One Pair Of Eyes

Prostitution - pornography - drugs - driving - are all fields in which the law has failed to achieve satisfactory results. Professor Camps, the well-known pathologist who has worked on many famous murder cases, is highly critical of some of the laws that govern our daily lives. He believes there are many instances where they achieve the opposite result to that intended.

Cars have always been dream symbols for the working American. But today it is not the mass-produced model from Detroit which dominates the lives of thousands of Californians but their own customised, sculpted machine-be it car, motorcycle, or even tricycle. In his One Pair of Eyes, the American writer Tom Wolfe explores some of the cults of the internal combustion engine which are currently obsessing Californians of all classes.

Can a woman look after her husband, her children, and her job without one of the three suffering? Shirley Conran, designer and journalist, thinks not. Our man-orientated society, she says, imposes an impossible multiple role on a working mother. This is why so many marriages break up and so many women break down; why the basic institution of marriage itself is going out of fashion for the young.

For the past eight years Yvonne Mitchell, the actress and novelist, has lived on the French Riviera. She has watched her 13-year-old daughter Cordelia receive a very different education at the local schools from anything she would have experienced in Britain. In her One Pair of Eyes, Yvonne Mitchell compares the two. She asks: can the highly disciplined French system, with its long hours, its emphasis on learning by rote and discouragement of self-expression, do more for a child than our own, more liberal methods?

The novelist and sports writer Brian Glanville fears that the real value of sport is being undermined by the demands and tensions of our competitive society. The danger-signals are most in evidence in the worlds of football and athletics. He believes that as attention focuses on the FA Cup Final, the World Cup, and preparations for the 1972 Olympic Games we ought to look beyond the headlines and consider what we are doing to our sporting heroes - and what they are doing to us.

Until a few years ago Dr Spock, the legendary baby doctor, was known only for his book on bringing up children, a work which enjoyed world sales rivalling those of the Bible. But with the growing proliferation of nuclear weapons he felt he had a duty to speak up in opposition. Since then he has become increasingly active as a leading opponent of the war in Vietnam. His view of the United States in this One Pair of Eyes is a sombre, even frightening one. To him, America is clearly a police state. But he sees hope in the moral indignation and courage of the young. The generation he now works with as public figure is also the generation which, as paediatrician, he helped to raise.

At 61, John Creasey, creator of such world-famous figures as 'The Toff' and 'Gideon of the Yard,' is the world's most prolific writer. He has written to date 543 books. His world sale is 65 million. He is translated into 28 languages. The minimum sale of each of his books - either 'by John Creasey' or one of his numerous pseudonyms - is estimated at 100,000. But for all that, the burning passion in Creasey's life is not writing, but his one-man campaign to reform British politics. He has no time for the Party struggle at Westminster, and has in fact formed his own political movement - All-Party Alliance. The APA has fought four by-elections always with the same candidate - John Creasey. His own philosophy of life is called 'Self-ism,' by means of which he says 'all the untapped sources of good in men will one day be released.'

Raymond Williams, novelist and lecturer, thinks university education should be fitted to the demands of real life. He believes that many of Britain's rebellious students are, like himself, inhabitants of what he calls 'the Border Country.' In this film Williams contrasts life in his working-class birth-place, Pandy, on the Welsh-English border, with academic Cambridge, where he teaches English literature. 'The journey between them is more than a physical journey. It's a journey between different kinds of life, different values. I cross that border in my mind almost every day. It seems to me important because the border country is everywhere. In so many places people are moving or being moved from old, settled ways into new, unprecedented ways which have to be felt, recognised, understood, responded to, altered.'

The prophets of doom who predict our imminent starvation are wrong. Man can easily feed himself. Miracle wheats, mammoth rice harvests, overall increases in the protein content of grain - all are bringing hope for mankind. In this film a Hampshire farmer, John Cherrington, says farmers have won us a breathing space in which to change society. But if governments and people ignore it, our world will come down in chaos.

Once upon a time there was a middle class who believed that they were part of the ruling system. Mergers, take-overs, computerisation, the growth of huge industrial combines - all these things have pushed the middle class further away from their traditional positions of power. Now they are all workers and they need the things all workers need - organisation and power in their place of work. So says trade union leader Clive Jenkins: the middle class have turned to the trade union movement and have come in from the cold.

At the age of 16 he left India to make his home in England. At 20 he won the Hawthornden Prize for poetry while still at Oxford. After spending half a lifetime in this country he had come to think of himself as an Englishman - until the campaign against coloured immigrants flared. Feeling that he had been denied the right to roots in Britain, Moraes returned to India. In tonight's film he shows what it is like to be a stranger in the land of one's birth.

"Today we are not as dependent on animals as we once were. Our approach to animals is largely based on sentiment - we like to credit them with human intelligence - and animal art has come to be regarded as a lower form of art." John Skeaping believes passionately that animal art can only survive if it is based on the true relationship between man and beast. In his One Pair of Eyes Skeaping describes his search for such a relationship and why he believes he has found it among the bulls and horses of the Camargue, in the South of France, where he lives and works.

Idries Shah, writer and traveller, descendant of the prophet Mahomet, sees our Western way of life through eyes trained in the Oriental Sufi tradition, which is based on a thousand years of understanding of human behaviour. In this film, with the help of Dr William Sargant, the celebrated psychiatrist, John Kermisch, late of the American Rand Corporation, and Marty Feldman, the comedian, he takes a concerned look at the sleepwalking society he finds around him, and offers some suggestions for change.