Man Alive

Nick Ross investigates the hidden story behind drug abuse in Britain. A new look at a growing problem based on a film shown 18 months ago to much acclaim.

The hidden story behind drug abuse in Britain - the search for a solution. Nick Ross investigates how the old as well as the young have become victim to drug addiction on an alarming scale. While heroin, cannabis and LSD claim the headlines, thousands of families are falling prey to everyday medicines or common household products. This, the second of two programmes, questions the responsibility of doctors and drug companies, and looks for ways to reduce the menace.

They seemed like a marvellous idea at the time - the New Towns of Britain, conceived in the 1940s as a cure for the nation's housing ills. But today, as local authorities take over the administration, they're finding that there's a severe price to be paid for inadequate design and shoddy workmanship, for houses built on the cheap. Now, the housing solution of the 1970s, ' rehabilitation' (doing up old houses), has begun to show similar cracks. Houses re-modelled only a few years ago are already beginning to decay. And some of the new public housing estates face gigantic bills for putting right faults in design and construction. Who is to blame-the architects? The builders? The politicians? Man Alive presents a filmed investigation and a studio debate on the housing scandal.

The garbage dump of Middle America '- that's what they call Chicago's ghetto. It's a vivid and desperate place where the murder rate is far higher than Northern Ireland's, where half the population is on drugs or alcohol, where the most common fatal complication of pregnancy is gunshot wounds - and where the only free hospital is facing closure. Cuts have already shut down three of America's surviving free hospitals, more are under pressure, now it's the turn of Cook County - 'County' as everyone calls it. In this filmed report, Jack Pizzey and a Man Alive film team go to the threatened lifeline of tne ghetto and meet the people who are fighting to keep it open, the patients who have already been rejected by other hospitals because of the darkness of the r skins or the thinness of their wallets, and the doctor who says ' I call it murder

It will take the laugh off their faces - and about time. It's just red meal thrown to the blue rinses. Two reactions to the Home Secretary's recent proposal to restore, experimentally, the punishment known as ' short, sharp shock '. Its aims are simple: for a short time life is made so tough that young offenders will be both punished and then, deterred for life. But will it work? The plan's opponents say that if you put a teenage criminal behind bars (and the number has trebled in ten years) you will neither reform nor deter him - between 60 per cent and 80 per cent will be back again within a year. So what's the answer? On film and in the studio. David Calder , Michael Dean , Jack Pizzey and Nick Ross put that question, to both sides.

On the night of the 13 and 14 of August this year, the great flotilla of yachts taking part in the Fastnet Race were overwhelmed by a storm in the Western Approaches. By morning five yachts had sunk to the bottom, another 20 had been abandoned and 15 competitors had lost their lives. Was there adequate warning of an approaching storm? Was it simply the storm's ferocity that caused so many failures-in boats, gear, safety equipment? Or were there faults in organisation, yacht design, seamanship? Why, above all, were so many lives lost and others placed in peril? Jeremy James questions the issues arising from the official inquiry, scheduled to be published today, and gives some of the survivors a chance to tell their own stories of disaster and rescue.

In the last 100 years, some 2,000 of our stately homes have disappeared, together with the armies of servants that once maintained them. But the world of Upstairs, Downstairs still lingers on in some of our remaining great houses where it can take a silver steward 18 months to clean all the 1,000 silver pieces, and a gamekeeper works all year to provide just a few days' shooting. In One of the Family, Jeanne la Chard looks at life behind the green baize door and talks to the men and women who enjoy their jobs and who are proud to be called servants, as well as some of the Dukes and Duchesses who employ them.