One Pair Of Eyes

When, if ever, will the tide of emigration turn, which now ebbs so fast from rural Ireland?

"Why do I dislike Berlin? Why does the place arouse in me all the prejudiced emotions I so resent in other people? And yet why do we all respond to those old hypnotic rhythms of nationalism which have plagued the continent of Europe for so long?"

Margaret Drabble narrates this documentary about her own life. The cameras follow her as she revisits the places where she grew up and was educated and ponders the events that have led to her present situation. The conflicts and the choices that women, in particular, must make between the freedom to create and the practical need to care for a family are at the centre of this self-portrait of the life of a young author.

People always say 'Shut-up, be quiet, pie in the sky, you'll get there in the end' - but you know, and I know, and everybody knows that it doesn't really happen. What happens is, you only get what you fight for.

"I have always had a certain loathing of schoolmasters, feeling them to be a corrupt body of creatures on the whole... I'm not an educated man: I'm a drop-out. I left school at sixteen... It was to revenge myself on schoolmasters that I became an actor." His own unhappy experiences very much in mind, Robert Morley swore that none of his three children should go to an English public school. When Sheridan, the eldest, was eight, Morley advertised in The Times for a school with 'no sports and a comfortable hotel standard of living'; and found one! The other children had equally unconventional educations, and all of them have thrived on it.

The Member of Parliament for South Worcestershire, who has been described by others as 'the most famous back-bencher on either side of the House' and by himself as 'an unashamed traditionalist,' embarks on a vigorous and idiosyncratic exploration of the contemporary British scene, in search of the kind of excellence that he particularly admires. The musical accompaniment is principally provided by Sir Edward Elgar.

"In matters of great importance it's style not sincerity that counts. In law, in politics, in the church... not just in the theatre... actors and performers dominate. In fact, we all play our respective roles - we all act." John Mortimer, in his double role as playwright and lawyer, tries to unmask us all.

First transmitted in 1968, singer and actress Georgia Brown revisits her old childhood home in Whitechapel, East London and notes the fading presence of the Jewish immigrant community. Brown discusses the recent change in the area's increasingly diverse population and ponders the question, "Who are the cockneys now?"

The sheer ferocity of a Scarfe cartoon, stripping his subjects of any human dignity and reducing them to a kind of sub-animal level, provokes a violent reaction in many people. "I expected to find myself working with a suppurating sore," said one of the animators on this film, "but he's not like that at all..." Even his victims, when they meet the artist face to face, are often surprised to find themselves in the presence of such a mild, gentle sort of person. In this disturbing, at times horrifying film, Gerald Scarfe may not solve the riddle of his own conflicting nature but he certainly casts a blinding light on it.

"My generation was liberated by Oxford: but it also confined us and marked us for life. Nothing has ever topped the exhilaration and privilege I felt then. Today's Oxford is like a ghost university, full of usurpers and tourists, simply decor against which to be happily young." With some of his contemporaries: The Rt. Hon. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, M.P., Robin Day, Alan Brien, John Wain, Alan Beesley, Tony Richardson.

Through the long days of a Swedish summer "to be flesh in contact with sun is to know fulfilment." The landscape is breathtaking, and the blondes are the most beautiful in Europe. Rene Cutforth, who describes himself loosely as 'one of nature's Swedes', takes on the guise of a nordic storyteller to utter dark warnings for the Western World. "Quite recently they have been set free from God and sin and poverty for a start, and it seems to me a very good start. But has it all left a vacuum? The Swede has simply ironed himself right out in favour of some damned silly machine that works in a social way - he's a slide-rule."

Do we just like travel for its own sake? Are we increasingly obsessed with the desire for encapsulated movement? As members of the moving world, do we believe ourselves to be superior to those who are left standing outside? Michael Frayn, novelist and playwright, believes that we do, and demonstrates his belief through the trials and journeys of Benson, latest addition to his gallery of contemporary characters.

You can have wealth without sophistication, but can you have sophistication without wealth? Charlotte Bingham, daughter of Lord Clanmorris, had a taste of the rich life until she was nineteen. This could have been her world. Instead, she chose to be a writer - her most famous book, Coronet Among the Weeds, which took the lid off the debutante scene, became a best-seller. Sophistication, or how to be rich, is a fantasy created by people who aren't.

Dom Moraes, poet and journalist, examines his situation as a coloured Englishman who suddenly feels he is an immigrant. "On April 20, 1968, Enoch Powell made his notorious speech in Birmingham on race relations. It suddenly seemed that he was expressing the feeling of the man in the street in England. It seemed to me that the whole of my life here must be based on a false premise..." Dom Moraes looks back over his own life - his childhood in India; his time at Oxford; his literary success, winning the Hawthornden Prize for his poetry at the age of twenty; his marriage into an English county family - and then goes to Bradford to see to what extent he can identify with ordinary immigrants.

In company with three of his former Japanese captors, John Coast revisits the scenes of his enforced labour along the banks of the River Kwai. Here, twenty-five years ago, thousands of British lives were sacrificed by the Japanese to drive a railway line through the jungle from Bangkok to Burma. If it had not been for the now famous film "The Bridge on the River Kwai" few people would remember their epic struggle for survival. But ironically, just because of the film, fact and fiction have become somewhat confused. Tonight's film is a personal and evocative account of just what did happen during the building of this infamous railway.