Man Alive

Mostly they are young girls on the brink of adolescence. They begin to diet and for a while are happy to be fashionably slim. But they don't stop there - they can't. They eat less and less until they are skinny, then emaciated, and ultimately skeletal. The girls who are not caught in time, in one of the strangest ironies of our affluent age, can die of starvation. What is this strange obsession that turns intelligent articulate girls into obsessive non-eaters? Doctors have a name for it-anorexia nervosa. But do they have a cure? Tonight's programme investigates and talks to some girls who are victims of this bizarre disorder.

Just a Rumour put about by Those with no Homes. That might sound cynical, but according to a Building Society there are 800,000 more houses than households in this country and according to Shelter nearly half of those houses have been empty for more than six months. At the same time there are 50,000 homeless, and that doesn't include those in sub-standard houses or those like young marrieds compelled to live with their in-laws. It's become increasingly difficult to rent privately; small landlords particularly are selling rather than letting flats because, they claim, of the effects of the 1974 Rent Act. But local authorities too own thousands of houses standing empty. Jeremy James examines the paradox of empty houses and homeless families with the homeless themselves, councillors, social workers and Shelter and the Minister responsible for housing.

Boys and girls in our society are brought up differently - different clothes, different toys and, almost always, different attitudes to life. So, what's wrong with that? Dr Benjamin Spock , author of Baby and Child Care - a book second only to the Bible in world sales - says that this is sexism and is harmful to both boys and girls. Children should not be made the victims of ' gender conditioning ' which labels certain areas of life

Fred Wadsworth is a hospital porter and lives with his wife and family in a council house in Manchester. His wage is E40 a week. Erlend Copeley-Williams negotiates assurances and he and his wife and family own a country house in Essex. His salary is £9,500. Five years ago we looked at the lives of these two families and asked how far down the road we were to the Utopia of ' bread for all before cake for any'. The answer was we still have a long way to go. Now, five years later, we ask are the Wadsworths better off and the Copeley-Williamses worse off? Or are they both worse off? It seemed a straightforward question, but, as Jeremy James discovered, the answers were far from simple - and far from what might have been expected.

Glorified social workers ... underpaid lobby fodder ... chained-up watchdogs. Back-bench mps in their more frustrated moments are inclined to use these dismal phrases about themselves. Has the Cabinet - in effect, the government - become too powerful? Has the Civil Service become too secretive? Is there any way forward for the back-bencher who wants to ask awkward questions? Or is it simply that mps under 20th-century pressures are forced to use a 19th-century machine? Millions of pounds of tax-payers' money are spent by the government on the nod without time for debate. Many mps complain that their £6,270 basic salary is too low, and that backup facilities are inadequate. Legislative pressure, guillotine motions, organisation of committees - all have evolved from old procedures. Are they the best that our ' mother' of parliaments can devise? On film, five of the youngest mps in the House give their views. So too do six ordinary voters who, at the request of The Man Alive Report, have

So what is this strange power that one person has over another person's mind? The ancient Druids called it ' the magic sleep' and Mesmer called it ' animal magnetism '. In tonight's Man Alive Report, NICK ROSS and JACK pizzey explore this strange phenomenon and question its uses and abuses. The programme examines some of the old misconceptions and demonstrates some of its modern practical applications.

' Only the very rich, the very poor, or the masochist can think about going to law today.' Justice is a human right. But what do you do if you have a strong legal case and can't afford to take it to court? Just going to court can be so expensive these days that, in a number of civil disputes, the only people who have a real chance of justice are the very rich. Or the very poor; they at least qualify for legal aid - the state fund that was introduced some 30 years ago to give everyone who needed it a chance to take a case to court. But legal aid has not kept pace with the times. Now, far from covering everyone in need, in civil cases it covers only a quarter of the families in the land. This Man Alive Report meets people who have good cases but can't afford to try for justice, meets some of the lawyers they can't afford, hears about methods that can cut round the full costs of a legal action and considers how we could reform our system.

Recent headlines like these have turned public attention again to one of medicine's most poignant problems - deciding when treatment has to stop. The use of life-support machines is just one area where doctors have to make crucial decisions. Specialists sometimes have to decide how to deal with the chronic difficulties that occasionally develop in old age; and the fortunately rare but often appalling congenital deformities that are on occasions discovered at birth. And yet there's little dispute amongst doctors about the medical decisions involved; what they actually do is probably not realised by most of us. Why is their role so widely misunderstood and misreported? Tonight, with Jack Pizzey and Harold Williamson in the studio, some doctors explain their approach, and next-of-kin give their views. Others, detached observers like Lord Soper and Marjorie Proops , will be listening carefully in an attempt to penetrate the misunderstandings and to suggest what, if anything, should be done

The only borstal in Britain where girls are kept behind bars - Bullwood Hall -is tucked away in the Essex countryside. For the girls sentenced to time here, it's the end of the road. Every other form of treatment has failed. Crime amongst young girls has tripled in the past ten years so Bullwood must cope with a wide cross-section of offenders - violent and non-violent, normal and subnormal, teenage mothers, burglars and prostitutes. Bullwood has many critics and, four years ago, the Younger Committee recommended it should close. It just wasn't suitable. All that's happened since is that the number of inmates has increased by 60 per cent. John Pitman and a camera crew were allowed to film in Bullwood for seven days and to meet some of the girls who talked openly about their lives.

Nick Ross investigates drug addiction. There was a time when drug abuse was big news: back in the 60s LSD, purple hearts and heroin advanced like a tide in Britain. Ten years ago this month the government responded: addicts were made to register, while the police, the courts and Customs clamped down on illegal trafficking. The tide was turned. Or so it seemed. This film inquiry now reveals a new and even more alarming threat, one that affects the old as well as the young. The Fix shows how people in Britain are falling prey to highly addictive medicines.

In Victorian England corpulence was the thing. The rounded belly and the swollen haunch implied prosperity and good health. Today fashion models starve themselves in order to maintain greyhound thin figures. For them, slim is beautiful. Other women submit their bodies to the cosmetic surgeon in order to have their buttocks rounded and their breasts enlarged. For them, buxom is beautiful. There's nothing new in physical vanity; what is new is the power for change. Today, if you don' like your body you can change it: by scientifically controlled dieting, by violent body-building, by surgical sculpturing, and by subtle disguise - which is where fashion comes in. Body Beautiful considers the human figure, male and female, slender and muscular, skinny and obese, elegant and ridiculous, from classical times to the present day, from Venus de Milo to Fred Emney. Michael Dean and Harold Williamson ask what ever happened to the divinity that shaped our ends? And is physical vanity the new road t

Do animals go mad in zoos? Do performing dolphins die of boredom? Can domestic pets go insane? These are some of the questions asked about the way we treat animals in captivity -in zoos, in safari parks or in our own homes. We've come a long way from medieval menageries with lions crowded into stinking pits, but even in the zoos of 1978 animals are kept in what appear to be cramped conditions. One answer seems to be our latest innovation in the field of captivity - safari parks. These give the animals more freedom, but do they give enough? Are captive bears who pace constant figures of eight going mad? On film, we visit zoos and safari parks to see what evidence there is of animal madness. And in the studio. Jack Pizzey talks to animal men of all persuasions - a safari park operator, a conservationist, a pets psychiatrist and an RSPCA vet - and asks the question: is keeping animals a crime, a necessity or just a harmless and sometimes lucrative pastime?

However much she has longed for a baby, however supportive her husband and family, however uncomplicated her labour, a new mother may find herself inexplicably tearful and depressed. Sometimes called ' The Baby Blues', it doesn't usually last for long. But for one in every ten mothers it becomes a serious problem - so serious that she needs help. And for some women (one in every 200), childbirth triggers off a severe illness called puerperal psychosis. Jeanne la Chard and Nick Ross ask doctors and psychologists about the causes of post-natal depression and how it can be treated. Also in the programme are those who've had first-hand experience of post-natal depression.

In this investigative film Jack Pizzey asks whether, as taxpayers, we are getting value for money from our civil servants. One town council builds much sought-after council houses quicker than usual and saves £500,000 on the approved official plans - yet the Department of Environment blocks other councils making similar economies. In another town, computer schemes from the Department of Health and Social Security result in waste costing over £30,000. Nobody knows how much goes down the drain each year. A senior civil servant singlehandedly saves £3 million a year. Three Government Ministers want his savings applied nationwide, yet other civil servants frustrate them. A cover-up begins. Little has changed in ten years according to two Parliamentary Committees. Indeed, a former Civil Service head admits to being highly-selective about which reforms should be carried out. And, of course, the Official Secrets Act is always there to prevent embarrassing information leaking out to the pub

A well-known Victorian engineer once stepped down from the carriage in which he was travelling to supervise the repair of a damaged wheel. When he climbed back up his fellow passengers all ignored him. By showing that he knew how things worked he'd shown that he was less than a gentleman. His status-sensitive travelling companions were suffering from a peculiarly English disease that 100 years later is still with us. Even in 1978, if you want ' to be accepted' in England you must be seen to be doing the right kind of work-work that's as far removed as possible from the means of production. All the evidence shows that not enough of our cleverest people are going into industry, the very place we need them. MICHAEL DEAN talks to a number of people who, quite independently, have been studying our strange and potentially fatal social disease.

Are our laws on incest essential and effective - or should they be changed - even abolished? At this moment the Criminal Law Revision Committee, at the request of the Home Office, are considering ' whether it is necessary or desirable to retain the offence of incest as at present defined.... In our society incest has been a taboo subject for longer than most of us can remember. But since the law is now under review, many people feel that the time has come to learn the facts and look again at the reasons for the taboo. On film, people who have been directly involved reveal how the present law has affected them: in the studio Michael Dean and Harold Williamson try to find out from psychiatrists, social workers, legal experts, and others responsible for dealing with incest cases just how far they feel our present law should be changed - if at all.

Programme image Inventions are increasingly coming from research teams in large industrial firms, though there are still a few lone inventors out there. But does Britain care enough to encourage and back them with private or public funds? Harold Williamson meets inventors who have spent years trying to convince manufacturers, while Nick Ross talks to financiers and industrialists about the problems inventors face in the commercial world.

The prisoners walk arm-in-arm, gaze into each others' eyes, behave like lovers. Then suddenly there is a flash of binoculars at a distant window. The strolling couples are being watched. The warden at Fort Worth Cocorrectional Prison in Texas explains to new inmates, ' You can hold hands, or walk arm-in-arm. But below bench level there'll be no physical contact at all.' The violence and tension of single sex prisons are replaced by new, but not unexpected, undercurrents. Reporter Jeanne la Chard and a Man Alive team have filmed a brave American experiment - men and women in prison together.

More than five million animals are used in experiments in Britain every year. At the end of the experiments the animals are killed. It's claimed most of them are used to make sure our environment is safe - what we eat, what we breathe, what we take when we are ill. But that assertion is challenged by an increasingly vocal animal-rights lobby - which says most experiments are unnecessary, cruel or trivial. Man Alive has filmed in laboratories round the country to find out what we do to animals. And, in the studio with reporter Michael Dean will be people who perform experiments and those who say it's time they were made to stop.

'Amoco Cadiz, Eleni V, Christos Bitas - so far in Britain we've been lucky. But a really major oil disaster is inevitable - another Torrey Canyon. You can see it coming.' So say experienced seamen, and they should know. It's only a matter of time before somewhere along our coast, another supertanker Mts the rocks - or another tanker. The cause may be bad equipment, or bad training, or bad navigation, or plain bad seamanship. But the result will be certain: a thick black tide bigger than anything we've seen so far. And then who cleans up the mess? In tonight's programme, on film around our coast and from the studio in London, Jack Pizzey asks why have tankers been allowed to grow so huge, so clumsy, and so threatening, and asks if we will be well enough equipped to protect our beaches when ' the inevitable' happens?

'This was the only way we could get children - and we would gladly pay twice as much.' So say one American couple who, after ten years of trying to adopt through registered agencies, finally turned to a 'baby-broking' lawyer and bought a boy and girl for $16,000. Jeanne la Chard talks to girls who supply the baby market, couples who have bought babies, surrogate mothers who conceive born-to-order children, and the middle men - the baby-brokers. And the problem is not confined to America - it exists in this country too.

Harold Williamson reports from the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, where a team of surgeons have developed new techniques of neurosurgery from the violence of Ulster.

Almost everyone has irrational fears - of mice, aeroplanes, dogs, sex, spiders, or the dark ... But, for some, these fears are crippling. Drugs and psychotherapy often help, but all anxiety states are very difficult to cure completely. In the last few years a growing number of people have been treated with a relatively new technique: behaviour therapy. It's vehemently attacked by its critics for being simplistic and reducing the status of human behaviour to that of laboratory rats. But its supporters claim that it's more rational in theory and more effective in practice than traditional techniques. Nick Ross follows and talks to three people as they try this treatment for fear.

Why is it that so few women make it to management level where decision-making and responsibility lie - and even fewer to the top? ' They are their own worst enemies - they lack confidence.' ' There is always the risk they'll leave, have babies - and not come back.' ' Many men wouldn't be happy working for a woman.' Those are just a few of the reasons offered by employers. Are they to blame, or is it the women themselves? On film Yvonne Roberts talks to three women managers and their bosses. They explain how they made it, and discuss whether it is possible to combine a career with a family, and whether there is too high a price to pay for success. Not every woman necessarily wants to become a boss, but all want the right to choose - and to succeed or fail on their own merits.