Man Alive

Stuntman Bob Woodham has ' died ' for a living countless times in films like You Only Live Twice, Adam's Woman and Fahrenheit 451. He works with. a team of stuntmen. If it's not Cleopatra or The Guns of Navarone, it's the latest Western, war film or action movie: a 100ft jump from a cliff on to rocks below; a motor bike smashing sidelong into a car at 30 mph; a horse dragging a ' cowboy ' along the ground by his foot at 20 mph; a car crash and two men are thrown through a windscreen ablaze.

John Wise, Manchester signalman, has had a lifetime of dull, boring jobs. At school his abilities largely escaped notice and he was written off when he failed the 11-plus. Now, 31 years later, he has proved he deserved a better chance - he's won a place at university. Jimmy May left school just two years ago. He wanted to be an artist and some of his drawings were published in a book about London's East End. But he's ended up in a butcher's shop and he hates every minute. They say that everyone, these days, has the chance to get ahead. But the Jimmy Mays of the world still fear they are born to fail.

On the north coast of Anglesey, construction has already begun on a super-tanker oil terminal for Shell. It is a £50-million development which promises unexpected wealth, new jobs and financial security. But there is a price to pay for this hope of a rosy future. The Anglesey Defence Action Group claim that the price is too high; that there is a grave risk of oil spillage on holiday beaches; that an area of outstanding beauty will be destroyed. The oil men say the terminal is ' in the nation's interest '; that it is necessary to meet the increasing need for oil products in the Midlands and the North West. Harold Williamson examines the arguments for both sides, and Desmond Wilcox chairs a town meeting with oil men, planners and the people of Anglesey.

In just over three years, the cost of the average house in Britain has doubled from £ 5,082 in June 1970 to f 10,423. At the same time, the cost of a mortgage to pay for that house has rocketed from just under E32 a month to over E82 a month, before tax relief. These are vital statistics which have shattered the dreams of millions of young married couples. Now many people who stretched themselves to buy a home of their own, three years ago, are having to lower their standard of living, sell off the family car or have the telephone taken away to pay the mortgage. Twenty years ago Harold Mac millan said that every family in Britain was entitled to a chance to own its home and heralded the birth of Britain as a major property-owning democracy. Today that democracy is crumbling. What do the next 20 years hold? Desmond Wilcox talks to the people in trouble; to those who believe they know ithe answers and to those who should know.

There were 18,000 murders in the United States in 1972. More Americans were murdered in three years than were killed in combat in Vietnam in ten years. A remarkable film report by NBC examines the reasons for these terrifying statistics. It examines how the seeds of violence germinate and grow in the poor areas-the ghettos; why it is that murder is spreading to the middle-class suburbs; why the murder rate is nearly twenty-five times greater than in this country. Jim Hartz reports from Denver, Colorado, a city the size of Manchester, on the homicide division -the murder squad.

Sometimes today seems just too much: mid-winter, industrial disputes and the fuel crisis may seem to conspire to make the 20th century most unattractive. Some dislike it so much they take every opportunity to escape into the past and spend their Sunday afternoons at Newbury, Worcester or Edgehill re-fighting the battles of the Civil War. On a good weekend as many as 2,000 troops and 10,000 spectators turn out. The Knights and Ladies of the Round Table of Camelot prefer their escapism even further back. JEREMY JAMES and a Man Alive team go back with them all to the good old days.

In this, the first of a two-part enquiry into prisons and the alternatives to prison, JEREMY JAMES talks to the men who run Lincoln to find out why they do the job; how they measure success. If you are sentenced to a term of imprisonment it is to a local prison - like Lincoln - that you will probably go first. There you will meet violent men, petty thieves, those looking for warmth and shelter and the people serving the longest sentences of all, the screws - prison officers.

Prison is the traditional and simple answer to a big problem. Yet, as last week's programme showed, because of overcrowding and under-staffing prison seldom encourages inmates ' to lead a good and useful life.' No one denies that for many of the 37,000 men behind bars there must be a better solution and now there are a few cautious experimental alternatives under way. In the second of two programmes JOHN PITMAN looks at some of these alternatives, including a hostel for men who have been in trouble most of their lives; an experiment in which boys - some with records of criminal violence -are working with disturbed children; a scheme sentencing convicted criminals to social work. In the studio JEREMY JAMES discusses other alternatives which are available and asks how many prisons could be closed if there were sufficient alternatives.

Nearly 1,000 bikes used to leave the Triumph works at Meriden, near Coventry, every week, most of them for export. They represented 80% of the British motorbike industry and were a massive dollar earner. Then management decided to close the factory and 1,700 men and women lost their jobs. But more than half of them refused to go. They staged a sit-in, organised a 24-hour picket and began a fight to take over the factory and run it themselves. For five months they have held out, their savings gone, their redundancy pay ended. What makes factory workers take desperate measures to save their jobs? How is their morale affected as the weeks drag on? Harold Williamson and a Man Alive film team went behind the picket lines, into the now silent factory.

No self-respecting dog would dream of missing Crufts. And so it was that 7,877 of them, with their owners, came together at Olympia last month for the 78th show -and ' Burtonswood Bossy Boots,' the St Bernard, beat them all. JOHN PITMAN was there, too, with a Man Alive film crew following the trail of owners and their dogs in the week leading up to the big show. The ' doggy people ' - as they call themselves - are a mixed bag. There's a retired company director and his wife who live in a big house with Great Danes; two bachelors who breed Cavalier King Charles spaniels; a little lady with a big poodle; and a pretty teenager who, for the moment, prefers Afghans to boy-friends. But they all have one thing in common: an incredible love of dogs and dog shows. ' Other people think we must be mad,' says one. ' And I suppose we are.'

An occasional series of interviews in which Desmond Wilcox talks to the men with power behind the scenes. Sir William Armstrong , KCB, MVO, Head of the Home Civil Service and Permanent Secretary to the. Civil Service Department. His decisions vitally affect the man in the dole queue and the man at 10 Downing Street. Recently there has been much discussion about who runs the country. Many believe that much of that power lies with anonymous civil servants; critics believe too much power, both in major policy decisions and in day-to-day contact with members of the public.

FINBARR NOLAN is the seventh son of a seventh son. All his life people have believed he has miraculous powers of healing. Their belief has lifted him from a rain-sodden Irish village into a world of Jaguars and Jensens. His income has been assessed by the Irish tax authorities at half a million pounds in four years. JACK pizzey and a Man Alive team went to the village where Finbarr began healing almost as soon as he was born 21 years ago, and accompanied him to London for his first healing clinics outside Ireland. He set up shop in a West End night club along with a show biz PR man and a business manager and the sick came to him with everything from catarrh to cancer.

If the planners announce tomorrow that next door to you is the ideal spot for an international airport, a six-lane motorway, or an oil terminal, what can you do about it? The official answer is that there are safeguards. In an investigation into the effectiveness of these safeguards Man Alive looks at public enquiries which have found in favour of objectors, only to be overruled by the Government. JACK PIZZEY and a Man Alive team also go to the Highlands of Scotland, where the oil boom is threatening to turn quiet lochs into factory sites-and examine the anatomy of another dispute which has just ended: a dispute over a new runway at Edinburgh's Turnhouse Airport. Objectors to the plan invoked all the safeguards and overthrew the plan at a public enquiry. But still the plan is going ahead and they believe it was a case of 'heads they win and tails you lose.'

It could happen to anyone. It has to 26 people at Danesbury Hospital. All of them once lived normal, active and healthy lives until illness or accident paralysed them. Most of them are still young. All know they will never get better; most know they can only get worse. Diseases like multiple sclerosis destroy marriages, break up families, bring financial disaster. Yet despite the anger and resentment at the unfairness of it all, there is a mood of courage and tenacity - even optimism.

Twenty years ago this week, on 17 May 1954, the first shot was fired in the American blacks' war for civil rights, not on the riot-torn street of some northern city but in the United States Supreme Court. In what has become known simply as the Brown Case, Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled that segregation was unconstitutional. It was a shattering blow to the Deep South, leading directly to the freedom riders, murder, riots and the rise of Martin Luther King. Now, 20 years later, to the wry delight of many Southerners, the civil rights battle has moved through the scorched ghettoes of the mid-60s race riots to the northern cities in general and Detroit in particular. This summer, the Supreme Court will pass judgment on a case in Detroit that will be as significant in 1974 as Brown was in 1954. Jeremy James has been to Alabama in the Deep South and Detroit in the Deep North to examine the first 20 years of American civil rights and asks - how far have the blacks really come and how far ha

There are many immigrant communities in Britain today. They have brought with them to this country their own gods, their own way of life. Should they retain their cultural identities or should they become absorbed into the wider community? Enoch Powell believes that integration means ' To become, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable.' Do people have the right to be different? How different? Even at the cost of offending others? In America, as last week's Man Alive showed, Martin Luther King's dream of the lion lying down with the lamb - and whites being brothers to blacks - is still only a dream. Is it nearer being fulfilled here? JEREMY JAMES talks to three boys who are determined to be different-a Jew, a Sikh and a West Indian - and also listens to the reactions of white British students.

With the raising of the school-leaving age, more and more children are taking part-time jobs. At the last count there were over half a million children at work. Many children benefit from the experience work brings - and the extra money. But others are exploited by thoughtless employers in jobs which are potentially dangerous - even lethal. As a safeguard every child of school age needs a permit to work. But few parents know about work permits - fewer still care. A jumble of local byelaws - and a shortage of those whose job it is to enforce them - adds to the confusion. JEANNE LA CHARD talks to parents, to the children who have the jobs and to those who try to enforce the law.

In the first of a two-part enquiry into the treatment of mental illness - the 'Cinderella of the Social Services' - Gordon Snell looks at Middlewood Hospital and its staff, struggling to provide some sort of psychiatric first-aid. Next week's programme looks at new approaches to the definition and treatment of mental illness. Middlewood Hospital on the outskirts of Sheffield was built 100 years ago as the South Yorkshire Lunatic Asylum. Today it is a typical psychiatric hospital: too big, understaffed, housing many patients, who are only there because they have nowhere else to go. There are 1,300 patients in Middlewood, many of them living in 50 bed, long-stay wards, staffed only by two overworked nurses. Each year over 150,000 people are admitted to mental hospitals. Most will be treated in institutions like Middlewood.

A growing number of psychiatrists and patients are turning their backs on traditional concepts of mental illness. They are asking: Who is mad? What is madness? Many believe that big psychiatric hospitals, like Middlewood Hospital in Sheffield - the subject of last week's Man Alive - are not the answer. This week Gordon Snell talks to the people who are working inside and outside the National Health Service to find new ways of treating patients and to those who are going out into the community to tackle people's problems in their homes.

The sinking pound and fuel surcharges mean fewer people going abroad, and the new motorway marching steadily westwards from Bristol makes Cornwall that much more accessible to weekenders from London and the Midlands. The result is ringing cash registers and prosperity for some. Others believe that Cornwall is being destroyed.

In the Republic of Ireland, women who have played a traditionally passive role are beginning to rebel. They believe it's a myth that all Irish eyes are smiling in a land of happy families. They point to mothers of enormous families who are denied the Pill, unmarried mothers who are forced to have their babies adopted, deserted wives who have little redress. One of the leaders of the campaign, journalist Nuala Fennell , has just written a book Irish Marriage, How Are You? It takes a hard, bitter look at the way women have to suffer in a male dominated society.

Cathy is 19 and lives in derelict houses ... Kevin, 21, shares a dormitory with strangers in a government reception centre ... Pat, 25, sleeps on the floor of a disused factory with down and outs ... John is 17 and a male prostitute ... and Bill and Phoebe, newly married, spend every day looking for odd jobs and anywhere to sleep. When you're young it's still possible to believe that the streets of London are paved with gold. All of them came to the capital expecting a very small miracle-a job and a place to call home. All met disillusion. Harold Williamson and a Man Alive team investigate the growing problem of young hopefuls in London and the pitfalls that can make them destitute-and worse - in a few weeks.

By law, anyone who looks after a child for more than two hours a day and gets paid for it must be registered by the local authorities. But because there aren't enough registered minders, every morning something like 100,000 babies are delivered into the care of illegal back-street minders. Registration, however, is no longer the main issue. What is now being questioned are the long-term effects of the baby-minding system. John Pitman has talked to both legal and illegal minders and working mothers whose children are at risk because they can't afford to be too choosy about who minds their babies.

Truancy has become an alarming problem. No one knows how many children ' bunk off' school. Some experts put the figure as high as half a million a day. The teacher shortage, raising the school leaving age, overcrowded classrooms, difficult family backgrounds, all contribute to the problem. In the London borough of Tower Hamlets - where more than 600 schoolchildren are absent every day-two teachers have set up an experimental school for truants aged 8-15 in a crypt under a church. Experts who realise that the juvenile court is not an answer to the problem are watching with interest as this tiny experimental school grows. Already there is a 100% regular attendance; now the children are pleading for the school to stay open at weekends.

When 27-year-old Alexa Scott-Plummer's father died in a hunting accident leaving to his only daughter a Scottish baronial mansion and 1,000 acres of land, there was a problem: Alexa preferred living in London. So Sunderland Hall was put up for sale. The asking price: half a million pounds. A buyer was found, so Alexa's mother and grandmother must leave the Hall. And the servants, and the farm manager, and the groom; and the shepherd and the tractor driver - all now stand to lose their jobs and their homes. For a whole happily feudal community it is an end to a 300-year-old way of life.

With the collapse of Court Line filling the headlines, few people have noticed that a life assurance company has also gone down -the first in 100 years. Nation Life was just one of the companies run by WILLIAM STERN , now in trouble; part of a £200-million empire which stretched from banking to property, built up with borrowed money-perhaps from your bank, life assurance company, or pension fund. Paul Griffiths , for Man Alive, looks at what happened and asks William Stern what went wrong?

The day at the seaside is a living British tradition celebrated by millions of city dwellers every year on cheerful expeditions to resorts all round the coast, from Brighton to Scarborough, from Bournemouth to Rothesay. The name in the lettered rock changes from one place to another, but the flavour is the same. Jack Pizzey , and a Man Alive team, have been at Margate observing that British institution - the Day Trip. For the family with kids -the youngest hadn' seen the sea before - it's the beach; for the pensioners it's the pub. the deckchair and the memories; for the teenage working girls it's bars, discos and big-dippers.

Every week more than 30 million people read their ' local rag.' Jeremy James and a Man Alive team evaluate the changes with a look at two weeklies. The Bedfordshire Times is now technologically more advanced than most national papers and its former reporter FRANK BRANSTON won the Provincial Journalist of the Year Award for his investigative Stories. The Craven Herald and Pioneer celebrates its centenary at Skipton, Yorkshire, this week. It is the traditional weekly: still with adverts on the front page, a corps of voluntary correspondents and its editor, JOHN MITCH -ELL, at 75 has been with the paper for 50 years.

Every Sunday brings a fresh crop of newspaper headlines about 'football hooligans.' Society is outraged and perplexed. Parents are concerned for the safety of their children. Kieran Prendiville charts the rise and fall of the ' bovver boys' and, at Queens Park Rangers' training ground DESMOND wilcox attempts to find reasons for the violence.

Dr William Masters and his wife Virginia Johnson , the pioneers of sex therapy, estimate that 50 per cent of married couples in America have sex problems which could lead to divorce. In Britain there are no statistics but, say Masters and Johnson, ' even if it's only a tenth as high, you'd still have a major problem.' Sex therapy is now big business in America. And since anybody can call themselves a sex therapist, clinics are mushrooming - much to the concern of reputable doctors who are worried about charlatans cashing in and causing more harm than good. John Pitman reports on 'the newest profession' and asks what we can learn from the American experience as sex therapy arrives in Britain.

Lower Broughton, a derelict area of Salford, housing nearly 800 families, is one of the worst slums in Britain, according to 'Shelter.' But in this country more than a million families exist in housing officially classed as unfit. A further three million homes lack basic amenities. Harold Williamson reports from Lower Broughton on the struggle for human survival against inhuman odds. Is the problem too big for local government to handle?

Until recently the dockside area of Pillgwenlly in Newport, South Wales - known locally as ' Pill ' - was a proud and colourful working class community. Now the council is committed to demolishing ' Pill ' as quickly as possible. A recent Government White Paper drew attention to the ' massive and unacceptable disruption of communities' brought about by comprehensive redevelopment. Jeanne La Chard talks to the residents who feel that many of the old streets could and should be saved.

In the United States only one beauty contest really matters-Miss America. JOHN PITMAN for Man Alive looks at American competitions beginning with the La Petite Miss. This year the winner was quite old - five. She confidently explained to the judges what she wants to be when she grows up: Miss America. Miss America isn'just another bathing beauty competition. Miss America is beautiful, truthful and wholesome. Miss America is the symbol of all that America possesses. All the good things that is.

Earlier this year, in a remarkable film about Danesbury Hospital in Hertfordshire, HAROLD WILLIAMSON looked at the plight of 26 people, all once active and healthy until illness or accident paralysed them. The courage of these patients was extraordinary, but the film could offer little hope. However, it did evoke an enormous response from people anxious to know what more can be done. Now DESMOND WILCOX talks to leading research scientists, Alf Morris mp, Minister for the Disabled, and the disabled themselves with strong views as to how their lives could be improved.

Ever since the first council tenants moved into the first tower blocks there have been growing noises of disappointment, even shouts of protest. But still there are more tower blocks under construction; and there are two million people already living high above the ground. It has now been established that the young mothers ' up there' tend to be depressed; tranquillised; imprisoned with frustrated children, cut off from play space; frightened by the vandalism and crime. What's to be done about it? On film, JACK PIZZEY goes up to the 20th floor to meet some of the families, and DESMOND WiLCOX brings them face to face with planners and politicians to see if together they can find some answers.

Eighteen months ago, a two-man team clandestinely shot a film in South Africa and smuggled it to this country. The result, Last Grave at Dimbaza, was labelled a ' spy' film by the South African Embassy; but neverthless it aroused great interest at the National Film Theatre and at Cannes. This year it won the Committed Film Award at Grenoble. Tonight, for the first time in this country, its message reaches a wider audience; and in response to an invitation from Man Alive, the South African Embassy shows a film of its own in reply: Black Man Alive-The Facts. The two films represent remarkably different viewpoints on the conditions for black people in South Africa. In the last few weeks South Africa has felt the threats of expulsion from the UN and a new regime in neighbouring Mozambique. Prime Minister Vorster has promised dramatic changes in the next few months and Dr Kaunda has hailed a recent speech by Mr Vorster as ' the voice of reason for which Africa has been waiting.' Tonight Man

"You can't put talented children in the same category as others. They have to give up so much to achieve their ambitions. It's a terrible dedication." So says the music professor teaching 11-year-old Alison Baker, a would-be concert pianist who has sacrificed the life of a normal child in order to become a star. John Pitman talks to three talented children - Alison and two 12-year-olds: Craig Maitland who wants to be a champion skater and Fiona Coull who wants to be an Olympic swimmer. All three are completely dedicated and have great potential. But, as the experts point out, talent in children so young can burn itself out. And not for some years will they know whether the price they are paying is going to be worth it in the end.