol. If these casualties were to happen in one place at one time they would shock the nation into urgent action to prevent such a catastrophe ever happening again. But because they are spread over 365 days and thousands of miles of roads, few people appear to take any notice - or to care. Last week Man Alive looked at the causes of road accidents. This week we investigate one of the weapons available to fight death on the roads - the law. How effective is the law in preventing road accidents and does it adequately protect the victims? Are motoring offenders criminals and should they be treated as such?

Dick Gregory is America's best-known black comedian. He is also a civil rights campaigner who uses satire to put across views no less militant than those of any demonstrator. He's also a brave man. Asked to lecture to a racially mixed audience at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, he knew the risks - and was honest enough to confess his fears. But he went ahead, and didn't so much lecture as harangue his audience, devoting his address to what he calls 'the moral pollution of the country,' jibing at American history texts, television commercials, and the attitudes of white liberals who support the black cause The programme tonight looks at Gregory's life in Chicago, his involvement in satire and civil rights, but devotes most of its time to his address in Alabama.

In Holland a row blows up about celibacy when a handful of young priests refuse to accept ordination unless the obligatory vow to remain celibate is removed. The bishops in charge (like the Bishop of Haarlem, above) have recommended a new approach to celibacy in face of shrinking congregations, dwindling numbers in the priesthood, and an increasing sense, among the five million Dutch catholics, that the Roman Catholic Church is losing step with the 20th century. The Vatican has remained stern. But in Holland there are priests who have married; and others who want to; and the movement for change is strong.

Sister Anita Caspary of California led her fellow sisters of the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in a move for change. They dropped their habits and veils - and started an almighty row which ended in their leaving the Roman Catholic Church. Father Charles Davis became a Catholic cause celebre when he left his vocation and married. In Holland other priests are doing the same. The row about birth control, about the Latin Mass, and the problem of shrinking congregations and dwindling numbers in the priesthood splits the Catholic Church with debate: a debate concerned with the role of Catholicism in the 20th century, the position of the Pope, and the authority of the Vatican.

For some it is the fashion today to insult British policemen with labels like 'pigs' and 'fuzz.' Other voices utter noises about law and order - sterner law, more order. Slogans don't help the police. But it is true that there is, today, a crisis of confidence between the British public and our police, traditionally the best in the world. Many of us suffer from wanting to have our cake and eat it, too. We want an orderly, safe society, but we resent the slightest loss of individual freedom as part of the price for this.

Today many people are demanding more freedom, more protest, bigger demonstrations, lighter sentences in the courts, a reformative attitude to crime, a tolerance of youthful violence. Others, alarmed by increasing crime and contempt for authority, demand sterner laws more sternly enforced. Between these opposing factions, often maligned by both, stand the police - the men we pay to keep the peace. Traditionally the police have been outside politics but more and more, often against their will, they are being drawn into the political arena. How will the relationship between police and public develop from the present crisis of confidence on both sides? Tonight, in the second of two programmes on law and order, Man Alive looks at the police, through the eyes of the public as well as the men on the beat - and with outside broadcast cameras, brings both sides together

It's easy to find reasons for leaving the North - all too often the work is dirty and hard, and unemployment pay never yet paid off a mortgage. But when you're safely installed in a warm Southern factory, doubling your money on a conveyer belt, the chances are you're less likely to find a neighbour who's only a cuppa away, or the warmth of the clubs and pubs. This, then, is the dilemma facing those who move South: is more brass and less muck a fair exchange for what they leave behind? Would you swap your friends for a fiver a week more?

In the first of two programmes Man Alive was allowed to move freely and speak face to face with the prisoners themselves. And this programme is the viewpoint - often bitter and cynical - of the men inside. Next week, some of the same men are transferred to a new experimental prison. 1,500 men serving sentences which range from 12 months to life; for crimes which vary from motoring offences to murder. Men crammed, often three to a cell in a Victorian prison, originally built in 1851, to house only 700 Men who say they are treated like animals. Men who say that, for them, prison is only punishment. Men made bitter, angry, apathetic -men likely to come back again to serve yet more time inside. Rule number one of the prison service is to encourage convicted men to 'lead a good and useful life.' But how can anybody do this in conditions like those in Wandsworth?

Gale was beautiful, intelligent and - according to everyone who knew her-had much to offer; everything to live for. Recently, aged 19 and a drug addict, she was found dead in the basement of a derelict house in Chelsea. Harold Williamson and a Man Alive team first met her when making a programme about people who had been brought up in children's homes.

The Home Secretary described Coldingley Industrial Prison as 'a leap into the future' when he opened this £1,600,000 prison in the middle of the Surrey stockbroker belt, recently. To some of the men inside, familiar with grim, overcrowded, old-fashioned prisons, and even to some of the staff, it may seem just like a step in the right direction rather than a radical leap forward. But it is a change, and a dramatic one. Even though it only holds 300 men, one per cent of the prison population, it may at least point the way ahead in prison treatment. Do we lock men up as punishment, or should we rehabilitate them as citizens? And is Coldingley the answer? What more should be done?

In the second of two programmes Man Alive follows a boy on his release, and with those in the prison and aftercare service responsible for the system, asks: what goes wrong? A sentence to borstal - anything from six months to two years - is meant to be not a punishment but a training for the outside world. It is often said that the best borstal boys are the worst citizens; that borstal training is acclimatisation for institutional life, not preparation for the world outside. The high failure rate in borstals today may be a reflection on what happens inside a borstal, but it's also a criticism of what goes wrong after a boy is released. One probation officer in tonight's programme describes borstals as 'a method of disposal to ease the conscience.' He knows that six out of 10 borstal trainees are in trouble again within three years of release.

It wasn't even a name that could be found on a map. But the word 'Poseidon' remained in the headlines for weeks on end. In the waterless outback of Australia prospectors working for the-Poseidon Company found huge nickel deposits, and Stock Exchange speculators caused shares to rocket from a few pence in value to as high as £124. What happened to the people out there -the prospectors, the mining men, the inhabitants of the almost deserted ghost towns left behind when the gold - mining boom petered out? Now all of them may be in at the beginning of a new kind of Klondike, from the girls in the unofficial, but thriving brothels of Kalgoorlie, to the old men who've seen it all before. In one outback town of less than 500 people there are already nine millionaires including Amy Pilletti, once a cook in a local hotel. There have been gun-fights and violence - all part of the problems caused when you want a share in Poseidon.

When a couple find they can't have children it's always been a difficult decision to make: to adopt or not. But now they may have to ask themselves another agonising question: would they take on a problem baby. Increasingly these days the only children left waiting in the nurseries are those labelled difficult to place-because they're the wrong colour or the wrong age or physically or emotionally handicapped. Man Alive looks at the adoption process focusing on couples who have taken the decision to give a home to problem babies; and, in a careful look at the adoption system, discovers both failings and implications for the 70s.

Two hundred years ago James Cook, a Royal Naval Lieutenant from Great Britain, set foot in Botany Bay to be greeted with spears and antagonism from the inhabitants of the new Australia - the aborigines. Today, decimated by murder, rape, brutality, and white man's diseases, the aborigines are far fewer in number than the contented nomadic tribes which originally roamed the island continent they called their own. Earlier this year, when the Queen witnessed a folksy re-enactment of Cook's first landing in Botany Bay, the black militants among Australia's aborigines simultaneously performed their own ceremony on the opposite shore. They threw wreaths into the ocean to mark the death of their tribes and to draw attention to the difficulties in the way of their hopes and ambitions to become as Australian as the descendants of the convicts and the settlers from a score of other countries. Jeremy James and a Man Alive team discovered in Australia concern as well as apathy; a problem for a gove

In this programme, the first of two, James Astor and a Man Alive film team look at two borstals, one closed, the other open. Between the ages of 15 and 21 young offenders can be sentenced by courts to spend anything between six months and two years in a borstal. No longer described as punishment - instead always labelled training - it is nevertheless a painful experience for an increasing number of young people. Today there are nearly six thousand young men and women in borstals. More than half of them will be in trouble again after their release - three-quarters of them reconvicted within three years. This high failure rate is seen by critics to show up a system out of step with the needs of inmates and which reflects badly on new ideas in the prison service. It may be called 'training.' It's still a sentence-in which a young offender is taken away from the community; even locked up in a cell.

Four students were shot dead, more wounded, when National Guardsmen opened fire during a campus demonstration against American involvement in Cambodia. And a small university town, tragically, makes world headlines. The shootings at Kent State University hardened attitudes that had been there all along. Militant students now see the enemy as coming out into the open. Diehard townspeople talk of a chance to 'finish the job' the National Guard started and put down what they call 'the freaks and hippies' for good. Both university and town authorities waver between repression and conciliation. Moderates on both sides have become uncertain. Above all, the situation in Kent underlines the failure of understanding between generations: between rebellious youngsters and anxious parents, between radical students and conservative townspeople. In the first of four programmes John Percival reports on the tensions underlying the present mood of America.

Jo Yablonski, his wife and his daughter, were killed in their Clarkesville home. Yablonski, a trade union leader in this troubled coal-mining area, stood out as a lone voice against unjust management and corrupt trade union practices. He was silenced by a gang of hired killers in the most savage moment of a long and angry history of industrial strife and corruption. Sympathisers for his cause fight on against callous employers and a suspect union. Wild-cat strikers picketing for the resignation of their own union president carry guns. Union officials protest their innocence, and Yablonski's grown-up sons insist on their guilt. The mood on both sides is one of anger and fear; and in the middle the vast majority of mineworkers who want only to earn their money in peace.

The middle-class white liberals of Sausalito, California, were proud of the integrated schools where their own children could grow up side by side with black children of the nearby ghetto of Marin City. Then a black militant, Sidney Walton, was appointed principal of the local junior high school. He distributed his own book with an opening picture of himself, guerrilla-clad, pointing a gun over a pile of schoolbooks and captioned 'books or guns?' Faced with the realities of black power, white parents feared for their children. Walton was fired. Liberal school-board members were forced to resign, parents withdrew children from school. A liberal showpiece experiment ended as a racial confrontation, bringing to the surface deep, fundamental fears in the white middle-class community. The row goes on. The mood is one of tension - and despair for the future.

In three films so far John Percival and a Man Alive film team have examined three aspects of a society, feared by many to be on the brink of chaos. Top Washington lawyers like Joseph Rauh strive to bring about an end to corruption in trades unions, to produce trust between management and men. Black militant leaders like Sidney Walton despair of ever, legally, obtaining a fair deal for Negroes, and now look forward only to revolution and violence. Young student radicals like Elaine Wellin believe the voice of campus protest will be silenced, if necessary by bullets, before the administration pays it heed. Government advisers like economist Professor J.K. Galbraith fear for the future unless there is action soon. In the studio these people, and leaders of Nixon's administration, discuss the way ahead.

If at first... try, try and try again. But some people go on beyond the point that most of us consider reasonable, seem never to know the meaning of the word failure, although they seem unlikely to taste success. Are they deceiving themselves? Are they really born failures - rather than stubborn triers? James Astor reports on Havergal Brian, a composer with a head full of symphonies; on Mrs Miriam Hargrave, refusing to accept defeat after 39 driving tests and passing at the 40th. And on singer Oriel Clair, refusing to accept a score of refusals.

It begins in London's Kings Road, New York's Greenwich Village, Toronto's Market Street, Amsterdam's Dam Square. It goes all the way through Istanbul, Tehran, and Kabul to the East. For some it ends in contemplation on the Ganges or meditation in Khatmandu. But for others it may lead to drug addiction-in Delhi, among the drifting hippy communes of Asia. For too many it ends in repatriation, disease, even death. The hippy trail is more than a journey, it's an idea; people sometimes looking for new values, more often simply opting out, hoping for short cuts to a Nirvana that does not exist. Jeremy James and a Man Alive film unit followed the hippy trail to India and Nepal. But their journey brought them to London where the trail has finally and perhaps tragically ended for an 18-year-old girl they met in Delhi.

They call themselves Gypsies - others call them tinkers, robbers, tax-dodgers, metal spivs, and a dozen other angry names. For centuries they drifted to the West Midlands to find winter quarters. But three years ago one local council decided that its people had had enough. The tinkers would have to go. Since then the council - Walsall in Staffordshire - has been fighting a running war. Now the council has decided to make a final stand. They voted 41-1 to reject a new parliamentary law ordering them and other authorities to provide sites for travellers. Other councils are coming to their support. Anti-tinker action groups have been formed. Now the government is considering action against the councils. Man Alive brings both sides together in Walsall to ask the question - where can they go?

Smuggled out of South Africa, 'The End of the Dialogue' is a powerful documentary shot by five black members of the Pan Africanist Congress. They, and the people taking part, risked their lives and liberty, for under South African laws they could have been arrested and charged under the 'Sabotage' or 'Terrorism' Acts. Commentators and businessmen go to South Africa, return and tell us about apartheid, but rarely are we told how it feels to be black in South Africa. We all know about apartheid: 19 per cent white population ruling 81 per cent black. Cold statistics like: South Africa is responsible for nearly 50 per cent of the total number of executions in the world; and South Africa's daily prison population 1968/69-whites 3,000, Africans and others 78,000. Cold statistics - until you see this film.

Whether we like it or not, the volume of jet aircraft traffic screeching over our heads is going to increase and go on increasing for many years to come. It is undeniable that aircraft are great money-spinners and dollar earners - London Airport handles more international traffic than any other airport in the world - but for those living near airports jet aircraft noise has reached almost unbearable proportions. Conversation stops; telephone calls are impossible; industry, hospitals, and schools are affected; radio and television sets are drowned out. And as air travel gets cheaper and easier, and airports all over the country expand and runways are extended, thousands more who once lived in peace and quiet find themselves under the flight path of the jet-age giants. But is the noise absolutely necessary? How serious a hazard to our health is it? Do the airlines respect the noise limits imposed? Can jet engines be gagged without ruining performance? Is sufficient being done to control

Nowadays it is difficult to tell who are the New Rich - or the New Poor. Henry Taroni, for example, has dirty hands and a noisy Birmingham scrap metal yard. But he's probably worth nearly a million. Or Louis Green, selling blankets from a barrow in the East End, who picks up £100 for a morning's work. He stays in bed for most of the other six and a half days a week. On the other hand, there are the New Poor, who despite their clean suits and their respectable worthwhile Jobs have been left behind by the affluent society. People like Frank Beveridge, a Ministry clerk, trying to bring up a family on about £24 a week. Or Frank Tebbutt, who gave up a well-paid position as a surveyor to run a charity's animal rescue home. Hunter Davies wrote a book about the New Rich and the New Poor, called The Other Half. Now Jeremy James and a Man Alive film team bring the book to television.

This week, in the first of two programmes, Man Alive examines the work of Community Relations Officers in the field, and the attitudes of immigrants to them. Race relations in this country today is a growth industry. Books surveys, committees, trusts, regulations - abound. Tough immigrant controls on one hand are said to betray a fear of future racial strife. On the other hand good intentions towards immigrants, particularly black immigrants, are expressed in the Community Relations Commission. This was established by the Race Relations Act in 1968 and charged with a wide brief: 'To encourage harmonious Community Relations and to encourage measures adopted for that purpose by others'. The intentions are good, but how effective is the Commission?

When the Government nationalised the race relations industry, great hopes were raised in the community, black and white. There are, today, 80 committees, 50 community relations officers working in the field. There is, at national level, the Community Relations Commission. It has been bitterly criticised. And passionately defended. But what are the facts? Are the Commission's resources adequate for the job? Has the Commission won the confidence of the immigrant community? The Commission's chairman Frank Cousins has resigned. Mark Bonham Carter takes over. This week those now concerned with race and community relations debate the Commission's future.

At this time of the year loneliness can be particularly painful. Loneliness isn't something that affects just the poor; or the old; or the deserted. You can be alone in the middle of a noisy family; surrounded by work colleagues; in a crowd of friends. Money, youth, and success aren't necessarily any protection. Christmas and New Year make it all seem worse -almost too much to live through. In our increasingly crowded and increasingly noisy society the problem of loneliness is also increasing-Why? And what should we do?