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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.'