8 episodes · 12th March 1977
A year ago the Oxford Eight won the University Boat Race in the fastest time ever recorded. Highlights from the months of selection and preparation for the lung-bursting 17 minutes are assembled in this story, set in and around the River Thames at Oxford, Henley and London. Next Saturday, Oxford and Cambridge race again for the 123rd time from Putney to Mortlake. There will be some new faces in the boats, but the ordeal the crews have undergone, and the emotions that spur them on, will be the same as for the Crew of 76, and for crews since the event began.
Eileen is at the beginning. Her husband, John, is on remand inside Pentonville awaiting trial at the Old Bailey for robbery, possession of a firearm, and resisting arrest. If he pleads guilty, he could get seven years. If he fights the case and is convicted, he could go down for 15. In the days up to and during the trial, when she herself is called to give evidence, Eileen talks of her hopes and fears for herself, for her survival, and her children's survival. There is little doubt that John will pay his debt to society. But as an addendum to his sentence, will go the unspoken sentence on his innocent wife and three children - years of severance from a breadwinner, a father and a husband.
Lorraine 's waiting has begun. Her husband, Steve, is serving two-and-a-half years in Leeds Prison for rape. Four months after he left the dock, Lorraine's baby arrived. All her courage is now summoned to face the physical and emotional demands on a body and mind already drained by the ordeal of childbirth. From the maternity hospital where she bore the son his father could not see, the bungalow for which she has worked and must work to retain, and through the bleak misery of prison visits with her baby son and two teenage daughters, Lorraine pieces together her thoughts and priorities, her feelings of self-reproach and determination to stand by a husband who is already corroded by jealousy, self-pity and remorse.
Kathy is at the end. In 24 hours her husband Steve will be released. He has served 18 months in Wandsworth Prison for robbery. She has served 18 months on the 12th floor of a high-rise council block coping with all the problems of a one-parent family for being the wife of a convict. Kathy has had to bear the stigma of 'guilt by association' that attaches to all prisoners' wives, and she has watched with mounting horror the erosion of her four children's emotional stability. The joy of her husband's release is underscored with the anxiety of living with a man again, and the knowledge that their future will depend on Steve getting a job and curbing his drinking. Unless that occurs, she will slide into the nightmare world of the battered wife.
Bob McAngus regularly drives his own juggernaut lorry from Britain to Italy. This is a filmed record of one mission - a journey from Felixstowe to Trieste. His manifest shows that he is carrying 20 tons of British furniture, bound ultimately for Qatar on the Persian Gulf. It becomes clear that modern truckers are more than mere lorry-drivers. Finger-tip controls, ' sleeper' cabs, and the comparative sophistication of continental motorway facilities make McAngus an aristocrat among routiers. But to be a successful aristocrat he must also know a thing or two about the web of Common Market regulations at international frontiers, and about those international gestures of 'goodwill so essential when you arrive at the Italian Customs and everything is not quite right....
David Kendall is a dairy farmer. He has 42 cows producing 80 gallons of milk a day. Yet he finds himself in trouble with the police on a most extraordinary charge: stealing a pint of milk valued at 8p. Kendall says he is not guilty and elects trial by jury. How and why the charge ever arose is revealed in this documentary film about rivalry in a small Dorset town. Reputations are at stake and a livelihood as well. All depends on the verdict of the jury at Dorchester Crown Court.
Following the transmission last August of Inside Story - Miscarriage of Justice, the BBC received a large number of letters from men and women alleging that they had been wrongfully convicted. In that film BERNARD RAYNER , a private detective, proved the innocence of two young men convicted of arson, and he too received many requests for his aid and expertise in righting wrongs where justice had apparently failed. One such case forms the subject of tonight's film. It concerns an informer who went beyond ' helping the police with their enquiries ' to become an agent provocateur, and instrumental in the imprisonment of at least three men who claim they are innocent.
In April this year a long-distance call from Moscow was put through to a London barrister. In the 15 seconds before she was cut off by the KGB, a Russian woman begged the lawyer to undertake the defence of her husband. His name was Professor Yuri Orlov, held incommunicado in Lefortovo Prison on unspecified charges. John MacDonald, QC, accepted the unique brief, and this film documentary is the story of how he, a British lawyer, unfamiliar with Russian and the Russian legal system, set out nevertheless to defend a client he had never seen, and to whom the authorities would allow no access. Yuri Orlov is a Russian dissident and champion of human rights. The story of his defence is told at a time when the USSR and other signatories to the Helsinki Declaration are assembled in Belgrade, a time when the issue of human rights could be the key to East-West détente.
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