Man Alive

Last autumn Man Alive revealed the sorry plight of elderly victims of mugging on Merseyside. Response to ' The Old Can't Run Fast Enough ' was overwhelming; thousands of unasked-for pounds were donated and viewers wrote and phoned with offers ranging from secretarial help to holidays. One invitation in particular caused a stir: ' could 20 pensioners from Merseyside come to London at Christmas to see a show - all expenses paid? ' They could - and did, some for the first time in their lives. On film Michael Dean reports on this rather special ' awayday': on lunch in Belgravia with the Vicomtesse D'Orthez - the actress Moira Lister - on tea with Dame Anna Neagle and Tony Britton , on the view from the stalls at My Fair Lady, on a day which everyone - from the pensioners to the camera crew - will long remember.

Admiral Beatty's famous comment as he watched another battle-cruiser blow up at Jutland would, in the view of some authoritative critics, not be inappropriate today. For example, on a recent exercise in the North Atlantic, some destroyers had to refuel after only three days at sea - otherwise, without the weight of fuel in their bunkers, they would have become top-heavy and unseaworthy. For what roles has our Navy been built? And how well is it equipped to fulfil them? Are our ships over-sophisticated and thereby overpriced? Could they effectively fight a limited war? Jeremy James asks if the Royal Navy still remembers Admiral Fisher's famous dictum that ' he who strains at the gnat of perfection will swallow the camel of unreadiness

A mill that made the yarn that made the carpet that royalty steps on-gone bust after 100 years. A family firm with a worldwide market in toys - in receivership. A workshop that could make almost anything in metal, one-off jobs that were always in demand - liquidated. All over the country, the receivers are moving in. The businesses are sold off, hammered out of existence to pay the creditors. And the fact is that small firms employ more people than all the major companies put together. Harold Williamson goes to four small firms to ask what is going wrong? Why are some firms going under while others - often in the same line of business - survive and even prosper?

What would you do if you were told that you only had a short time left to live? Few of us, faced with a future like Jean Cameron 's, would be able to summon up the same courage and determination. She is one of the many people Harold Williamson talked to about this sudden and devastating bombshell - and how they coped. JEAN CAMERON is trying to write a book about finding herself just as terminally ill as those she's spent her own life trying to help; at the same time Tim Martys is trying to fight back death by striving for a new life out in the country; and Ken Thomas is trying to raise £2 million to buy a body scanner and save lives - even though he knows it is too late to save his own. Ambitions, it seems, don't have to be dramatic. The quiet resolve of some people can be just as strong as the lone oarsman rowing the Atlantic.

You can't insure against bad neighbours, but they can blight your home and peace-of-mind much more disastrously than a combination of mere dry rot and a leaky roof. A burning feud may be sparked by no more than a cup of sugar - never replaced - borrowed 19 years ago. Or early morning lawn mowing. Or the same piece of music played too often and too loudly. Nerves tighten, tempers flare. Threats, retaliations, even the law can follow. Neighbours have wound up in prison. Jeanne La Chard looks at these neighbourly wars - often amusing to outsiders, never so to the participants - and asks what, if anything, can be done to solve them.

Christine [text removed] was dying from a rapidly spreading cancer when she decided that, somehow, she would will herself better. She is one of three people in this film who have made extraordinary recoveries from illnesses diagnosed and confirmed as terminal. Can the mind -through faith or will-power or meditation - so affect the body that it can stop the progress of a normally fatal disease? The three women in the programme - and there are more such 'recoveries' among women than men - are convinced that the mind can triumph. After all, they point to themselves as living proof. Michael Dean asks doctors how did they do it? Was it medicine or miracle? Freak or faith?

At 7.30 each morning 5,000 Liverpool dockers queue for work; by mid-morning 1,000 are usually home again - watching television, walking the dog, cleaning the car. They will all be paid whether they work or not: not less than &78.50 per week. That was the bargain - 'jobs for life' - which the union leader Jack Jones negotiated with British port employers back in 1972. It ended a crippling national strike, cleared the way for full-scale containerisation, and has kept the docks fairly peaceful ever since. But at what cost? Many dockers feel trapped and demoralised - but, in a time of high unemployment, they dare not risk giving up a sure but limited pay packet. Meanwhile the docks of Merseyside contract and they lose big money - most of it in labour costs. Man Alive follows Jack Jones as he meets dockers and employers along the waterfront where he himself once worked. How, today, do they all view the consequences of that 1972 'for life' agreement?

Most people would call it a crash; airlines and their cabin-staff talk of 'the unlikely event'. And indeed, for 20 years the aviation industry and its governing bodies have concentrated on preventing plane crashes altogether - with great success. The statistics show that you would probably crash only once in nearly 1,000 years of daily flights. But crashes still happen, and the chances of surviving them have not improved. The strength of modern jet bodies makes it possible to classify the majority of accidents as ' 'survivable'. Yet when survivors describe the plane's interior immediately after impact, they talk bitterly of collapsed seats and broken limbs, of blinding toxic fumes and burning upholstery, of coat racks blocking the emergency exits, of escape chutes that don't inflate. And all of this when speed of evacuation - officially 90 seconds - is vital to save lives. In short, the problems and dangers occur after the crash. Using unique film, Jack Pizzey examines the regulations

A badly damaged baby is ' allowed' to die. Is it mercy or murder? Some doctors hold that no matter how malformed a new-born baby may be, its life must be sustained at all costs. And parents will often accept damaged babies without resentment. Other doctors, and some parents too, take the view that a life severely limited by handicap can be a fate much worse than a quiet and painless death, and that love is not diminished in letting a baby fade away. Who decides? On what criteria? Where do the parents come in? Harold Williamson visits a Special Care Baby Unit where the mothers are encouraged to share in the life-or-death decisions - decisions with which the nurses and doctors are familiar but never at ease.

Cigars at 120 a time. Two thousand pounds a year on hair-dos. Gold-plated baths costing £5,000 each. Handkerchiefs at £10 a blow. A yacht at a quarter of a million pounds. Who is buying them? And, more intriguingly, how? Despite the worst recession since the 30s, there still seems to be plenty of money about - in some pockets. Is it that a lucky few are simply born with a rare ' get-rich ' gene? Or is it that they have got themselves the advice of extra-sharp accountants? Can anyone get rich? Man Alive looks at the lifestyle of some big spenders. And asks how they do it. Could it be that there are really two tax systems in Great Britain and that some people are always going to have it easier than others?

A woman dies and her husband gives up his job to look after the children. A war wound pushes another man into unemployment-then theft. An asthmatic mother with a handicapped child can't move out of a damp and fungus-ridden council house. All are getting ever-deeper into debt, scraping by on social security survival money. It could happen to almost anyone. The official system doesn't seem to help. Through the winter thousands of families, unable to meet their heating bills, get their electricity cut off. Increasing numbers of people have to live in unfit accommodation. And the more they try to improve their lives, the worse their plight becomes. They're trapped. Jack Pizzey reports.

Astonishingly, our chances of being killed on the roads have stayed the same for half a century-it is almost as though we have decided to tolerate 6,000 dead each year. Why do we so meekly assume that the carnage is inevitable when patently it is not? In a specially extended film report, Man Alive hears from doctors, police and accident investigation teams who are angry and bewildered that so little is done to stop the killing.

Three young people give a heart-warming example to us all in their fight for independence. Alison is 17 and in her last year at college. Born spastic, she can run now, and she speaks with halting eloquence. But how will Alison cope when she leaves the shelter of family and friends? Billy, who is 19, will never leave his wheelchair. Born with spinal atrophy, his body is almost powerless. Yet he hitch-hikes around Britain, writes his own songs and has now embarked on an autobiography. He lives in a radically designed home for the disabled and dreams of the day when he'll have a place of his own. Steve, a 29-year-old barrister, soon to marry, runs his home from a wheelchair. Severely spastic, he is helped day and night by Community Service Volunteers, who work in shifts. Now he is working to bring his own kind of independence to other disabled people.

Bare bosoms may have boosted some newspaper sales, but there has been another, more subtle result'of that and other naked displays. Only a few of the thousands of women who, every year, have breast operations need them for truly medical reasons. For the rest, it is cosmetic surgery, ' I feel I am a boy dressed in dresses,' says Susan, a National Health patient wanting her breasts enlarged. Susan is one of two women who undergo cosmetic surgery of the breast in this film profile. The other, Ruth, has a private operation to lift and reduce her breasts. The film explores the reasons which leads two attractive women to ' correct' what they feel to be ' wrong ' with themselves. It also underlines the risks involved in this sort of surgery, Michael Dean discusses the implications of the film with a plastic surgeon, a psychiatrist and the two women themselves,

It is no respecter of persons: monarchs have had it, statesmen have died of it. And although it's been called ' the wages of sin', innocence doesn't guarantee protection - the sexually faithful can get it from a partner who strays even once. VD or, as it's now called, sexually transmitted disease, was on the retreat 30 years ago. It looked then as though penicillin and other drugs would banish it from our lives. But today STD is spreading again and with alarming speed, especially among the young. This year something like half-a-million cases will pass through British clinics. Doctors will treat people from every social class, not just for syphilis, gonorrhoea and NSU (the infamous three), but for more than 20 other sexually transmitted diseases, including genital herpes, the incurable virus that is already an epidemic in America. Man Alive visits the clinics where the war against the sexual diseases is being fought and Michael Dean talks to the doctors and to some of the casualties.

They plan where we will live and where we will work. They decide which buildings will be pulled down and which will be put up. Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they get it wrong. They are that amorphous group we ignore until they want to put a motorway, a pylon or whatever at the bottom of our garden. They are The Planners. Are they visionaries or vandals? How well do they do their job? Do we have too much planning or too little? How much say do we, the public, really have in the planning decisions that affect our lives?

Every day the shops are open they lose over £l million to theft; it has been described as ' a great train robbery every 36 hours'. And of course, we all pay higher prices to cover these losses. For some, shoplifting is an almost full-time occupation. They regard the risk of arrest as an occupational hazard. For others being caught leaves an indelible mark on an otherwise blameless life. Why do they do it? Michael Dean talks to the innocent and the guilty, to store managers and the police. He examines some of the myths - for example that most shoplifters are women — and asks how can we stop a crime that is costing all of us more each year.

It's not all gloom and doom even though unemployment is mounting. Redundancy need not spell disaster -it can be a spur to better things; to achieving a lifelong ambition, even to making a dream come true. Like the Gloucester woman who carved out a business of her own in a man's world when her job disappeared ... like the new enterprise in Manchester that tests entrepreneurs and the chances of their business ventures ... like the Leeds furniture factory that got back on its feet after going bust because the workers took a big gamble that is paying off. Harold Williamson meets people who believe in themselves and are building their lives anew.

Too much alcohol doesn't do anyone any good. But women come off even worse than men: they get drunk on less, they are more likely to contract liver disease, they can damage an unborn child -with serious risks for its future mental development. Yet women in Britain now drink more than ever before and start earlier. Supermarkets sell drink along with breakfast cereal, and women's magazines are saturated with advertisements which some claim glamorise alcohol. Certainly, sales have doubled in less than ten years ... Man Alive meets women with drinking problems, and asks doctors and researchers if more should be done to warn people of the risks they run.

In Switzerland, almost every mp is on the board of a bank or a sizeable company, often both. Jack Pizzey examines connections between the state and big business. An executive of a multinational reports his company to the EEC for breaking its trading laws; he is arrested by the police and imprisoned. An English woman working in Africa buys a Swiss-made medicine banned in the West; she nearly dies. The methods of a baby-food firm selling milk substitute in the Third World break World Health Organisation codes. Could these things happen if the directors of the companies did not sit in board-rooms one day and in parliament the next?