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A monthly series of highly personal documentary films in which individuals are given a platform to discuss issues close to their heart.
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1984
A highly successful yet totally untrained artist, Beryl Cook only started painting in her late 30s. Her subjects are mostly women, usually middle-aged and nearly always enjoying themselves. Plymouth, where she lives provides the setting for many of her pictures. 'When I'm out I may see something I love. Then I nearly always know I'm coming back to paint it. I don't think there can be any message in that.'
Because of an accident during his birth Simon Trehearne is mentally handicapped. But he lives and works in the community, sharing a house with a handicapped friend; he believes passionately that people like himself can and should lead independent lives. Simon is in charge of the boiler at a furniture factory near Stourbridge in the West Midlands. He's an enthusiastic traveller - usually on his bicycle, a CB radio enthusiast, and has helped restore the local canal. He is also concerned with those less able or fortunate than himself, a concern that lands him momentarily in an awkward situation with the neighbours.
Why do we work? Why are we made miserable by having to work, and even more miserable when we can't? What is work? Can work be called work when it's fun? Is the need to work inborn in man? John Wells embarks on a serious investigation of this subject. Lacking a man from Mars with an innocent, impartial and uncorrupted view of human society, he enlists the help of Max, a chimpanzee. Max proves a willing pupil in learning our language. With unashamed zest he sets out to answer the question 'Why work?', interviewing five learned humans who have already been grappling with the problem. Using valuable film archive material, Max presents his findings in the form of short monkey documentaries.
'It's fun having two identities. It makes me a sort of Clark Kent of The Observer. By day I am shy, retiring Peter Hillmore ; by night I become the suave, dinner-jacketed crusader Pendennis - licensed to poke my nose into other people's business.'
A room in East London that remained locked for 30 years... Soviet tanks in the streets of Prague... a battered typewriter... a bridge near Oxford that leads nowhere... the Bengali community in Spitalfields... a peace march: these are some of the images and scenes that Zdena Tomin looks at in this film. In Czechoslovakia she was a spokeswoman for the human rights movement Charter 77 and saw democracy made and then destroyed in 1968. As a stranger, an exile with the official status Nationality Uncertain, she looks for the roots of democracy in Britain today.
A confirmed nature-hater since childhood, Laurie Taylor sets out from his weekend cottage in Battersea to try to find his 'true self in the country'. Armed with Ordnance Survey and Collected Wordsworth he is quickly lost - 'a townie in the wheatfield' - and soon falls foul of the giant machines which have been unleashed on the new factory farms of England. Retiring to the Lake District he peers at packed beauty spots, walks the ramblers' M4, and follows the crowds to a Visitors' Centre, where one can learn about the countryside without the bother of actually going there. Baffled, he retreats to the peace and order of Hyde Park. 'You don't have to feel anything about a city park. No one asks you - "how was the park?"
Cecil Collins is a visionary artist who has followed a lonely path outside mainstream modern art and its fads and fashions. His vision is now increasingly recognised, especially by many of the younger generation, on whom his work has made a deep impression. Collins believes the sacred purpose of the artist is to remind mankind of a world above and beyond our everyday preoccupations. He paints images of the paradise he feels we have lost in a blind drive for technological mastery over nature. 'Living with a vision is very difficult, but living without a vision is worse.'
1967
An evocation of great British journalist James Cameron's love affair with Nehru's India thirty years after it's birth. The film inaugurates important BBC series, ONE PAIR OF EYES, and has been repeated many times since, including the night 30 years of BBC2 was celebrated.
"We've learned how to think. Now we've got to re-learn how to feel - if we are going to survive." A highly personal view of modern Britain, inhabited by men and women whose emotional needs have not really changed since the Stone Age.
Once the river Tiber washed the walls of the self-styled capital of the western world. Later it was the Thames. Today it is an American river - the Potomac. But behind the cherry blossom, the white marble, and the big parades, one Englishman observes some contradictions.
Personal power - how do those who have it feel about using it? Did they seek it? Has it changed them? Was it worth it? With contributions from: The Rt. Hon. Barbara Castle, M.P. Minister of Transport; William Rees-Mogg, Editor of The Times; General Sir John Hackett, C.-in-C. British Army of the Rhine; Arthur South, leader of Norwich City Council and Lord Brooke of Cumnor, who as Home Secretary had to decide between life and death.
"Man is the only animal who knows he is going to die. It therefore became imperative to live without despair. Thus was created God." James Cameron, who describes himself as a permanent minority, journeys from St. Peter's, Rome, down the crowded road of the great faiths to Israel, Egypt, and India, and casts a sceptical glance at mankind's interpretation of God's demands.
"The British are one of the least enthusiastic people in the world. They don't believe in their party system; they don't like socialism. They are in grave danger of being alienated from everything." Jo Grimond returns from a journey across Yugoslavia and decides that we, too, should wipe the slate clean and start again.
Peter Wilson, who has seen more big-time sport than almost anyone in Britain, feels that something has gone wrong with our success rate.
Norman Parkinson, the distinguished fashion photographer, focuses his expert eyes on women. With Vanessa Redgrave, Twiggy, Raquel Welch, Marisa Mell, Celia Hammond, Kay Thompson. "As a species women are much more important than men." "The best photographers are the biggest liars." "I take a woman and gild her a little until she shines."
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.
Joe Tilson is one of Britain's foremost contemporary artists and is obsessed with the problems of flesh and blood human beings living in a mechanical, scientific world. Using the analogy of a computer, he explains what he calls the 'hardware/software scene.' Hardware, or technology, solves the physical problems of the world but not the human ones. These human, or software, problems remain largely unsolved. Joe Tilson has his own peculiar way of illustrating his reaction to the problem.
Romance stopped being romantic when they all started calling it sex. Women are no longer treated as the gentle sex; chivalry is old hat; it's 'Happy now - to hell with ever after.' Marjorie Proops, Britain's best-known woman columnist, lays bare our unromantic age, and yet she believes that deep down there's a bit of romance left in all of us.
The decisions of businessmen affect every one of us. At last a successful tycoon reveals the principles that have guided his business career and how he personally has been able to reconcile socialism and capitalism. Lord Campbell talks to businessmen and workers, union leaders, left-wing politicians, and right-wing journalists. He concludes that there is a deep and dangerous split in our society between idealism and materialism which can and must be healed. Business can never be loved but it can be respected. It is up to businessmen whether business is worthy of understanding and respect.
Patrick Moore takes a look at independent thinkers including flat earthers, hollow earthers, belief in a cold sun and many more interesting people.
Hero worship is an essential part of our lives - without heroes we have no great deeds to emulate, we can achieve nothing. How big a part do heroes play in our everyday lives? John Dankworth believes that mass hero worship is largely un-constructive and thinks it is our private heroes who matter most.
What makes you laugh? It is always easier to describe humour than to analyse it. Marty Feldman, for many years a successful comedy writer before his more recent activities as a performer, prefers to look at humour through the people who create it, comparing their traditions, motivations, and anxieties with his own. Among the people he talks to are: Peter Sellers, Sandy Powell, Eric Morecambe, Peter Brough and Archie Andrews, Dudley Moore, Annie Ross and Jon Hendricks, Johnny Speight, Denis Norden, Barry Took.
Sir Con O'Neill is one of Britain's top diplomats - British Charge d'Affaires in Peking, British Ambassador to Finland, and, more recently, British Ambassador to the Common Market. He revisits Belgium, Finland, Sweden, and the Republic of Ireland to illustrate his experiences of Britain's image abroad. Sir Con thinks there is only one way to prevent Britain from 'sinking giggling into the North Sea.' 'We are liked enormously - for our record in war and for our happy attitude to life. And yet there are doubts - we are losing the world's confidence in our ability to keep our promises in both industrial and political fields. Our casual outlook puts us in danger of losing our status as a successful nation. Happiness or success - the choice must be made.'
"The nature of a man's life, the nature of a man's mind, depends very largely on the kind of shocks and jokes to which he is subject. In Wales an industry was dying, a massive popular religion was dying. It was these things that held my eye and drove my pen."
Television, radio, computers, and jet aeroplanes may seem to bring the world to our hearthrug but they also increase the danger of mistaking the image for reality. The volume of today's instant words and pictures is so overwhelming that, to make sense of them, we take refuge in stereotype attitudes, rely on new myths - and in doing so, we erect still more unreal images of the world
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.
A generation of Communist rule changes many things - but not the real character of the people. George Mikes, writer, humorist, and traveller, left his native country in 1938 and settled in London. Since then he has gone back three times, including a visit in 1956 when he wrote a first-hand account of the unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Communist regime. In tonight's film the author of How To Be an Alien returns to look at today's Hungary in his own idiosyncratic way.
Mai Zetterling gives her own provocative views on the world as she sees it - views on marriage, on the pressures of contemporary society, on women and on her own attempts to live without compromising. This is a film about the making of a film - a short film Mai Zetterling has directed expressly for this programme in which she states her belief in what she calls "an awareness of life". In it the husband and wife are acted by her close friends the actor Joss Ackland and his real wife Rose Mary.
"Pessimism about the future is very fashionable - and very profitable. But if I could have any period of history to live in, I would choose to be living right now". So says John Crosby, the Observer columnist, who belongs to that long list of celebrated Americans who have settled in Britain. In this film Crosby tries to bring a spark of common sense to what he regards as the current hysterias about pollution, over-population, world food shortages and other sacred subjects.
Headmaster of Lancing when he was only 33, now headmaster of Marlborough, John Dancy "believes a public school can only be successful if it offers its pupils a vision - a vision of something they can live by, or aspire to". In his One Pair of Eyes John Dancy, one of Britain's most progressive public school heads, shows how he is trying to achieve his aims at Marlborough - a public school where there is no fagging or beating, where a small number of girls are admitted, and where the old games-playing traditions of "muscular Christianity" have no part in his concept of what a school community ought to be. Dancy's vision of understanding comes from a mixture of Greek and Christian ideals - in the words of one of his favourite quotations: "To Christ we owe compassion, to the Greeks everything else".
Up to the beginning of this year, 30-year-old Des Wilson was the director of Shelter, the charity which has done so much to draw attention to the homeless and their needs. Now an Observer columnist, he looks back on his four years of charity work. He examines the role of charities in Britain today and asks: Are we really a charitable society? He maintains that we treat our charities as a substitute for the Welfare State. As a nation we give over £50-million a year to charity, but is financial generosity enough? In this film he talks, among others, to Richard Crossman MP, former Minister of Health and Social Security, and to James Loring, director of Britain's largest charity - the Spastics Society.
Anthony Grey was the Reuters correspondent in Peking at the height of China's Cultural Revolution. He was arrested by the Chinese Government, as a political hostage, and held prisoner for 806 days. "Two years of solitary confinement in China might seem to be a destructive and negative experience. Now perhaps the elusive positive aspects are becoming clearer in my mind. Undoubtedly my views of what is important in life have been radically affected by what happened to me". In this film Anthony Grey draws on his experience of Peking, and an earlier assignment in Berlin, to explore what it means to be a free individual; and discusses with a number of people, among them Michael Stewart, MP, and Arthur Koestler, some of the political and social forces that can put an individual's freedom at risk.
Himself of Afrikaans origin, and as a young man one of the first to oppose racialism in South Africa, writer and explorer Laurens van der Post has long sought to discover the causes at the heart of racial prejudice. In this film he goes on a journey of rediscovery to South Africa and elsewhere. But his journey is also an inward one, to the dark places of the human mind. The conclusions he reaches challenge our whole way of looking at racial prejudice.
This weekend, between 8,000 and 10,000 people each day will visit Lord Montagu's-home at Beaulieu in Hampshire. Is this taking commercialisation too far? Would it not be more dignified for a stately home owner who cannot afford to maintain his house to hand it over to the nation? In this film Lord Montagu puts the case for private ownership. 'Our historic houses must above all remain as family homes, not museums.' He looks at the situation in France, where the chateaux so often stand 'as dead mausoleums of a bygone age,' and visits other stately homes in Britain. He also gets forthright comments from some Oxford students and a group of car workers at Cowley.
In this personally authored documentary, John Braine, who is probably best remembered for his first novel, Room at the Top, discusses his work and the beliefs that inform it. Braine takes us from his childhood in Bradford to his present home in leafy Surrey and also shares his growing convictions about the importance of stability in society and the urgent need to avoid either revolution or drastic political reform.
Starting from zero, says Leonardo Ricci, 'is the point every man should arrive at. A man is a man when he finds himself alone and has to survive.' Ricci is an Italian architect, painter and urban planner. During the Second World War he saw communes rise spontaneously amidst the devastation in Sicily. Ever since he has worked to produce a radically new architecture, one which encourages a communal city life, and which also allows everyone to live within easy reach of the countryside. The programme was filmed in Sicily and Florence, his home city.
What useful purpose is served by the creative artist in society? In a harsh world where millions starve, do poems or paintings or symphonies have any relation to events which actually affect men's lives? In this film Sir Michael Tippett, one of Britain's most eminent composers, examines the changing relationship between the artist and society. Looking at contemporary life with its mixture of humanity and violence, he suggests that we are living at a time in which there is growing hunger for the satisfaction of the inner world to which the artist speaks.
It's not unusual for people to come back from Los Angeles with horror stories about violence, pollution and the sheer unmanageable size of the place. But not Reyner Banham, Professor of the History of Architecture at London University. He loves many of the things about Los Angeles that others hate, from driving on the freeways to the garish commercial art that spreads along the boulevards and over the hillsides. And tonight he explains why he believes Los Angeles is a great city and a significant one.
Now that Britain has lost her empire is there a role for us in the world? Lord Caradon, formerly Sir Hugh Foot, who became internationally famous as Governor of Cyprus, and was for six years British Representative to the United Nations, believes that our opportunity in world affairs is greater now than ever before. But he also believes that our policy in Southern Africa and our apparently unconcerned attitude towards racial issues are isolating us and damaging our image amongst the developing countries of the world. Lord Caradon revisits the United Nations in New York where he talks amongst others to former Secretary General U Thant. He also returns to Jamaica where he was Governor 15 years ago to discover the feelings of a former colony towards Britain today.
'Almost everybody I know has firm opinions about almost everything. It's better to have halitosis than to have no opinion. The characteristic position I find myself in is one of cautious agreement with two incompatible points of view.' Playwright Tom Stoppard conducts an idiosyncratic search for certainty in a film involving a peacock, the M4, the Department of Weights and Measures, and a Professor of Physics.
'The core of Christianity is the Resurrection,' says Dooley, 'because the Resurrection is about hope and life.' Arthur Dooley, the internationally famous Liverpool sculptor, believes that the message of Christ is that mankind can triumph now. Since the war Dooley has watched his Liverpool 'torn apart by big business, politicians and soulless planners' out of touch with humanity. The hope lies with ordinary people realising their potential, resurrecting their own dynamic culture. He takes us through his devastated city to meet some of these people: the street painters by the Bluecoat Chambers; the pub poets and protest song writers; one of the last fishermen on the polluted Mersey; Chrissie Maher of the Tuebrook Bugle; Bill Shankly of Liverpool Football Club; and the men of the Mersey shipyards, 'the true artists of the nation in whom I put my faith.'
Mark Boxer is the resident cartoonist ('Marc') of The Times, and Associate Editor of the Sunday Times Magazine which he launched in 1962. At 41 he has achieved a degree of success which for many men would be the crowning point of a career. How can he continue the rest of his life without a sense of anticlimax? This question provides the theme of the programme. Boxer trains his fastidious and ironic gaze on himself. He recalls early successes and we see a typical Boxer day at present.
'The only thing worth having,' David Franklin asserts, 'is something you've worked to get and can take pride in.' Words and music have been the cornerstones of Franklin's life and on these he built two brilliant careers, first as an opera singer and then as a broadcaster. Two formal institutions, Cambridge and Glyndebourne, formed the man and fashioned his attitudes - a respect for fine sounds and a passionate belief in proud, old-fashioned things like dignity and manners; but the very disciplines he learned there have made him intolerant of the modern world 'with its greed for material things the easy way.'
Spike Milligan is a very funny serious man and a very serious funny man. For him life's problem is to tiptoe through the chaos he sees around himself. When it all becomes too much for him he retreats to a tiny workroom in Bayswater. Most of this film was made in that room, sallying out to face the world when the mood took him. And it took him to some unexpected places, looking for, among other things, a doughnut, a blind bird and buried treasure in the Thames.
Allan Prior is a writer of fiction - novels, films, TV plays - but he is probably best known for his scripts for Z Cars and Softly, Softly. He portrayed policemen and criminals as he found them. Some people said his brand of truth was too harsh. He says that the real thing is always worse, that the professional criminal is on nobody's side but his own, that his only concern is to have a good time at somebody else's expense. To illustrate his theme Prior has written two scenes of life in a criminal 'family,' contrasting fiction with fact. He also talks to victims of criminal greed and violence; and, ten years after his visit to write the original Z Cars scripts, returns to Kirkby's Newtown - where, most of all, he finds evidence that 'the real thing is always worse.'
In our so-called 'Permissive Society', discipline is an unfashionable concept. The emphasis on personal freedom and the pressure for abolition of all restraints are, Lord Soper believes, dangerous and destructive because they are divorced from any sense of religious or social purpose. In this film Lord Soper, preacher, pacifist and socialist, looks back over his own life and times and makes an urgent plea for a new sense of discipline without which true freedom is not possible.
Lady Antonia Fraser is the best-selling biographer of Cromwell and Mary Queen of Scots. To her, biography is a special and important art, with unusual responsibilities and dangers. One single book can easily change the attitudes of a generation to a great public figure. In re-creating her subjects, she leaves her stamp on the pattern of history. Yet at the same time she is a biographer who has a never-ending love affair with her art.
Alan Garner, the brilliantly successful author of books that dazzle and haunt children - and haunt adults, too - is a man obsessed by violence; in the universe, in the ground, most of all, in himself. This film was made in Cheshire, the countryside in which Alan Garner was born and where his family has lived for generations. He shows how he came to terms with his own personal violence; and in a series of unusual film sequences attempts to show how violence, once understood, can be put to creative use.
During the lifetime of most of us Britain has moved into the ranks of the second-class powers. The decline in our power and influence continues. You could say we're on the road to Ruritania. In the latest in this series of highly personal films, Paul Johnson - journalist, broadcaster and author of a widely acclaimed history of England - gives his views on our latest dilemma. He believes we can only understand the present if we examine our past: 2,000 years of English history provide clues to our present-day difficulties over the Common Market and the economy. The historian A. J. P. Taylor , as well as Michael Foot M.P., Anthony Howard, and J. B. Priestley contribute to the programme. But the overall view is very much Johnson's own.
In the course of an exotic and adventurous journey the wife of the Poet Laureate, astride an Indian hill pony, carries out her own crusade against progress among the foothills of the western Himalayas. In search of remote and unexploited hill temples and a simple life, she tilts at concrete buildings, the internal combustion engine, modern education, the drug-mysticism of hippies, and the indiscreet placing of electricity cables. Lady Betjeman was the daughter of Lord Chetwode, Commander-in-Chief in India during the 30s. Her love affair with India began as a girl of 18, now, as a highly eccentric, amusing and determined explorer, she returns whenever she can.
Australian actress Diane Cilento seeks spiritual answers on a communal farm run by followers of GI Gurdjieff, including the philosopher JG Bennett.
The friendship between Australia and Britain is dead, declares Australian author Russell Braddon , who has lived here since 1949. In this protest at the recent loosening of ties, he insists that Britain's new immigration rules and Australia's new nationalism have poisoned the old loyalties and affection. Filmed in Australia and Britain, the programme also reveals Braddon's crisis as an expatriate: his old sense of being British and Australian has been destroyed and, suddenly, he belongs nowhere.
Restaurateur and writer, American-born Robert Carrier, illustrates through his own lifelong enjoyment of good eating that food is love.
Adventure, travel, the challenge of the unpredictable: these are the ingredients of Eric Newby's life. As a boy he sailed round the world, apprentice on the last of the four-masted sailing ships carrying grain from Australia. He has climbed mountains in Nuristan, canoed down uncharted rivers with Red Indians in Canada, and travelled to every part of the world. In this film Eric Newby looks back not too seriously at some of the adventures in his extraordinary life. With the aid of many of his own photographs of his travels, he expresses his belief that to make the most of life one must grasp the opportunities it offers - not only in distant places but close to home and around us.
A country childhood. A strict religious upbringing. A very English addiction to cricket. A profound love of music, particularly organ music. The discovery - as a schoolboy of 15 - of the soaring possibilities of modern science. Sir Bernard Lovell retraces these influences and their effect upon him and attempts a major statement about the dilemmas which face one particular deep-thinking scientist at this present time.