40 Minutes - Season 5

First aired: 10/10/1985 26 episodes

Episodes

1. In Between Days

Aired: 10/10/1985

A film about being 16. A group of four friends in between being children and adults, emotionally, sexually and physically.

2. 50 Years On

Aired: 10/17/1985

A Golden Wedding holiday. Four couples married in 1935 celebrate 50 years of life together, and talk of the happiness and sadness of their golden years.

3. Schoolgirl Mum

Aired: 10/24/1985

Girls who become pregnant under 16. The girls, their boy-friends and their parents talk about the consequences.

4. Johnny Oddball

Aired: 10/31/1985

10 years ago a famous documentary was made by Franc Roddam about "Mini" Cooper, a most attractive and intelligent child arsonist. Now released from a secure psychiatric institution, he hopes to make a career as a magician.

5. Forget-Me-Not

Aired: 11/7/1985

A Western-style beauty contest in austerity-ridden Poland.

6. Searching for a Miracle

Aired: 11/14/1985

A child with a genetic disease and his young parents go from Northern Ireland on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, in the French Pyrenees. After a week they find there is a change.

7. Page 3 Girls

Aired: 11/21/1985

The story of Sharon, a young hopeful still at school, ambitious to become a famous top-less pin-up, like Samantha Fox and Linda Lusardi.

8. Keep Taking the Rose Petals

Aired: 11/28/1985

Asian alternative-medicine men in Britain, attracting increasing custom from Westerners.

9. Animal Crackers

Aired: 12/5/1985

All over Britain are strange and delightful buildings with one thing in common - they were created for animals. Lucinda Lambton is your guide to such follies. Castles, temples, palaces, obelisks and pyramids, they are a happy by-product of the British passion for animals.

10. Our Man in Shanghai

Aired: 12/12/1985

The Foreign Office opens a new mission in China. The film follows the new Consul-General during his first week in Shanghai. A high-powered trade delegation is due, led by Lord Young; our man has to look after them while finding his own feet. He succeeds in seeing the only performing panda in the world.

11. A House of Hope

Aired: 12/19/1985

A film for Christmas. Alcholics, criminals, down-and-outs and tramps find a sanctuary in a remarkable Christian community in Dorset.

12. The Gift of Life

Aired: 1/9/1986

Seven couples in Hammersmith Hospital go through the long and painful process of trying to conceive a test-tube baby. one succeeds.

13. Flight from Vatersay

Aired: 1/16/1986

The Hebrides - idyllic isles of wild beauty, majestic, remote, peaceful? That's not how Neil Gillies, 23 years old and unemployed, sees his island home of Vatersay. For him it's a place of isolation, boredom and drink. He can't wait to leave Vatersay, his widowed mother and his eight brothers and sisters, to try his luck in Glasgow. His prospects aren't good. Jobs are scarce, accommodation hard to find. There are compensations - Vatersay has few girls; Glasgow seems alive with them. Over the months, the demands of fending for himself begin to tell. When Neil leaves his hard-won job he escapes into the illusory comfort of alcohol. Should he have stayed on the island? Or can he come to terms with this uncompromising city of bed-sits, the dole and bars?

14. Stop the Wedding!

Aired: 1/23/1986

Strange and moving tales of people being jilted at the altar.

15. Student Nurse

Aired: 1/30/1986

The pressure on student nurses. Three girls at different stages of their training at St. James Infirary, Leeds.

16. Emergency - Bloomsbury 3

Aired: 2/6/1986

Dramas of life and death with the ambulance service in action in central London.

17. How to Find a Lover

Aired: 2/13/1986

The singles scene in Miami, Dallas and New York.

18. Cry for Home

Aired: 2/20/1986

'I'm British', says the young lady with strawberry blonde hair and a Midlands accent, 'but I don't have a drop of British blood in me.' Carmen Laanemagi is from Leicester - and Estonia. Pauline Riemers is a nurse in Epsom; her parents are Latvian. Algis Kuliukas, a British Airways computer programmer, lives in Hounslow; he's part-Lithuanian. Last July they embarked on the Baltic Star in Stockholm. It was the beginning of an emotional and exciting voyage. The aim was to sail as close as they could get to the coasts of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia - now part of the Soviet Union. Forty years ago their parents had fled as refugees when the three Baltic states lost their short-lived independence. Now the lost children were returning - hoping for a distant glimpse of home. Narrator Ian Holm

19. The Fishing Party

Aired: 2/27/1986

They are four friends, rich young men - city commodity-brokers, the drinks trade. They belong to the right clubs. They hunt, shoot, play polo, make money. They had the idea of going fishing in Scotland for a few days in the autumn, to see if they could break the world record for a catch of skate. They ended up with something else. As the October weather squalls and shines, as the boat rolls on the stormy waters of the Pentland Firth, as the days pass without the big bite, so the jokes flow, the bottles are cracked, and Robert, John, Henry and Guy reveal their spirited, outspoken opinions. "Better for some to have privilege rather than nobody - let's lead from the top, not the bottom ... Many of our friends, in the City and the army, worry about the aggressive young men of the loony left...."

20. The Real Life of a Hollywood Wife

Aired: 3/6/1986

The women who really matter in the dream city. Reporter - Mrs Richard Burton.

21. A Case of Malicious Wounding

Aired: 3/13/1986

A Yorkshire coal miner caught up in the bitter industrial warfare between strike pickets and police. The traumatic events of 24 August 1984 have changed the course of his life.

22. Come Home Julie

Aired: 3/20/1986

A young black girl, once fostered by a Scottish family, then snatched back to Ghana, returns to her foster parents - with not altogether happy results.

23. Nuts!

Aired: 3/27/1986

The tragic and comic story of the ground nut scheme, a Government fiasco of the 1940s.

24. Countdown to Today

Aired: 4/3/1986

The inside story of the birth of a new daily newspaper, filmed over a period of months.

25. The Last Day

Aired: 4/10/1986

The story of three people retiring from work in Lancashire, their families, and their changed way of life.

26. A Passage to Wisbech

Aired: 4/17/1986

Carrick is a dirty British coaster - a 30-year-old tramp carrying unglamorous cargoes from port to port in the Channel and the North Sea. Her skipper and owner is Rick Waters , once part-time butler to Edward Heath: 'I resent people calling my ship a rust-bucket. She's an old lady who needs the occasional helping hand.' George Norman, the mate, looks after the cargoes. The ship could capsize if a cargo shifts at sea. Tom Owen, ex-Royal Navy, struggles with Carrick's dodgy engine. 'Most other merchant seamen regard coaster crews as the scum of the earth,' he says. Carrick makes uncertain progress through the mad March days, carrying fertilizer to Exmouth, grain to Antwerp, and spuds, improbably, to Wisbech. Coasters like Carrick can reach the ports that other ships can't....