[speaker001:] Hello. Learning difficulties are often associated with behavioural or emotional problems, but how are they linked and why? Today on Ideas on Action, Polytechnic lecturers Bob Brooks and Rod Smart will help us answer those questions. I visited Bob Brooks at home, to ask why learning difficulties can create emotional problems.
[speaker002:] You have to look at the way in which children learn, and the principle vehicle through which children learn is associated with visual symbols, and later with the written word. Now if children are unable to interpret the visual symbols and the written word, in order to make sense of them, there's bound to be some reaction which will show itself in a sort of behavioural response which appears to be different from the responses we would receive from children who are able to interpret these words and symbols.
[speaker001:] Could you give me an example?
[speaker002:] Let's suppose you show a child a picture of a cow, and you indicate to the child that that animal is known as a cow. Now if the child cannot interpret and relate the symbols to the animal, then he's left wondering what the symbols mean, he can't relate the symbols to understanding that a cow is spelt verbally as C O W, and he's left quite mystified, and he doesn't know what we're talking about. In turn, we press our point and say, 'But it's a cow, and this is a very simple word, and you ought to be able to understand it.'So we begin to put pressure on the child, and the child reacts because he can't appreciate what we're trying to get across to him, and so we get a sort of stalemate situation, where the teacher, be it a professional teacher or a parent, is pressurizing the child to understand something which appears quite simplistic, and the child is responding quite deadly, because he cannot focus, he cannot conceptualize, what is to us a very simple concept.
[speaker001:] How would this manifest itself in behavioural terms?
[speaker002:] Well when we say anything to a child, we look for a response. When we offer a child a symbol, we expect a response. Now if the child doesn't understand the symbol, their behaviour can react in one of two directions. One it can go towards the withdrawal end of the spectrum, so that the child shuts up, withdraws, isolates himself and puts the lid on. Or at the other end, we get a reaction which is entirely aggressive, because the child is trying to grapple with something he doesn't understand, he doesn't get a sense of caring feeling from the person trying to teach him, so he reacts aggressively. And of course you can get the whole admixture in between total withdrawal and total aggression.
[speaker001:] How do teachers learn to distinguish between behaviour problems associated with learning difficulties and behaviour problems linked to a different set of disorders? Well, teachers can use school facilities to eliminate the possibility that a child has sight or hearing defects, or other physical or mental problems. Then, says Bob Brooks, teachers must observe the quality of the child's classroom response.
[speaker002:] The teacher in the first school classroom particularly has got to look out, they've got to be aware, does the child give any overt sign of recognition? If I can give you an example. We're all as teachers and parents familiar with a child gaining some new piece of information and all of a sudden their face lights up, their eyes become bright and they say, 'Ah! I see.'And we know they've learnt something, they've understood it and they've got it for life. Now when that sort of'I see'response is missing from the child, then I think we've got to think in terms of 'Is this child able to understand the verbal and visual symbols we're offering?'
[speaker001:] Sorting learning difficulties from behaviour problems can seem difficult for teachers and parents, but education specialist Rod Smart says the two may really be inseparable.
[speaker003:] I've worked with children in various settings, mainly in secondary school, and in recent years I've worked with students, so when I try to make that sort of categorization I find it very difficult. It's the classic chicken and the egg problem, that if you try and identify something starting one area, and using that as a sort of causal factor for another area of behaviour, I'm not sure whether, in the majority of cases, you can satisfactorily identify one as being the cause and the other being the result of that causal factor. And in many ways I don't think it's important, and I, I think that in the majority of our children with those kinds of difficulties you find the two in association, and you can't work on one without working on the other. I mean both in the experience of, that I've had and research that I've looked at, there seems to be in terms of positive results, kind of strategy that are being used are strategies that, that both improve learning performance and improve emotional conditions for the child. So I, I would be very reticent to suggest any programme that is specifically in one direction or the other. When you look at any remedial teacher, whatever their inclinations might be, when you actually observe work it's quite clear they're, they're always working on both an emotional level and on a learning level.
[speaker001:] Distinguishing between behaviour problems and learning difficulties is finally a matter of emphasis. Rod Smart.
[speaker003:] I think you might find a situation quite clearly where you would find a child behaving in such a way in the classroom that it was being disruptive to himself, disruptive to teachers, disruptive to, to his classmates, and therefore the, the first move must be in a direction of rearranging that behaviour so that there could develop a situation in which you might do something about the learning difficulty. On the other side of the coin you might find a child who is experiencing such difficulties in his learning that the first line of attack must be in, in terms of perhaps producing just an improvement of his base level of learning, so that the next step can be taken. So I think it, it is a question of emphasis. But I think before very long you are in fact working in both directions.
[speaker001:] To make the task of parents and teachers even harder, adolescents can aggravate the problem of detecting and solving behaviour problems associated with learning difficulties. Rod Smart reports.
[speaker003:] Identification of what might be called a transient problem, compared with, with a deep-seated long-term problem, is perhaps not always apparent. Undoubtedly adolescence is the one which raises numerous transient problems in terms of puberty particularly, in terms of physical change, where adolescents become very worried about their, their body image, about the changes that are happening to them physically. And in the majority of those cases, that is a transient problem, and teacher assistance needs to be at a level of, of general support to get them over that period. The longer term help is something that I don't think teachers can do on their own, I don't think even somebody like a, a specialist school counsellor can do on their own, which is the time at which the availability of agency help needs to be, become apparent. And I think, I mean the kind of situations I would think of as in that would be, just to take it from my own experience, of children who become quite experienced. Very often, puberty for example, that depression will become more enhanced, so it might present itself as a problem that seems to be rising out of puberty, but as time goes on and through school help that doesn't seem to be resolving that problem, I think that's the point at which the specialist within the school, the teacher within the school, must think about, 'This doesn't seem to be resolving itself. I need to look elsewhere,'and the referral processes that go on would be through the G P or, or through the school psychological services where longer term help might be necessary. And, just quickly, I can think of two or three examples of children who in fact became very suicidal through their depression. And they certainly needed more help than the school could give. But it's very difficult for parents in those situations perhaps to accept the, the deep-seated nature of their children's problems, especially if it's, it's somewhere connected with the kind of defective relationships they're having within their own homes.
[speaker001:] Parents and teachers can always turn for help with learning and behaviour problems to their school psychologist, or to the East Sussex Dyslexia Association. But Bob Brooks has another suggestion for parents.
[speaker002:] I think the only response you can make to any child who's facing a challenge is that you care, that you will be patient, that you will go on and on and on. So often teachers and parents set limits. If nothing happens by such and such a time, then we shall have to do something else. They very often don't know what the something else is going to be, but we tend to put time limits on what children should do and when they should do it. With any disturbed child, we have to be patient and we have to learn to wait. And I think there's one important strategy which many teachers are apprehensive of using. This is what I call the strategy of non-decision, the decision that we will do nothing, that we won't harass the child, that we will give the child time to relax and move at his own pace, rather than determining the pace that we feel the child ought to be following.
[speaker001:] And based on his own experience, Rod Smart thinks that parent-teacher cooperation plays a vital part in solving behaviour problems.
[speaker002:] I worked for three years as a school counsellor in South Brompton, and the majority of the children who came my way were children who had some degree of behavioural difficulty or emotional disturbance. And although my initial work was with the individual child, I found that in a large number of cases, the parental interest was of a high order and, and the children's willingness to involve parents in their behavioural difficulties was also of a high order, so I found myself working not just within the school, not just with the child, but in a parent-child situation. And there it didn't materialize as much as an advice service as a way of working together to solve the child's problems. I'd rather take that approach, and what I would suggest is that, wherever possible, teachers should think about involving parents in the kinds of difficulties that the child is having in school, and thereby becomes a team effort rather than parents working one direction and perhaps teachers working in another.
[speaker001:] What else can parents do? Well, Bob Brooks says that patient support is one of the best helps that parents can offer to children with learning difficulties.
[speaker002:] In this society of ours, many children are led to confusion by the complexity of the life in which they're placed. And I think for the dyslexic child, for the disturbed child generally, we need to offer an atmosphere which is calm. I think the thing that I would say to parents: 'You may be anxious, you may be concerned. Try not to convey your anxiety and concern to the children. If you can care for them, show them that you love them. Very often these things will at least ease, if not heal.'
[speaker001:] Many thanks to Bob Brooks and Rod Smart. Next week on Ideas in Action, we'll start Christmas early, with a new two-part series on Yuletide tales. Until then, good-bye. [recorded jingle]
[speaker004:] Hello. This is the first of a series of programmes in which we're going to look at the computer and its impact on our lives. In this programme I'm going to sketch in a bit of the background, by way of introduction, and in later weeks, various colleagues of mine, concerned with all aspects of the computing world, will be helping me build up the over-all picture. Details of individual programmes are given as usual in the Radio Times. I suppose that we each of us are born with our own primitive computers: two hands and ten fingers. Which of us do not find it convenient on occasions to count on our fingers? Walk into a room where there's a group of people, and ask, which want tea, and which want coffee. The natural and, and instinctive way of arriving at the totals, is to use the fingers to count. On one hand for tea, and on the other hand for coffee. The difficulty arises, of course, when you run out of fingers, or try to take milk and sugar into account. This is a primitive but thoroughly respectable bit of computing. Of course when we think and talk about computers, we generally have in mind something much more formal and more scientific than our own hands. A box with knobs and buttons to press, which does a lot of calculations rather quickly. But at a fundamental level there's really little difference between you and I struggling to count on our fingers, and the most modern and sophisticated piece of computing wizardry. In both cases there's a facility for storing data, for performing operations according to some sort of program, and for telling the operator the results. The difference lies in the capacity for providing or performing all these functions. So if computers are really that ordinary and familiar, what's so special about them? Well I think it's really three things. First of all they have enormous and very efficient and reliable memories for retaining simple bits of information. And since complicated situations or statements can very easily be broken down into a set of simple statements, this in effect means that computers can store complex pieces of information too. Secondly, computers can do sums and manipulations with this information very rapidly. Here again, only very simple operations are possible. But since more complicated instructions can always be broken down into a collection of simple steps, this doesn't matter either. Millions of bits of information can be processed at a rate of millions of steps per second. In a recent B B C 2 programme on computing, the presenter commented on the huge capacity of computers such as those used by the Meteorological Office to predict the weather. The one used in London can handle fifty million pieces of information in one second, and it still takes minutes to produce a forecast for a few days ahead. As a comparison, he pointed out that if the entire population of China were set the same task, it would take them more than four hours to complete it. Of course, this is not even really a realistic option, because you'd still have the impossible communication problem of getting the information out to the individuals involved in the first place, and then getting the answers back again and coordinating them to make some sort of over-all sense. The third feature of the modern computer is that it is now much more accessible to the layman. Whereas historically it was expensive, rare, and available only to the privileged few, mainly mathematicians and scientists, now anyone can own and use one. Look at any newspaper or magazine, and you'll see advertisements for personal computers. There are now over a hundred makes of micro-computer for sale in the United Kingdom, and several thriving magazines entirely devoted to these devices. What cost hundreds of thousands of pounds in the nineteen-fifties, and occupied a large building, now only costs a hundred or two, and is not much larger than a typewriter. Even the methods of getting information in and out of a computer have changed beyond recognition. The reels of punch-paper tape and the boxes of cards are often replaced by ordinary cassette tapes. The language that the layman has to learn is not the original machine code or even the more modern FORTRAN or PASCAL, which is used by scientists, but is generally BASIC, which, as its name denotes, is a very straightforward set of instructions in simple English. When you want the computer to list what instructions it has received, you type LIST on the keyboard. And the instructions are displayed on a monitor, rather like on a television set. Let's have a look more closely at some of the changes that have taken place in the past few decades. When talking about computers, we use the word 'hardware'to describe the actual machine and its accessories, and 'software'to describe the actual programs that are written and devised to operate using the hardware. When computers, as we understand them in a modern sense, first came into use in the early nineteen-fifties, they were huge, expensive and unreliable. The basic circuits used electronic valves, and the heat generated was itself a great problem. The electrical power consumed and the heat that had to be dissipated by elaborate cooling systems made them expensive and inconvenient to run. Parts were always going wrong, and half the time computers were out of action as technicians laboriously tried to find and remedy faults. Quite apart from all this, computers took up an awful lot of space. They needed their own buildings. All computers operate on a very simple and fundamental principle. Basically they can add or subtract, and anything more complicated than this has to be achieved by breaking down the more elaborate procedures down to a sometimes large number of successive steps. For example multiplication can be reduced to an appropriate number of additions, and so on. In principle this may appear to be a very cumbersome activity, but in practice it's not. Because you can use a particular sort of algebra, based on the so-called binary system, which greatly shortens and simplifies problems, which might at first sight seem terribly long and complicated. The early computer programmer and user had to learn to speak the language of the computer, machine code, and had to learn how to put these simple instructions, often in very tedious forms, into the computer. The language had to be learnt and used with great accuracy, because there was very little tolerance for error. If a mistake was made, the program didn't work. And probably very little information was fed back to the operator as to the cause of the error. I went on a computer training course in the mid-nineteen-fifties. After a week in the classroom, those of us who were regarded as having mastered the principles were allowed to run a very simple and short program on the London University computer, provided it was passed by one of our instructors. So what has happened in the three decades that have passed? Electronic valves gave way to transistors, and these have been replaced by the silicon chip, literally a thin slice of silicon, on which miniature electrical circuits can be created. Whole circuits are reduced to small slivers of material, measuring a few millimetres across, and the number of components and whole circuits that can be put on each chip is increasing each year. In the early nineteen-sixties, each chip consisted of about ten electrical components, and was equivalent to one logic circuit. By nineteen-seventy, a thousand components were being squeezed onto a single chip. In nineteen-seventy-five, a hundred thousand. And now it's possible to put the equivalent of a million components on one single chip. And progress hasn't stopped even yet. It's estimated that by nineteen-ninety, there will be something like a hundred million components on a single chip. And the chip will still only be the size of a centimetre or two. And all this has happened with costs going down rather than up. The reason for this is quite straightforward. As techniques improve, the number of components that can be put onto each prototype chip increases. The first chip can represent hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pounds, of investment and effort. But having got one working chip, the next thousand or even million, can be reproduced very cheaply indeed. Not only have the basic building blocks of the computer become smaller and cheaper, and hence more readily available to a greater number of people, the language of the computer has become much more accessible to the lay person. First of all, new languages were developed for the scientist and engineer who did not want to learn basic code. FORTRAN, PASCAL, ALGOL are examples that I've already mentioned, and will be familiar to science students. These were used by the computer operator to write programs for his or her particular purpose. As a preliminary, the computer memory was fed with a large set of instructions for translating the program into machine code. A bit like getting the computer to swallow a dictionary and a book of grammar, before you started speaking to it. As more and more uses were found for computers in business and commerce, as well as in science and engineering, even easier languages were developed for lay use. And as I've mentioned already, the most common now used is the BASIC language, which sound like a rather halting English. And it won't be long before even more colloquial and everyday languages will be the norm rather than the exception. The effort, and to a great extent, the cost, has moved from producing hardware to developing software. Programs for use by accountants, shopkeepers, doctors and even housewives. In nineteen-fifty-five, about eighty percent of the capital cost of a computer lay in its hardware, with the other twenty percent being invested in software programs to perform particular tasks. Now the reverse is true. A company might spend ten thousand pounds on a computer, but they would then spend sixty thousand pounds on the associated software to make it work. At the moment computers are increasing in speed by an average factor of ten per annum, and the number of computers in use in the Western world is increasing by about twenty-five percent per year. If we assume that the number of professional programmers, these are people who are competent to use and develop software, is roughly proportional to the number of commercial computers in operation, this means that if the trend continues, in ten years time, there will be a need for roughly a hundred times as many computer programmers than we've got as present. I'm not quite sure how many we've got in Britain. But if we take a guess that there are thirty thousand, this means that in nineteen-ninety, three million people, or something like a tenth of the entire working population, will be engaged in writing materials for computers. Of course this calculation has to be taken with a pinch of salt. There will only be that number of computers if the range of applications and uses increases a hundredfold too. But even if my estimate is significantly wrong, computing remains a growth area, and one in which, notwithstanding economic recessions, the outlook looks bright. Don't put your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington, send her to be trained as a computer programmer. Well, that's all that we have time for today. In the next few weeks, I shall be looking at all aspects of the computer world. Until next week, good-bye. [recorded jingle] Hello. Computers are used increasingly for commercial purposes. Not just by large companies, but also by quite small organizations. Delia Venables runs the Micro-computer Advisory Service based in Lewes. Delia, have we reached a stage where not just big organizations but also quite small firms ought to each have their own computer?
[speaker005:] Well not the very small firm yet, I would say. If it only takes you an hour or two a week to run your administration, then you don't yet need a computer. But probably at the stage where somebody is spending two or three hours a day erm processing invoices, trying to get cash in, erm looking at the stock control, then that's the point where they could very well consider a small computer now.
[speaker004:] And what sort of price are we talking about when people say they ought to have a computer? Hundreds of thousands, or, or much less these days?
[speaker005:] Well you've probably seen in erm the newspapers you can now buy small computers for one hundred or two hundred pounds, but they're not really what we're talking about, because the very smallest computers of this sort, like the Sinclair and the B B C computer, don't have any sort of storage for the data. Or, at most, they allow you to plug in your own cassette tape-recorder, but that's a very slow and not very erm professional way of looking after for example your customer records. So in order to have something that enables you to keep records of two or three hundred customers, and then of course to be able to print out some sort of lists or invoices at the end of it, you would need to pay, probably even now, a couple of thousand pounds, and very often of course more.
[speaker004:] So your rule of thumb, for starting, is that if somebody's spending more than two or three hours a day, perhaps, on accounts or stock-taking or whatever, then it might be worth checking out the possibility of using a computer.
[speaker005:] Yes indeed. Because once you've got a computer running for your main application then you can always find other things to do with it which may help you to improve your business. What you need are different programs. And you can buy the programs as off-the-shelf, packaged programs for relatively little money, perhaps a hundred or two hundred pounds a packaged program, so you might pay perhaps two or three hundred pounds for a stock control program, two or three hundred pounds for an invoicing or sales ledger program. This obviously adds on to the cost of your basic computer but if you are a small business it isn't an enormous amount. The sort of computer we're talking about would have two floppy disc units. And so, depending on what you want to do on nine o'clock on Monday morning, you would take out the required floppy disc, put it in your computer, take out your data disc, which you would also have kept, put that in the second floppy disc unit, and you'd be ready to run that particular application.
[speaker004:] And how much experience is, do operators need to work one of these things? An ordinary little firm that has operated perfectly cheerfully with a clerk and a few assistants over the years, is it actually a practical proposition to install the computer and perhaps train one or two of the workers to use it?
[speaker005:] Very much a practical proposition, but I think you do have to be fairly keen and interested. erm What you can't do is take somebody who really the very idea of computers, and turn them into a successful computer operator, because they will make mistakes, and having made mistakes they will be terrified and won't want to do it again. But somebody that likes experimenting and that, is aware of all the possibilities that are opening with computers, will in fact learn very quickly. erm Anybody that's well-organized, good at clerical operations, preferably can type a little bit even though, if only perhaps with a few fingers, erm would make a perfectly computer operator for a small firm.
[speaker004:] And we've talked about the packages and the software. You said they each cost a few hundred pounds. Have you any idea, and as an estimate perhaps, what the total amount of a typical collection of software packages would be, compared with the actual cost of the computer?
[speaker005:] Well, if you're talking about the smallest sort of business, and you've spent maybe two thousand pounds on your actual computer, complete with a printer and the floppy discs I've been talking about, then you might expect to spend another five hundred to a thousand pounds on a basic set of software. If you buy slightly larger computers with more storage erm and more facilities, then you will tend to pay more for the software. For example if you spent four thousand pounds on the hardware, then you could well spend fifteen hundred or two thousand pounds on the software. And so on.
[speaker004:] Let's have a look at some of the applications. You mentioned accounts. What are the advantages of actually using a computer to keep accounts as opposed to a gentleman sitting on a tall stool with a quill pen?
[speaker005:] Well I think gentlemen on tall stools with quill pens are becoming increasingly hard to find, and to pay a living wage to. erm And a lot of the time this gentleman would have been sorting through the data, finding out who owed how much money, writing them polite letters, and this is the sort of thing you can do very quickly with a computer. You still have to put the data in once, you have to enter the invoice, but once it's entered, it will be there to be accessed in all sorts of different ways, and at the end of the month, a business would very often want to send out statements. Well it might just take a couple of hours to print out a complete set of statements for two hundred customers. And it can be done on the morning after the end of the previous month, whereas manually our gentleman on the tall stool might have spent at least a week preparing it, and getting them out, and that's a week that you haven't got your money in.
[speaker004:] What about erm order processing and so on? Does that have an advantage to put on computer?
[speaker005:] Well, this is a slightly more complicated application, where you're not just selling for example straight from stock, but you take orders from customers, and then you would have to manufacture, perhaps to buy in, to assemble, some sort of goods for sending out. And so the systems become a little more complicated in that you have to keep records of your customers, of your orders, of your stock, and to some extent, of how your own production, or your assembly, is getting along. I think for a very small company this perhaps might be more complicated in computing terms than would be worthwhile, but as soon as you're getting to the point of many orders in a week, then it can be exceedingly useful to be able to ask the computer to tell you for example what are all the outstanding orders, what are all the overdue orders, what is the stock position bearing in mind that some stock is committed for certain orders, what orders have we got with suppliers to us which are still outstanding, and questions of this sort, can make your business much more efficient.
[speaker004:] And we talked a little bit earlier about word-processing. Presumably the great advantage of word-processing, if, if you have the sort of decent printer that you mentioned, is that you could send what appear to be rather personal letters to a whole lot of people rather rapidly erm putting in, for example, at a very elementary level, their individual name, but also coupling together relevant paragraphs erm which would be appropriate to them.
[speaker005:] Yes. This is the sort of thing Reader's Digest have done for years, of course, on great enormous computers. They would have lists of all the people that had bought books from them or might have bought books from them in the past, categorized by where they live, the age of the person, the sex, the special interests, the past purchases, and then they would send out special books... erm special letters, if they had a new doggie book coming out they might select all the ladies over fifty-five who had bought doggie books in the past. What Reader's Digest with its enormous great computers have been doing for at least ten years, now people with small computers and a word-processing package can do for themselves, and certainly they would be selecting from their customer lists particular people to send particular advertising to and special letters.
[speaker004:] And we've talked mainly about small companies, small firms of one kind and another. Presumably all this applies equally well to, to shops because I suppose you could link up the cash registers to some sort of stock control, so that you could almost keep a running total of what you, you have in stock as you erm punch the appropriate numbers up on the, on the till?
[speaker005:] Yes, this is what big shops, particularly in America, have now been doing for a few years, in that the till that takes your order as it were is also a computer terminal on line to large computers somewhere else, and every time your tin of baked bins is checked out by the girl on the till, it is adjusting the stocks on its large computer and saying, 'Hey, we're going to run out of baked beans at approximately ten o'clock tomorrow morning. We must put in an order tonight.'That sort of application hasn't yet reached the small shops where really the proprietor of the shop himself is only too well aware of when the baked beans is running out. But it is coming, and certainly some of the medium-sized shops, perhaps with a couple of two or three outlets but under the same management, where it's not quite so easy to see when you're running out of baked beans, are already beginning to take advantage of some of these retailing computers.
[speaker004:] Delia, you yourself run an advisory service. What sort of general advice would you offer people who wanted to check out the possibility of using a computer in their own operation?
[speaker005:] Well you have to have some idea of what you want to do with it. And that really means which operations, in your own business, are taking quite a lot of time, and therefore costing you money. And the sort of operations of course that are capable of being put on a computer. So that first of all we would have to look at how much time people spend preparing invoices, sending out statements, producing age debtors lists and that sort of thing. Quite often people don't need a computer, what they need is a slightly different manual system, and I tell them that quite often, they're very, very pleased, they think they've saved themselves two or three thousand pounds at least. But if you do find an area where you could save a key person several hours a day, then that is real money saved where he could be using his special expertise in his business to get more business, and then one would have to look more closely at erm the particular application, particular jobs that he's doing and that could be put on the computer. This might be things we've talked about, stock control, sales ledger and so forth. Having decided on that general application, then it's a question of shopping around amongst all the different computers that are on the market, and there are hundreds, to find the ones where the ready-made programs most nearly match the needs of that particular business. It really isn't these days just the hardware, the, the box of electronic magic tricks that matter. It is the programs that have been written, and these packaged programs have got to be fairly close to your business in order not to be very frustrating and more bother than they are worth. The software is the key to finding the right computer these days.
[speaker004:] And do you normally buy the software from the same person that sells you the computer?
[speaker005:] Well that's extremely advisable, because if you have a problem in the middle of your morning's run of sending out invoices, you may not know whether it's a software problem in the programs, or a hardware, hardware problem in the actual electronics. It's much better to be able to have one telephone number of somebody to ring up and say, 'Hey, the screen's gone blank and I don't know what to do next,'and have somebody, initially over the telephone, giving you advice, helping you to get round the problem, or, if necessary, sending round a service engineer quite smartly. But what you don't want is a series of conversations with two or three different people all of whom really want you to go away and are just trying to pass the buck to someone else.
[speaker004:] And it's quite possible to arrange for demonstrations of suitable equipment to be given to you, is it?
[speaker005:] Oh yes. Any company that's trying to sell computers is only too pleased to give demonstrations, and either you would go to their showroom, where they've got it all set up, erm or they would bring the, the equipment in to you. In fact there's advantages both ways round. If you go to their showroom, you can get a feel for how they, the supplier, run their business and whether they're efficient and whether they've got erm good people in their organization. Of course if they come to you then you get a feel of how the equipment is going to feel in your office, and that can be useful too.
[speaker004:] And what about maintenance? Is that ever a problem?
[speaker005:] Yes, it can be a problem. You certainly don't want your computer grinding to a halt in the middle of your important statement run. And you have to have a maintenance contract. If you're a serious user you simply can't do without it, and this can be expensive. It's likely to be several hundred pounds a year even for the cheapest computers, at least ten percent of the cost of the computer a year, and it starts straight away. I don't really understand how computer suppliers seem to get away with this, because with most things you have a year's guarantee, and then you start your maintenance contract. But it's almost universal, with small computers, that you start your maintenance contract within days, or weeks, at most, of getting it installed. And so you can really consider that your first year's cost is not just the cost of the computer but it's also this extra few hundred pounds for your maintenance contract.
[speaker004:] And lastly, Delia, do you see the movement towards more and more computerization continuing in the future?
[speaker005:] Yes, but I think there's no need to buy computers just to be clever or to be well ahead of your neighbours or your other business friends. Computers can also get in the way, and if they're not running properly they can be frustrating. So I think caution is erm very important in buying a computer, and if you wait a couple of months erm you won't have done any harm, because something newer and more beautiful is always on the way. So don't rush at it.
[speaker004:] Well thank you very much, Delia. That's all that we have time for today. Next week, Erin Sloman will be back again, talking about ways of teaching people computing.
[Geoffrey:] Partly in the questioner's mind, erm could be answered by reference to language problems, I mean, a technical or professional qualifications may be equivalent, and may be awfully good, but if one expert and qualified person can't talk the language of the country he wants to work in, that's going to be a barrier on its own, and I reckon that is often the bigger barrier between the easy movement of qualified people from one of our countries to another, than the lack of qualifications, or disagreement about qualifications themselves. erm I think that must often be the case.
[speaker004:] The next question comes from Mr Len Reed, of The Crescent, Morescombe, who asks: 'Do the British take sport less seriously than other European countries, and is the idea of the amateur sportsman, or artist, for that matter, essentially English?'Geoffrey.
[Geoffrey:] Well thank you, I, I'll leave to Norbert the handling of the artist's side of this, but as to the amateur sportsman, I know this is a very familiar and accepted notion among us, that the British don't take sport seriously enough, but I wonder if it's not one of the many self-delusions that we suffer from. erm After all, sport, sport in every country was amateur until some time about the middle of this century. If you look at the people who went in for the Olympic Games, right up to the Second World War, erm you would call them amateurs. I suppose that in a few countries like Nazi Germany in nineteen-thirty-six the erm the nation's amateur champions were given a special backing because of the force of nationalism erm national focus of attention on them at that date, but it, it still was, they were amateurs still meeting on equal ground. It's only since the Second World War I think that a few nations, especially the, the, the highly socialist ones with a strong erm directed policy of sports, in sports and education, have begun to put an amount of effort into sports training which the less socialistic and less state concentrated countries like our own have found a, a bit offensive. Now, whose fault is that but our own? It's, I, recur here to something I said in the broadcast I did earlier in this series, that a British national characteristic which distinguishes us very much from every Continental country, is our erm phobia about committing money and means to the state to spend for our common good. Now the complaint about sports is simply that other countries put more central and local government money into sport and into facilities, into training, into stadia and so on that we do. We could do exactly the same with sport, like we could do it with art and theatre and music and, and a hell of a lot of other things, but it's unfortunately a part of our national political tradition that a large number of us feel some reluctance about doing this.
[speaker004:] Do other countries have the same distinction between amateur and professional that we do?
[Geoffrey:] Yes I think so. And, and, and lets remember that the first big shock that British sportsmen got, the first shaking of the earth which intimated that we weren't so hot at these things as we used to be was in professional sport, it was in football, it was when the Hungarians beat England in nineteen-fifty-six, and the Hungarian army officer Elista Pushkas became erm a world figure because he'd led the team that had humbled British football might. Well, they were professionals as far as I know, it wasn't a matter there of professionals beating amateurs. erm As for the distinction between the amateur and the professional, no, I think, I think that we've got stuck with this amateur business, partly because it's related to the idea of the English gentleman, which is only slowly fading. erm I don't think he exists as much as he used... Norbert wants something.
[Norbert:] Well I, I absolutely agree with that. I, I think in fact there's still an assumption that the real sportsman, the real artist, the real human being is the amateur of each sort, and not the professional. There's a kind of shyness about trusting the professional in this country. erm If you can call somebody an expert, that means you're being rude to him. erm erm Brian calls us experts at the beginning of the programme erm everyone listening knows we can't all be experts of course on all these things, we're just sort of amateurishly trying to be sensible on these questions. erm I think the problem about sport and art in this country very often is that the amateur is over-regarded and the professional's under-regarded, and as Geoffrey rightly said, erm underfinanced on a national level. erm There's a kind of assumption that if something, if somebody does something on a Sunday afternoon, for lack of better, something better to do or because it's raining and golf is therefore, therefore off, that he therefore does it in a truer, sincerer way than a man who might be doing it as his career, for his income, to keep his family alive and so on. I honestly think that it's time the English got off this notion, which after all has nothing to do with the original meaning of the word 'amateur', which means having a passion for something, erm got off this notion that the amateur, the gentleman, as Geoffrey said, is necessarily more truly engaged with the activity than somebody else.
[speaker004:] Of course we're very wedded to this notion. It goes right across into politics and administration, doesn't it?
[Anne:] Yes, to a certain extent. Certainly we rely on erm unsalaried voluntary justices of the peace. Very few erm Continental countries would consider entrusting the administration of justice erm to erm people who took an afternoon or a day off work every week or so and went in to sit on the Bench. But it does seem to be another example of the way in which we look to the amateur, to somebody who depends, for example, on the, very often on the legal briefing of the Clerk of the Court, erm to counterbalance that with his common sense. We do put a very high premium on common sense, I think, and that certainly is a national characteristic.
[Geoffrey:] mhm It just occurred to me that our Civil Service, in its higher reaches, is also notoriously recruited very largely from the ranks of people who studied Latin and Greek at universities. That is still to some extent, erm though less true, I daresay, than it once was, but the mystique, I think, survives, does it not, Anne will tell us, in Whitehall, that these people bring erm who, who are essentially amateurs in matters of political science, sociology, international relations and diplomacy, bring a gentleman amateur's omnicompetent wisdom.
[Anne:] Certainly there's a very strong feeling that common sense is not something erm that can be trained by a training in political science and that it's valuable. I think we have to be a little bit careful about this because, of course, erm the feeling is not that once they've been in the job for a little while that they are still amateurs, it's merely that we don't require them to know a great deal about what they're going to do before they start. But I think most people would recognize the very considerable professionalism that they acquire on the job. Where we have a different point of view is the point of view that says that a general education which will train the mind erm and expand capacity for judgement and so on, erm is perhaps more important than an exact knowledge of erm some particular political science theory.
[Geoffrey:] mhm What sort of a general education is A level in this country, do you think?
[Anne:] It's obviously more specialized than some of the education erm at comparable level in other countries, both in France and in Germany erm they take erm as their eighteen-plus exam erm an exam which covers a rather wider field, erm so in that sense, oddly, we specialize early, which is an interesting comparison.
[speaker004:] Well we do seem to be still wedded to some form of British amateurism, I think, the panel would agree with me there. Mrs Connie Bunker of Hassex Road, Herspear Point wants to know, 'Are the health and social service provisions in different countries similar to those in Britain, and is there a move towards uniformity between the countries in the E E C?'
[Geoffrey:] Gosh.
[Anne:] I think there's a great deal of disparity between the countries of Western Europe erm in the way in which health and social security provisions are organized and erm provided. erm There seems on the whole to be general agreement throughout Western Europe about the kinds of things that ought to be covered by health and social security system industrial accidents, sickness, provision for old age and so on— and all the countries of the European Community, for example, have some kind of system that provide these sorts of benefits. And in all Western European countries the state is increasingly involved in trying to ensure that the system works, proper standards are met, that facilities are reasonably equally spread over the country and so on. But it is very difficult to make comparisons. We can for example say that in West Germany erm a worker who's paid contributions for forty-five years gets an old-age pension that amounts to about seventy-five percent of what he was taking home in take-home pay before he retired, and obviously this looks a much better deal than the British old age pensioner gets. But we need to know a lot more about for example his housing costs, his rent and rate rebates that he may be entitled to and so on, before we can really say erm that we can make a proper comparison erm and different countries have different priorities. In France there's long been a high priority on keeping the birth rate up, so there are very high maternity grants and family allowances, especially if you've got three or more children. But some of the comparisons we can do produce quite interesting facts. erm The proportion of the total economic activity of the country, the G D P that is spent on social security and health care, is much higher in West Germany and in France than in Britain. erm On social security and health together it's about ten percentage points higher in West Germany erm and about six percentage points higher in France than in the U K And I must say I do wonder why in West Germany erm you've got half as many again doctors per hundred thousand of the population of the U K and only about two-thirds as many nurses, which does suggest, you know, differences in national approaches to things like health care. And of course you get differences in organization as well. erm In some countries they're run through the state and in others through insurance associations or insurance groups, so that you get this kind of difference. And I can't see any moves towards uniformity, I'm really not aware that there are any pressures in Europe towards a common system.
[Norbert:] I, I wonder why the questioner was interested in the uniformity business. Is it that she, she's, she's, she's wondering what will happen to her family or children if they go abroad, or is she thinking that each country in the Community, perhaps having some special erm excellence of its own, ought to be shedding this example among the others so that we all raise ourselves to a common, higher level? If that's what she's thinking of, then I guess that we all very much wish it could happen. That if our health service and social security system has got any special advantages erm left, which it may still have, erm then perhaps erm our friends in the Community could learn a bit from them. It sounds as if we could learn a great deal from Germany and Holland about, in the health service, erm because their systems by now by all statistical tests of mortality and illness and so on, seem to be doing a better job than ours.
[Anne:] Although in terms of expense they are of course more expensive, and therefore this also erm is something one, one has to consider. It is a question of priorities and what people, you think it's worth paying for. And the Germans for example are at the moment very concerned, and indeed the French too, very concerned to try and keep costs down, because they have been erm going too fast.
[Geoffrey:] National food, drink, sport and erm other habits must also be relevant to the understanding of this problem.
[Anne:] I think that's true. And in so far as it, as the question arises erm of what kind of, of provisions erm are you going to find if you go abroad, erm then I think we can say that within the European Community, erm citizens of one member state are entitled to what the citizens of the member state in which they happen to be staying are entitled to. erm So that if you erm visit France, for example, erm you will find yourself being reimbursed for the same amount of your medical cost as a French citizen would have had reimbursed to him. erm In some cases this can cause difficulty and some self-employed people who have erm tried to erm get the necessary documentations to claim this, have found that they're not covered in some countries of the European Community erm because the general national erm insurance schemes there don't erm apply to self-employed people. So that erm although you're entitled to what a native of that country would get, so long as you're in the European Community, even that can vary.
[speaker004:] Thank you. We talked earlier about amateur British people and we talked about amateur British magistrates and I'm a, an amateur British magistrate, but the question that I'm going to put next was put by a colleague of mine, who has preferred to remain anonymous, and that is, it's proposed to fine motorists on the spot for minor offencmes in this country in the near future, and the question is, 'Does this system apply in other European countries, and is it a good system?'Norbert, you look as if you've got views on this.
[Norbert:] Well, I know it applies in some European countries. erm I can't roll them off and I don't know if it applies in all of them, but it happened to me in Italy that erm I was fined on the spot. The offence was grievous and innocent, I drove the wrong way round a roundabout, which sounds appalling but there was not a single other car in sight to, in a sense to steer by so to speak, erm but there was one policeman, and he stopped me, and he fined me, and I had to search for my purse, which I had well hidden, this being Italy, erm underneath all the bedding and the tents and the cooking pots, found it in due course, presented him very shakily with these thousand lire or whatever it was he wanted, and, and this is really the point, drove off very shakily too. A, that I was upset, I don't like being fined, but it's also I don't like being told off by anybody, you know, it's a sort of basic child reaction. erm And I think this is a serious point. erm I think in a way to, as many a parent knows, to act instantly, cause some pain, and then let the matter drop, is a very good system in some senses, but is it, is it a good thing to have happening in the middle of traffic? erm I suggest that on the whole something might be gained if this was tried here. erm We park appallingly carelessly, some of us do it intentionally very often, some of us do it innocently or probably ignorantly, and perhaps to be fined on the spot would be a way of saving an awful lot of paperwork, an awful lot of time, and perhaps reminding people that they shouldn't be doing these things although I'm always slightly worried, this is in a sense another problem, I'm slightly worried by, by the inequity that six pounds or whatever it is will mean a lot to one person and hardly anything at all to another, and you do see some cars mis-parking again and again, and I'm not sure that erm the instant penalty would make much difference there. erm How does one in any case fine a motorist who isn't standing by his car or sitting in it? erm I would, if the question is shall we try it, if that is implied, I would say it's worth trying in a very moderate way, it may require the police and the police representatives so to speak, the wardens if they're going to be empowered to do this kind of thing, I think it's going to force them to become very, very diplomatic and civilized in the way they handle it, but we of course too will have to learn to respond in a civilized manner.
[Anne:] It isn't only Italy in which it applies. My husband got fined in Germany erm for crossing a road on foot erm when the green man erm to enable, that said that the pedestrian crossing was clear wasn't showing. There was a red light up, and he was stopped by a policeman as he reached the opposite pavement and duly asked for the appropriate number of marks. erm I sometimes feel erm that erm in fact it would be a good idea when I see people doing things which I regard as immediately dangerous, but I think it might make considerable difficulties for the relationship between the police and the motoring public which erm are already at times very strained, and I'm not sure, for some of the reasons erm that Norbert has suggested, that it's erm necessarily a very erm happy system. On the other hand I suspect that you as a magistrate have, have views about the amount of time that it takes up erm in your court, dealing with what must seem to you erm fairly erm minor offenses, and I wonder what you feel about it.
[speaker004:] Oh well that's really turning it round, isn't it? erm My feeling is that it would work very well provided there was a, a safeguard, and that is that if you wanted to argue you could. And that you, if you wanted to go through appropriate court procedures and disagree with the official then that was up to you. In other words you essentially had the choice on the spot of saying, 'Yes, I certainly did it, and here's my fiver or whatever it is,'or 'No I don't agree with you and I would like to go through the proper judicial procedures.'
[Geoffrey:] Well there is a kind of motoring offence and it's really a parking offence which we're all familiar with, about which there is no doubt whatever, and it's when one is parked on a double yellow line. Now, that is a bloody nuisance to everybody erm who is trying to go along the street, which is of such a narrowness or difficulty, that it has been marked with double yellow lines in order to, to facilitate the flow of traffic. And all kinds of reasons are conventionally winked at by our good-natured policemen and traffic wardens. erm One pretends that one's wife is going into the shop just for ten, you know for just three minutes, or that there is a baker's van delivering stuff at nine, nine o'clock in the morning. But in, in the United States I've noticed, the laws about the yellow lines are much better observed and the traffic circulates better. I can see that erm to introduce into this country on-the-spot fining, such as is known in some Continental countries, erm might sour relations in an unfortunate way between the executors of the law and the victims. What would be more satisfactory would be the introduction of the American towaway system, in which great lorries with grabs and hooks come round, and without any ado whatever, whoosh the car away from where it is illegally and improperly parked. That's a great satisfaction to everybody, it goes to a car pound, and then you have to go there and pay your sixty dollars or whatever it is to get it out. There's no souring of relations because there's no argument possible. erm The penalty is fixed, it's redeeming your car from the pound, and the traffic is enabled to go through the street in the way that the planners of the traffic system had intended.
[Norbert:] I, I absolutely agree with Geoffrey on this. I, I think we perhaps as amateur drivers and amateur policemen and amateur... [LAUGHTER] wardens and whatever, we don't take the double yellow lines half seriously enough, erm and I think parking generally is, is something we're very bad at and I'm an occasional sinner in this respect too, but it, it did strike me the other day, erm paying a fifteen pound fine for parking on a single yellow line on a Sunday afternoon but I hadn't noticed a sign that said I shouldn't, erm paying that fifteen pound fine in other words not having paid the six pound instant fine, I remember thinking that, really there's, there was no way of talking back, and I had in fact attempted an explanation as to why I'd done it, and explained the reasons why I thought this really was very overlookable on the side of the law, erm I don't suppose they paid much attention to it, I don't imagine giving it a moment's thought at all. At any rate the effect was the same as if I hadn't written at all. So in a sense there was a kind of instant, automatic, mechanical, 'I'm the big man, you're the offending person in this respect'feeling about it, it was a one-way system anyway. And as I say, if it was done in a very civilized way by people who'd perhaps learnt to smile or somehow turn this, what must be a minor offence, into a minor occasion, erm I think it, it might actually ease relationships.
[speaker004:] Thank you. Another question is more in connection with the Common Market. Mrs Judy Robinson, from Fermor, wants to know 'Will the change in the French Presidency alter the balance of power in the E E C?'Geoffrey.
[Geoffrey:] Boy. erm I'm not sure that Anne, erm with her special knowledge of French politics, wouldn't be better at this than me, but these thoughts come through a historian's head. First, that the change in the government of a particular country erm can never work that much change that quickly in its policies and relations with its neighbours because they are determined by its economy, by its history, by its geography and so on. erm An awful lot of elements in the equation are fixed already. And, and, erm just as the changing headmastership of, of a, a big school never alters the character of the school for years and years because it's like a ship which has got momentum going through the water, you can't suddenly change a thing with so many passengers, erm so many tonnes and so on. Secondly, erm we have a change from erm a so-called conservative president to a, a so-called socialist one. erm He's limited in lots of ways. First of all, he's got a general election coming up and we don't know what its result's going to be and it may disappoint him, he may find that the Parliament he has to work with is not going to be of the same cast of mind as himself. Secondly, erm think of the world of 'Yes, Minister', it must be so, or even more so in France perhaps, erm there's this huge French administration which has done things in much the same way through the decades and I suppose won't easily be changed from doing them. Thirdly, there are some settled lines of foreign policy which he has already said he's no intention of changing. erm I've been a little bit appalled by the levity with which some of our extreme, extremist politicians recently have spoken about abrogating this or that international obligation entered by the country if a general election returns them to power, as if a, a self-respecting state can do that in a state system. Well Monsieur Mitterrand has already made it clear that in some important respects I think particularly of defence, erm that, that's he not going to rush into any changes. So I, if there are going to be changes in French erm France's relations with its neighbours within the E E C, erm I don't see that they can be very quick, and I don't see that they can ultimately be all that large.
[Anne:] I agree absolutely with what Geoffrey has said. I think one can point to another fact which is that Monsieur Mitterand comes from a political party erm which resembles that of his predecessor in being pro-European. Neither the erm of the two other major parties are, but both the Socialists and erm President erm ex-President Giscard's party erm were committed to the idea of European integration. So that in that sense the fundamental orientation is likely to change even less erm than one, than might have been the case if there'd been a more radical change. Obviously personal relationships erm enter into erm balances of power. erm Monsieur Mitterand's relationship with erm Chancellor Schmidt for example is certainly not yet anything like as close erm as Chancellor Schmidt's relationship with ex-President Giscard was, but they are both socialists, erm they do have a certain amount in common, and I see no reason why they shouldn't quite quickly build another erm relationship erm that would be quite similar to what happened before. On certain specific issues there may be changes of emphasis. Monsieur Mitterand has already said that he's going to seek to drive a harder bargain with Britain over fishing limits even than President Giscard was trying to do, and I think our negotiators must expect a rather tough time as far as fisheries are concerned. But those are very minor matters, and in the long term, I think, as Geoffrey has said, erm the changes will not be very large or very important.
[speaker004:] Why do we always argue about fishing rights and seem to have very little argument about oil?
[Anne:] This is partly because fishing rights erm were written in erm to the, to the European Community system erm as part of in a sense the agricultural policy, erm because they were regarded as part of food policy, and it was thought that you must have, if you're going to have a common agricultural policy, and that was one of the important points erm of the negotiations for setting up the European Community, then a common fisheries policy went alongside with that. Whereas there isn't erm such clear provisions for a common energy policy erm and there aren't the same arrangements written into the agreement erm about for example sharing energy resources. At the time when the agreements were written, I don't think anybody foresaw the extent to, of North Sea oil. In so far as they did see a coming energy source they thought it would be atomic energy, and they wrote the treaty that's called the Euratom Treaty to cover this, but it didn't cover oil, and that is perhaps why it's been a much less contentious subject. It's been dealt with in a different way and not erm with an attempt to arrive at a common policy about it.
[speaker004:] Well thank you very much, Anne, Geoffrey and Norbert. Unfortunately, that's all that we've got time for today. If we've not answered your question in this programme, I shall be writing to you directly during the next few days. This is the end of our current series from the University. Hopefully we shall be back in the autumn with more news and views to share with you. But until then, good-bye. [recorded jingle] [recorded jingle]
[speaker009:] Hello. In our programmes in the current series about computers, we've talked about all sorts of applications, in business, in science and in industry. We've recognized that the computer revolution is truly with us and is here to stay. But what about using how to use them? Is it easy? Is it possible for the ordinary man in the street to become confident and competent in handling a computer system, whether it be in his office or in his home? Erin Sloman is Reader in Artificial Intelligence in the University, and has already contributed a programme earlier in this series. Erin, how easy is it for the ordinary person to learn how to compute?
[speaker001:] I think that at the moment it is not easy for ordinary people to learn to compute on most of the existing computing systems. There are several different reasons for this. But let me say that I think it's not in principle difficult. It is possible now to design computing systems which have much better languages than the ones that are readily available, and much more helpful programs on them, which enable the user to have a kind of dialogue in the way that you would with a person that you're trying to communicate with, whereas, at the moment, you can't have that sort of dialogue. You've got to be very precise, very clear, you've got to stick rigidly to rules, and these rules are quite unfamiliar to most people, and therefore it's not easy. erm Let me refer to an advertisement which erm some listeners may have seen in the Radio Times in the last couple of weeks. This advertises a new home computer and makes a claim which I regard as quite outrageous. It effectively says that these computers understand English. Now, that's just not true. The language that most of the home computers are used with is BASIC, and although there are a few words in that language which look like English words, like 'If'and 'Let'and 'Go to'and perhaps some others depending on the dialect of BASIC that you have, these words do not work in the way that ordinary English speakers are used to. Let me give one little example. If a mother says to a child, as he's going out, 'If it rains, put your coat on,'she doesn't mean, 'Test now whether it is raining, and if it is, then put your coat on, if not, don't bother, and then forget about that instruction.'What she means is that this instruction should be borne in mind if at any time it starts raining. Now, you can't say that kind of thing using 'If'in most computer languages, even though they do have an 'If'. When that instruction is obeyed in a computing system, it usually means 'Test right now.'And this is one of many ways in which ordinary communication between people depends on our having a very powerful memory, having the ability to look out for situations that we've been warned about, and to take action in accordance with instructions that we've been given previously and have stored up. Whereas you can't do that sort of thing with erm most computer systems. There are all sorts of other ways in which it is hard to learn to use existing languages. Many features of these languages which derive from the historical accident that computers were first used mainly for manipulating numbers. So the languages have been derived for convenience of mathematical calculations and most people are not very good at mathematics, and they find the kind of symbolism used unnatural and unfriendly. There is no reason why computers shouldn't be natural and friendly, it's just that it takes a lot more memory in the computer to have all the complex rules of an ordinary language, and also it's much harder to write the programs that tell the computer how to understand a natural language.
[speaker009:] On the whole, people use language in a, in a rather sloppy form, it's ambiguous, they, they know what they mean, other people know what they mean but they put in all sorts of inferences by the way in which it's phrased or erm the way in which the words string together or past experience of the person. Now, to what extent could one move in that direction using a computer, which is a rather precise and definite sort of object that wants to know exactly what it has to do and how it has to do it?
[speaker001:] What you've called the sloppiness of English is actually part of its power. It means that, depending on the context, I can communicate something subtly different from what I intended before without us first having to go through the rigmarole of defining new terminology to extend the language. And this depends on our having very powerful and general rules in our minds for relating what is said to the broader context. Now, if we can do it, and it's not magic, then there must be some reasons we can do it, some rules we're following, and those rules can in principle be put into computers. There are in fact people trying to do this sort of thing. Last time we talked I mentioned work in artificial intelligence, and this is one of the areas in which work is being done. And right now there are computing systems in which, with which you can have a conversation, and you can use relatively sloppy English, and, like a person, if the computer doesn't know exactly what you mean, because your words are ambiguous, it will offer you several alternative interpretations erm if it has formed some, and then have a dialogue with you about which one you meant. Alternatively it'll ask you to rephrase it in some other way. Now, designing systems like that requires computers with big memories, much, much bigger than the ones that you can buy in your shop round the corner at the moment, and the programs are quite complicated, it's quite difficult to do this sort of thing, but in principle there's no reason why it shouldn't happen, and that would make computers much easier to learn to use.
[speaker009:] You talked a lot about computers being more friendly in the future than in the past. What did you have in mind particularly?
[speaker001:] Well, there are a variety of different aspects of friendliness. One I've already mentioned, namely, if you type something that the computer doesn't understand, it shouldn't just say, 'I don't understand, Error number three hundred and twenty-two', or something like that. It should make some effort to understand. It should try to work out what sort of thing you were trying to say, and maybe be able to work out in, in a general way what you mean, but just need one extra piece of information to disambiguate what you'd said. That would be a kind of friendliness. But there are other kinds of friendliness too. For instance, another very common language that people use is PASCAL, there's a growing, almost a cult in favour of it. Now, in some ways it is much better than BASIC. It is a more powerful language. It's easier to express complex ideas in PASCAL. But it is very unfriendly in a way which erm has to do with the type of interaction you've got to have. In BASIC you can type in an instruction and it gets obeyed immediately. With PASCAL, you have to prepare a whole program, and then you have to tell the computer to digest it, that's called 'compiling it', and then possibly it has to link in with other programs, and then you can run the program. And this is quite a lengthy procedure, and you might have made mistakes at all sorts of different point. A friendly system is one where as you talk you are being understood, and you can get some sort of response. There are other kinds of friendliness too. For instance, at Sussex University we have developed a system called Pop Eleven, which, like BASIC, is fully interactive, like PASCAL, has structures which enable you to do complex things. But it also has built in a Help facility, teaching aids, so that if at some point in the middle of developing your program you forget something, you can ask the system erm to tell you for instance how to use one of its facilities, and you can get onto the screen some information about that, and then carry on where you were, and you can switch easily between different modes. We've attempted to design a system which is friendly in that it takes account of the different needs that a person will have at different times while trying to communicate with a computer. Well these are just some of the ways in which computers can be made more friendly. Of course at the moment they're very unfriendly in that you have to learn to type. erm In principle it should be possible to be able to speak into a microphone, or to write on a pad, with a pencil, and the computer would be connected to the microphone or the pad and would take in and interpret what you've done, without having to learn this rather clumsy method of putting things in one letter at a time.
[speaker009:] At the moment, you can get adaptors for computers to cope with some form of speech or at least a limited range of verbal instructions erm and in fact Apple computers and others have little packages which allow about thirty well-defined verbal instructions to, to go in. Presumably that's just the tip of the iceberg.
[speaker001:] Yes. In principle, though I think it's very difficult, as I understand it right now, you've got to go through a rather unfriendly session of training the computer to respond to your voice, and if you say something in a slightly different way later on it may not recognize it as the word that you had previously trained it on. But, as you say, this is the tip of the iceberg. Things are moving and I'm hopeful that these problems will be solved.
[speaker009:] I've just been up to the Wembley exhibition of word processor, and one of the things I noticed there was the increasing number of processors and packages which I think you would describe as friendly or at least semi-friendly to, to help people. Packages which checked your spelling, for example, in something you've put on and very politely suggested that you may or may not have got a word quite correctly spelt that you had intended perhaps spelt one way, it came out as another way, and there must be an awful lot of work going on in this area.
[speaker001:] Yes, that is an important aspect of friendliness. People often, in communicating with one another, say something slightly different from what they intended to say, and the other person will make allowances, using the context. And there are these spelling-corrector programs, which will in many cases know what you meant, even though you have erm made a mistake. They have to have a lot of rules built in. For instance erm if you're communicating via a typewriter, there are various common mistakes which can arise out of the fact that two keys are close together, and so you've hit one key when you meant the other, and knowing that can help the computer to work out what you intended. And that illustrates what I meant by saying that you need quite complex systems. There are many such little rules that are needed in order to have a good spelling corrector, that will not make some correction that is not the one you intended. At the moment, as far as I know, there is on the market no computer that really can have a large memory and is also within the price range for the ordinary primary school or home, but if these new falling prices of memory do come as quickly as some people are predicting, then that could make a huge difference. What I'm worried about at the moment is that large numbers of people are buying computers, especially some of the cheaper ones, and my prediction is that after a few weeks, they get put into cupboards, and aren't used, because they are so unfriendly, so hard to use, whereas in principle computers could be very powerful and useful devices in the home. The new packages you mentioned will certainly help.
[speaker009:] And are you confident that the friendly brand of computer is coming fairly soon, or is there resistance to it amongst the professionals?
[speaker001:] There is some professional resistance, in the sense that people who've done a lot of work on programming get used to certain sorts of languages, and if you make proposals about teaching some new way of dealing with computers, they throw up their hands in horror, and object that this is going to be inefficient, or it's not going to prepare people adequately for what goes on in industry, or whatever. Now, it may well be, that these objections will just be overridden by the market. If the new, friendlier systems do come onto the market, and if they're bought as presents and so on, and they get into the homes and they get into the schools, then people will just learn to use them, and it's the existing professionals who may have to change their habits to accommodate. But that's optimistic. I think there, there is a lot of inertia in the system, a lot of resistance, especially if people have learnt something complex and put a lot of effort into it, and have written lots of programs using the existing languages. They're very reluctant to change. I've experienced that myself, so I have some sympathy for that reaction.
[speaker009:] Thank you very much, Erin. That's all that we have time for today. Next week the series finishes with a panel discussion about the ways in which society of the future will be affected by the computer revolution. Incidentally, those listeners who are involved in management, and who are wondering whether microprocessors could contribute to their business, might like to know that there's a one-day seminar going to be run at the University on June the twenty-ninth on this subject. The seminar is called 'Product Enhancement Using New Technology', and as I understand it, the aim of the seminar is to give technical and non-technical managers a clearer understanding of what microprocessors can and can't do. If you would like further details, contact Sandra Jones, in Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University, or get in touch with me, and I will pass on your enquiry. Until next week then, good-bye. [recorded jingle]
[speaker004:] Good evening from the University of Sussex. Tonight we're going to take a look at two aspects of education and I have with me Stephen Ball, who's been carrying out research into the different between streamed and mixed ability classes in comprehensive schools, and Sandy Grassy, who co-ordinates the many links between the science side of the university and schools. Stephen, let's start with you. Tell me about your findings.
[speaker002:] Well what this has involved me in has been a long study of a single school. I spent two and a half years working with a single comprehensive school looking at the change in that school from a system of streamed teaching to a system of mixed ability teaching. Because of the way that erm the school changed over from having a system of streaming in its first three years, to a system where mixed ability was introduced year by year from the first to the third year, I was able to follow two groups of pupils through the school — one lot of pupils in their streamed classes, and then another lot following them on in their mixed ability classes — and try and discover something about the differences in their experience of school in the two different modes, in the streamed and in the mixed ability classes.
[speaker004:] What were your general conclusions?
[speaker002:] I think the general point would be really a favourable impression of mixed ability teaching. There's a lot of worry, I know, among parents and also advisers, Local Authority people, about mixed ability teaching, about its impact on standards. I think the one clear thing to come out from my study is that erm with very careful preparation and with adequate thought about teaching methods that a school can successfully go over to mixed ability teaching without any necessary impact on the standards of performance of the pupils, and this has really been justified recently in the O level results of pupils who have now been through the mixed ability system and finished their O levels in the school. And they've performed well — in some areas better than the streamed pupils did previously.
[speaker004:] What about the brighter children? Don't they suffer?
[speaker002:] Again, this is certainly a worry that is often talked about in terms of mixed ability teaching. The school was aware of this and specifically created a post of responsibility for the brighter child and gave this to a senior member of the staff, and that member of the staff was responsible for looking at the effects of mixed ability teaching on specifically identified brighter pupils, and I don't think the school would say that erm they totally solve the problem of what to do with the brighter children, but I think it's a problem which exists even in streamed classes because the sort of pupil we're talking about are pupils who are exceptional in their own right. We're not talking about whole groups of pupils who previously have been in top streams, we're talking about half a dozen, ten individuals in any one year group and they are equally as difficult to deal with in the streamed situation. And in some ways mixed ability, with its orientation towards individual approaches to learning, provides the possibility of focusing more on those children more than even was possible in the streamed situation. So I think the school is in the position of wanting to think more about the problem of the brighter child, but they certainly were not unaware of it and were attempting to deal with it.
[speaker004:] Isn't your conclusion based on rather a small sample just being two classes from one single school?
[speaker002:] That's right, although the examination results were taken for each cohort. I looked at one, well in fact two classes in each year group in detail, because I really wanted to focus very closely on how the pupils experience the school in the different modes of erm grouping. What has happened previously in a lot of educational research is that large samples have been taken. We know something numerically about different systems, but we know little about them experientially, we know little about what it feels like, what the impact is upon individuals in the two different systems, and I really wanted to swing to the other type of research and look in more detail at how different pupils would respond to the streamed situation, not simply in terms of their performance measured in tests, but in terms of their attitudes to school, their attitudes to their life outside of school, their involvement in erm sub-cultural groups or in youth clubs, this kind of thing. So it really necessitated small samples of pupils who I got to know fairly well, rather than a large sample.
[speaker004:] Did the children know that they were being studied, and did the teachers know that they were taking part in such an experiment?
[speaker002:] Yes, they knew my role in the school, both the teachers and the pupils. I think obviously the younger pupils didn't grasp it very clearly. I normally explain to them that I was writing a book about the school and they certainly understood that. The teachers were in on my research from the beginning, erm I originally gained the co-operation of the headmaster — he allowed me to come into the school — and then I found the teachers enormously co-operative, in fact, far more cooperative than I had a really had a right to expect. They would ask me into their classes to watch them teach; they gave me time for interviews; they allowed me into staff meetings and departmental meetings and I... at various points in my research I erm attempted to feed back to them some of the material that I was coming up with, and we would have meetings to discuss this and I would erm use those meetings then to refine my ideas.
[speaker004:] From the viewpoint of this being and objective experiment, I would be a little bit worried about everyone knowing the nature of the experiment you had in mind, because, as you probably know, in industrial studies there's a well-known effect, I think it's called the Hawthorn effect, which merely by studying a group of people you change their behaviour and their output, simply because they know that you're taking an interest in them and they've got some idea of your expectations. Are you sure this didn't happen in your study?
[speaker002:] Well I was certainly aware of this. I think it is adequately dealt with as problem because of the... really the length and the depth of my involvement with the school. I was there, as I said, for two and a half years, so it would have been difficult for the teachers to respond to my presence in an artificial way because I was there for such a long time. Really I think I am able to demonstrate in the written account of the research that I am presenting a very real account of their teaching and their problems, as well as their successes. erm sometimes I was able to observe lessons that went wrong and were very difficult for the teachers, as well as the lessons that were successful, so I don't really think it emerged as problem at the end.
[speaker004:] So you're really in favour of mixed ability teaching in comprehensive schools?
[speaker002:] I would be, yes. I think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. I mean perhaps the point I haven't brought out, which was another enormous effect from the mixed ability teaching, or the mixed ability grouping, was the improvement in the pupils erm behaviour. One of the problems with the streamed situation was that those pupils who found themselves in the bottom streams, who found that they were perhaps not regarded so highly, or so positively by their teachers, tended to respond with misbehaviour in their classes with occasionally vandalism around the school and a generally a negative attitude towards the school and their teachers in general. And the immediate effect of the mixed ability grouping was to eradicate behavioural problems of that kind almost entirely. There were no longer groups of pupils in any one class who were against the school and were erm wanting to disrupt the teaching of their erm... of their teachers, and really problems were reduced to individuals in teach class, one or two pupils, which erm didn't present the same massive problem to teachers as the bottom streamed groups had done previously. So this was a very positive outcome which the teachers, not unexpectedly, were very pleased about, this improvement in the behaviour of pupils.
[speaker004:] Does it require a special sort of teacher, one with particular gifts, to do this satisfactorily?
[speaker002:] I think it makes a lot of demands upon the teacher. It's not something that is done easily or lightly. Some of the newly qualified teachers, perhaps, found some difficulties initially in coping with the wide range of abilities the mixed ability classes presented them with, and in some ways the school was not well provided with in-service support for mixed ability teaching and had to do a lot of their own work in terms of the appropriate methods to choose, the appropriate resources, the appropriate materials to develop. So not every teacher was one hundred per cent successful with mixed ability teaching, but I don't think one can ever expect that with a new method and I think now that the system has been running for a number of years in the school that it's possible for each department to support new members of staff and introduce them to the appropriate methods and approaches to mixed ability classes.
[speaker004:] What proportion of comprehensive schools now have mixed ability teaching?
[speaker002:] Well it's a difficult question to ask in a... answer in a way because, because the pattern of grouping differs enormously from school to school. There are still very few schools that have mixed ability groups in all of their first three years, but more and more school are introducing some mixed ability group in their first three years, and about thirty per cent have mixed ability grouping in their first year now. Something around fifteen per cent have mixed ability in the first three years. Beyond that there are very few. When the C S EsO Levels arrive at the beginning of the fourth year most schools decide to separate out their pupils into different groups, although in the school I was studying in and in one or two other schools, it's possible to parallel C S E examinations with the existing O Level examinations and therefore to continue to teach the pupils in mixed ability groups, and that happened in English in the school I was studying, and in other schools it has happened in other subjects.
[speaker004:] Presumably the case for streaming gets stronger as you go higher up in a school?
[speaker002:] Certainly the constraints of examinations make it more and more difficult to cope with the range of abilities in the mixed ability class. I think this hits different subjects in different ways. It happens perhaps sooner in the languages and in science than it does, say, in History or English or geography, and certainly language teachers find much more difficulty in teaching mixed ability classes. And one tends to find that languages — FrenchGerman — are the first to abandon mixed ability, usually in the second year, sometimes the third year of a comprehensive school.
[speaker004:] Is it government policy to move in the direction of mixed ability classes?
[speaker002:] I don't think one could say policy, no. erm I think the move in this direction is a drift really. There's been no guidance from the government, but they don't certainly... they certainly don't seem to be against mixed ability teaching. There's been a recent H M Is report, which has asked some questions about mixed ability teaching and expressed some worries about those teachers who perhaps don't have the adequate support and preparation for mixed ability teaching, but they're certainly not against it, or the H M Is are certainly not against mixed ability teaching.
[speaker004:] What research in this area needs to be done now?
[speaker002:] Well I think really what one must look for now is more detailed research on what actually goes on in mixed ability classrooms. Really we know... still know very little about what teachers actually do in the classroom, and it's all very well standing back in university and saying teachers should do this and should do that, but in order to be able to offer guidance I think we really need to do more research in mixed ability classrooms to discover how teachers are at the moment dealing with the situation and where we might offer them more support, and that's the direction I'd like to see research go in, rather than more erm of the grandiose large-scale quantitative studies, which collect lots of figures and statistics — I'd like to see a lot more studies in actual classrooms looking at actual teachers teaching. erm looking at what they do and how we can improve that.
[speaker004:] Do you have any plans yourself for more research in this area?
[speaker002:] Well I hope to look more at mixed ability teaching. Really it's a problem of erm time and resources. The difficulties are that one has to spend a lot of time sitting in the classroom working with the teacher, or observing the teacher, and it's difficult to find that time when one is teaching at university. So often the push is in the opposite direction to doing research which doesn't involve one in long-term contact with the schools, and this of course is one of the reasons why this type of research isn't so often done, but I hope to do some more work in classrooms, yes.
[speaker004:] One last question. How does being in a mixed ability class affect the social development of children?
[speaker002:] Well that was of the interesting things to come out of the study, erm something which was totally unexpected as far as I was concerned, and that was it seemed that the pupils in the mixed ability classes developed more slowly socially than the pupils in the streamed classes. This was manifested in a number of ways, particularly in that pupils still in their second year in the mixed ability classes would be talking about playing with their friends and generally their attitudes towards the teenage culture of pop music and magazines and fashions and discotheques didn't seem to develop so quickly as it had in the streamed situation, and I think really this comes from the problem of those pupils in the streamed situation — in the bottom streams in particular— who found that they wanted alternatives to school when they were in an inferior position in the school. They were devalued, if you like, by finding themselves in the bottom streams and so they tended to look for out of school things, alternatives to school, from which to gain their satisfactions, and they would look to the pop media, to fashion, to football, to these kinds of things. And in the mixed ability situation this certainly did not happen in the same way. So the children, in a sense, remained children longer in the mixed ability situation, and again this was something that the teachers found very pleasing in that the pupils were remaining erm involved in the school much more and much longer in the mixed ability situation.
[speaker004:] Sandy, you have the rather impressive title of Coordinator of Educational Activities for the Science Area. What sort of activities are these? Could you give me an example?
[speaker003:] Well as example of the kind of thing that we've just finished doing is we've run a course for local school teachers from East and West Sussex on using electronics in schools. We wanted very much erm to help teachers to work from circuit diagrams and to build the electronics, and then, as we said, at least to worry about why it didn't work and try several tests before giving up completely. We ran this kind of course by asking the teachers at the beginning of the course to select some device they'd like to make, that they'd seen the circuit of in a... in a school magazine... school science review magazine, and then build that. We would teach the electronics necessary to devise the tests and how it worked and things like that, and sure enough by the end of the time some of them had built devices, well all sorts of devices.
[speaker004:] Yes. Is this done during the evenings, or during holidays, or weekends?
[speaker003:] This is done on Saturdays and Wednesday evenings — all day Saturday and a Wednesday evening, on a fortnightly basis.
[speaker004:] And it's open to any teacher, any science teacher, to apply to come on this course?
[speaker003:] Any science teacher to apply to come on the course.
[speaker004:] That sounds a very good scheme. What about erm the chemistry area, the School of Molecular Sciences, do they do similar things?
[speaker003:] The way that they get involved is that they try to back up some of the school teaching in the sixth form chemistry. They take groups of school children in to look at experiments and techniques that are far too complicated perhaps, expensive perhaps, or even dangerous, to run in a school — like X-ray crystallography and infra-red spectrometry. A group of children will come in from a school, with their sixth form science teacher, and go round the chemistry laboratories for an afternoon looking at techniques like this.
[speaker004:] Yes. Are they actually allowed to operate the machinery, or
[speaker003:] No, this is... they can not get their hands on it. They
[speaker004:] But they see it working?
[speaker003:] They see it working and often they are given a print out of the results at the end of a spectrum or something like that that they can take back to the school with them and analyze.
[speaker004:] Yes. This is for sixth formers and teachers. Do you do anything for children lower down in the school?
[speaker003:] Yes, we do. We offer lecture service erm for children at a lower level in the school. This is quite important because when a child... in the third form the kids are making up their mind whether to do science or not. They know about science from television and from their school teacher, and any other source of information to them is really beneficial to let them make a sensible decision. For instance, we offer topics like 'How small a thing can you see?'or 'Exploring the solar system', or 'How small can you make things?'. These are lectures that are pitched directly at their level erm with the knowledge that they have round about the third year in schools, so that they can see some of the problems that physics tackles. We have, for instance, one lecture on how you tell how Napoleon died. There's a technique in nuclear physics, called neutron activation, which allows you to measure quantities of trace... very small quantities of particular elements in materials and it's been applied to looking at the concentration of arsenic in Napoleon's hair, and you find that there are particular periods in his life when he got dosed with arsenic one's not quite sure how — and at those particular times he was erm very ill; it correlates very well with the historical evidence. Of course all of this took place on St Helena, when one cynically feels that the British would rather get rid of Napoleon. This kind of erm usage of nuclear physics is often of a lot of interest and understandable to a child in the third form.
[speaker004:] Supposing a school wanted a talk on a particular topic, could they just write in and erm contact you and ask you whether you could provide a lecturer on that subject?
[speaker003:] Oh yes. We certainly feel that this is a possibility. In fact, we would rather do it that way. To start the exchange we have to suggest a list of possible topics, but we also feel confident that we could... should be able to lecture on any topic, any scientific topic, to, for instance, third form children certainly.
[speaker004:] Tell me about the one day schools for school teachers that you run.
[speaker003:] The one day schools that we run for school teachers in the South East of England, a larger catchment area than the East and West Sussex — in fact it goes up towards London and it includes London — it goes out towards Kent and Portsmouth. These are lectures... lecture courses which happen on one day and which are really designed to cover something of interest to sixth form science teachers, usually sixth form physics teachers. For instance, plasma physics, space research, superconductivity, astronomy, topics like that. erm the format for these is one of four lectures, in which we revise in the first lecture ideas that are round about sixth form level and then in two lectures following that we take the teacher through, very quickly, the kind of coverage that we give to the topic in the university. And then at the end we will run a single lecture, a kind of gee whizz lecture, something that shows the applications of the ideas we've been working on during the day to some particularly unusual branch of physics.
[speaker004:] You haven't actually mentioned biologists or applied scientists. Are they involved in these schemes at all?
[speaker003:] The biologists and applied scientists are involved in the schemes in that they also are part of the resource that one would consider in the university to give talks to school children. The biologists and the applied scientists have done this, have offered lectures to school children, mostly in response to requests that have come in to them for specific lectures. They don't offer erm a list of lectures at the moment.
[speaker004:] Thank you. And the activities you describe are separate from those laid on, for example, by the British Association for Young Scientists, which also hold meetings
[speaker003:] Oh yes. They are definitely separate. Those are large one day meetings for school children at fourth form level or so. These are completely separate from them.
[speaker004:] And I believe there are also courses laid on erm in the educational development building for teachers by the educational area?
[speaker003:] Yes, these are for the in-service B Ed. and various other courses like that, yes, and some of them have a scientific aspect to them and we're involved in those as well.
[speaker004:] Thank you Sandy and Stephen. Next week is the last programme in this series. We shall be taking a look at the Media Services Unit at the university that has provided the technical services for producing these programmes, and also we shall be talking about the response to the programmes themselves. Until next week, then. Goodnight. [recorded jingle]
[speaker009:] Hello. This is the second in two programmes in which I talk to Professor Nuttall about Shakespeare and his plays. I find it amazing that Shakespeare's still as popular as ever, and I started by asking Tony why this was the case. Why, after all these years, people still seem to be able to find something new to say about him.
[speaker004:] Speaking as an old university hack who's been teaching courses in this place since nineteen sixty two, the Shakespeare course is the one thing which is utterly and deeply different every time I teach it. Trying to stop short of bardolotry, but it really is astonishing. I get the feeling that I begin to know my way around, to know at least most of the chess moves of it. With Shakespeare almost every time that I read more than forty lines, I see something I'd never seen before, which is demonstrably there. erm he does seem to me to be me the best — I mean all this common opinion is true — he is a writer of indefinite richness and it is amazing, but the case. I've nothing to add really [LAUGHTER]. One does, quite genuinely find more all the time.
[speaker009:] Do you think it was the case that when Shakespeare was actually writing these plays he had any real concept of the richness of his producing, or was this all superstructure which has been put there by various university professors since?
[speaker004:] Well I think it's not a superstructure that's been put there because, I mean, for example when you get a particular idea there are often other questions you can ask to check whether it's really present, to see whether the thing is alluded to at the appropriate point later in the plot and that sort of thing. And erm again and again you find that it is, that the thing you half suspected is mentioned by a character later, and when I find that I'm strongly inclined to suppose that Shakespeare has put it there. The question whether he was conscious of all these layers when writing seems to me unanswerable. I have no doubt that he was very, very intelligent in the ordinary meaning of the word. For example I think he probably had a very high I Q for what that's worth. Ever since Ben Jonson people have thought of him piping native woodnotes wild and not being terribly educated. Education isn't the same thing as intelligence. He had lot of intelligence and not all that much education. I think he was conscious of a great deal probably, but at the same time many writers will tell you that they find when they've finished a poem or a play things in it, demonstrably in it, systematically and intelligently present with real relations, which they don't remember writing. This is why you often get writers saying 'Don't ask me, look again at the poem'or 'Trust the tale, not the teller'. And the marvellous thing in Plato of Socrates, when he'd been told by the Delphic Oracle that he was the wisest of men, he started off like a sort of good poperian scientist trying to falsify this and he went round finding people wiser than himself and he went to various people and they weren't any wiser, and then he thought 'Oh, the poets, they're marvellous people, they know so much', and he went to them and he found that the hadn't a clue what they'd written. And he concluded, quite soberly, that they must have been visited by muse. It [LAUGHTER] seems to me a very reasonable conclusion. I mean you can re-dress it up in Freudian terms and say their unconscious did it, which is really a very similar thing to say. I mean the unconscious becomes a sort of god in that case. erm so what I'm saying is... my guess is, and it's no more than that, that Shakespeare was probably conscious of a lot of it, but there's also probably an area that came from a very rich and active unconscious. But all that's just guessing, I mean we've no way of testing it.
[speaker009:] To what extent do you think that the creation of all these, as it were, structures on Shakespeare is a useful exercise, or do you think it's a little bit like sort of medieval philosophy and taking a little a long, long way?
[speaker004:] Well it's like medieval philosophy in that it's not utilitarian. To me the justification really depends on the fact that I view Shakespeare as a terminal good. That is to say I think that a world without Shakespeare in it would be a world substantially impoverished. I think Shakespeare is a good complex thing in the universe. That I take as a sort of axiom, as given to start with, in this argument. Then it follows from that that understanding Shakespeare and keeping the understanding of Shakespeare alive is also a good because if, for example, this great, rich and wonderful thing were simply there in the world and no-one could see him and no-one could understand him, and no-one was any longer thinking or talking about him, that also would be a secondary impoverishment. And erm I don't feel any shame, therefore, about going on with it.
[speaker009:] Really what I was saying is I think [LAUGHTER] probably came over, but I will rephrase it.
[speaker004:] I'm sorry [LAUGHTER].
[speaker009:] There's a sense to which, to put it in current terms
[speaker004:] Yes.
[speaker009:] when I say 'I am cold'I may just mean [LAUGHTER] I am cold and it may not be a statement about my view of myself with regard to society and my particular stage of middle age crisis and so on and so forth, although, you know, given a certain number of intelligent people they could no doubt build an enormous emphasis on
[speaker004:] Yes, well
[speaker009:] the simple straightforward statement 'I am cold'and I just wondered whether, you know, extrapolating backwards whether we're doing the same disservice to Shakespeare.
[speaker004:] You're talking to the wrong man on this. I'm not in sympathy with you, you see. You're putting the point about over-reading Shakespeare. You'd find lots of academics erm at the Shakespeare Conference in Stratford who would agree with you that there is far too much over-reading of Shakespeare. I tend to think it's rather hard to over-read Shakespeare, simply because of the experience of finding that my reading fell short on many occasions. It is very easy to read him wrong and to make mistakes, and there are, of course, occasions when he does offer a brutal simplicity, which it would be ridiculous to try and develop. I myself, for example, tend to be an old-fashioned Coleridge and psychologistic critic, you know, I look for motives in Shakespearean characters, in ways which Elsie Knights told us we shouldn't do, and I do this because I think Shakespeare encourages us to make inferences and to think about them in that way. However, if you take characters like Lysander and Demetrius in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, it's obvious [LAUGHTER], even to me, that it would be ridiculous to try and look for complex psychology and motivation in them, you know. There are cases where you can over-read, sure, but by and large over-reading is not the main vice of Shakespearean criticism. If anything, we went the other way after erm how many children had Lady Macbeth, and we under-read. We decided that Shakespeare's plays were mere patterns of imagery, without human beings in them, and by a strange act of critical abnegation, deliberately blinded ourselves to all sorts of psychological insights, which the Victorians had been able to see and are now being seen again.
[speaker009:] One of your major interests has been that of the relationship of allegory to
[speaker004:] Yes.
[speaker009:] Shakespearean plays of one kind and another. Could you tell me a little bit about that?
[speaker004:] Well, my interest in allegory really began at quite a different point. I was initially troubled by a philosophical problem. Can I explain that, or try to [LAUGHTER]?
[speaker009:] Yes.
[speaker004:] I was struck by the fact that in one of the dialogues of Plato, Plato gets very worried about the notion of beauty, because he thinks beauty is something which is beautiful. He also thinks beauty is that in virtue of which we call beautiful things beautiful. Now if the beautiful things are beautiful, and if beauty itself is beautiful, what of the beauty in respect of which both beauty and the beautiful things are beautiful? Is that also beautiful? Sorry, this is pretty mind-blowing, but he has got himself into difficulties because he things that beauty is not, so to speak, a logical construction that allows us to talk about particular objects in the world, he thinks it is itself a sort of spiritual thing. He thinks it is itself something beautiful that sort of swims down into our world and is incarnated in particular objects, and then he wonders about that because his own way of forming universals means that he'd have to do it all again and again and again in an infinite regress, so he has a problem, basically, about calling beauty itself beautiful. Now meanwhile — not meanwhile, but quite a lot later — in early medieval allegory, you find that the allegorical poet has a quite ordinary technical problem when he's writing about things like mercy and cruelty. He wants to show the relation of mercy and cruelty and of course they conflict, so he writes a poem in which there's a battle and there's a character called Cruelty, who comes and fights against a character called Mercy. Now Cruelty is going to be called as cruel because that's the way allegorical poetry works. Mercy is going to be shown as merciful, so as soon as they start to fight Mercy starts trying to forgive Cruelty and Cruelty easily wins. Mercy wants to say, of course, that Cruelty in this god-governed universe is going to be defeated by Mercy, so he's got a technical problem. His technical problem again arises basically from the fact that he calls Cruelty cruel. Most modern philosophers would say it was nonsense to say that Cruelty was cruel and only call people cruel or particular things. So there they both are, Plato with a metaphysical problem, the poet with a technical problem. Because of their habit of referring to universals with adjectives derived from the universal, calling Beauty beautiful, calling Cruelty cruel. When I looked at all this stuff, it came to me that it was very interesting that they thought of Beauty as beautiful and Cruelty as cruel. It meant, in fact, that they were thinking of abstractions in quite a different way from the way we think of them. erm the technical word for this is that for them universals are self-predicating — that sounds very and intelligible. It means in effect that they had a quasi-sensuous way of seeing abstractions. They saw abstractions as in some warm and coloured, and the sort of things to which you could appropriately apply quite vivid adjectives. Now that in turns means that the poetry of the period, and the allegorical poetry of the period especially, is not as F R Levis would probably have assumed, to be divided into cold intellectual abstractions and warm sensuous particulars, there is a sense in which the very abstractions have a sensuous property, perhaps through a philosophical mistake, but nevertheless it was the way their minds were build. You can see their minds were build that way because of the problems they get into both philosophically and technically. Therefore, I decided [LAUGHTER] that I had the clue to something that had long baffled me, that whereas Levis's strict division of the world into sensuous particulars and more intellectual abstractions — I hope I'm being fair to him, I'm caricaturing and shortening whereas this was applicable to the modern period, it probably wasn't to the period I decided, I think, roughly before the eighteenth century, and with this in mind I then turned to the mysterious last plays of Shakespeare that we've been talking about earlier and tried to see whether the sense one gets in those plays of love, for example, not as simply a logical construction for talking about the way people behave in relation to each other, but as some kind of spiritual entity existing prior to the human subjects in the play, whether that sense could be in some degree confirmed and explained by an investigation of the general use of universals in the period and earlier.
[speaker009:] This approach could be explored with other sorts of literature.
[speaker004:] Yes, indeed.
[speaker009:] The bible, for example, I would have thought was a
[speaker004:] Yes, it could. One thing that I had to say, frankly, at the beginning of my book on allegory was that The Tempest was not the necessary base of that book. It was, in fact, just a peculiarly rich and extended example, and the kind of thing I was doing was in principle applicable to great numbers of texts. That was why, when you first asked me about this, I turned the whole question round and said 'You have to begin from the philosophical problem', but indeed it could be applied in many places.
[speaker009:] Let me pick up a few points which occur to me arising out of what you've just been saying. First of all beauty, which is a word which is used by all sorts of philosophers. I remember erm wasn't it Eyre that made great mileage of saying that just because there's a word for beauty doesn't mean to say that there's such a thing as beauty.
[speaker004:] Yes, well Eyre there stands as a sort of a paradigmatic modern philosopher, and when I was saying earlier that it was just a logical construction to help you to talk about particular things, and I think Eyre would go along with that. He is in fact opposing himself to the view that I was trying to get out of the older writers, namely that beauty is the name of some sort of spiritual being.
[speaker005:] As a non-philosopher I always used to find that slightly depressing statement that of Eyre's about beauty, and it seemed to me that one could immediately follow [LAUGHTER] that by saying just because there's a word for it maybe you have it because you like it and you want to use it and isn't that self-validating in a sense [LAUGHTER].
[speaker004:] Well, erm it may not be quite as [LAUGHTER] depressing as you think. Someone who says there is not actual entity separate from the world called beauty could still be a chap who believed that the word beautiful had a vivid and important use. He would simply say it refers to all those aspects of things which make them beautiful considered in some, and that, if you think of that as a sort of mental object for a moment, is a very rich one. erm it doesn't, for example, necessarily imply that statements about beauty are merely subjective, or are delusory or are soft headed, or maybe that Eyre would want to say that on another occasion [LAUGHTER]. I mean Eyre can be very depressing, you know, I'd go along with that all the way.
[speaker009:] That's all that we have time for today. Until next week then, goodbye. [recorded jingle]
[Geoffrey:] Good evening from the University of Sussex. Tonight we're going to take a look at the work of the Institute of Development Studies, which is based at the university. This is a national centre concerned with Third World development and with the relationships between rich and poor countries. To tell us about their work I have with me the Director, Richard Jolly, two of the permanent fellows of the Institute, Dudley Sears and Carlos Fortin, and a visiting fellow Beana Aguwa. Beana let me start by asking you what is the Institute of Development Studies.
[Norbert:] The Institute is a national institute concerned with research and teaching in the area of the development studies. We were founded in nineteen sixty six. We grew very rapidly until the last five years or so, since when we've levelled off in size, but erm the range of our activities in various countries abroad and indeed in Britain, has continued to grow.
[Geoffrey:] What do you actually mean by development?
[Norbert:] Well if you asked me that ten or fifteen years ago I think I could have given a rather easy answer erm namely that development studies was concerned with the problems of countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, and how they could erm accelerate their economic, social and political development to provide better living standards for all their population.
[Geoffrey:] So do you deal only with under-developed countries?
[Norbert:] Well that's why I said ten or fifteen years ago it would have been easy to give an answer. Increasingly, as we've been studying the problems of developing countries, two major changes have been occurring; one in our own thinking that in many ways problems of developing countries are linked in extricably with things that are going on in Britain or Europe or other parts of the so-called industrial world, and secondly that as we've been studying developing countries, we've been finding that more and more problems in Britain and other industrial countries begin to look like some of the same problems that we've been used to in developing countries. Indeed, people begin to talk about under-developed Britain, or under-developing Britain, so that we now don't see this sharp division between British problems as a developed country, and developing countries' problems in Zambia, or Chile, or wherever, or India. Rather we see they are related sets of problems, needing in part national solutions and in part international changes.
[Geoffrey:] Do you do most of your work by travelling overseas, or is it done at Sussex?
[Norbert:] There's a great range really. We have some erm members of staff who are permanently working in different countries at any one time — probably fivesix people from the Institute. During any year most staff members of the Institute will spend a few weeks, if not two or three months, in erm some developing country, or perhaps several, and of course we're also heavily involved in international agencies. But we ourselves see a close link between this operational experience and involvement and the research work which, for the most part, does take place erm here in Sussex.
[Geoffrey:] Carlos, you're in charge of the Study Programme. What does that involved?
[Anne:] Well the Institute has a large teaching study and training programme, which is essentially centered around what we call a study seminar. We have about seven or eight of those every year. They bring together some twenty to twenty-five people, mostly from Third World countries, but including some aid administrators from Britain and other developed countries, and they stay together for between four and six weeks, working together in a wide range of different topics and with various objectives. We have some that are very specific, in the sense that they are intended to provide certain particular skills or techniques. For instance at the moment we are running one on statistical techniques for Third World officials. Other are much broader. The one before this one, co-incidentally, was a very broad one, which was an attempt at assessing the results of Five, which of course took place in Manila in MayJune, and right after that, with the participation of some of the people who had been, in Five we tried to assess what impact, if any, their conference is going to make for the future of the world economic system. So we have a wide range of them. The purpose is not to... is not to train in the sense of imparting knowledge to people who don't have it, but rather to put whatever experience they have into context, on which we can have something to contribute.
[Geoffrey:] Are these study programmes open to people from any country?
[Anne:] That's right.
[Geoffrey:] So individuals, say, from Russia or Communist Block countries could come if they wished to?
[Anne:] They certainly could. The study programme is essentially erm addressed towards erm Third World countries, and it is supported by British technical assistance, and therefore a number of the participants, a large number, are funded by technical assistance funds. Those of course would have to qualify according to the rules of technical assistance and British aid, but in principle the study seminars are certainly open and we normally have people from countries other than the Third World ones.
[Geoffrey:] Do you run programmes similar to that overseas, Beana, or just at Sussex?
[Norbert:] Well we're... the study seminars can take place either at Sussex or overseas, and in fact our present policy is to try and increase the number that actually take place in the Third World, because we feel that that has a number of advantages.
[Geoffrey:] How do you know whether they are successful or not?
[Norbert:] That's a very big question, and in fact we're trying now to... with the co-operation of the British Counsel, who act as a recruiting agent for our purposes, erm to conduct a survey, a sort of customer survey, of the kind of acceptance our problem has had. We've just conducted a very primary review, and we found that the interest and the demand for these seminars has been pretty constant since at least the early seventies, therefore we feel that we are... we seem to be fulfilling a need of Third World governments and agencies. Not only governmental, but private and voluntary agencies too. In addition, a number of people who have gone through our study seminars keep in touch with us and tell us that they are using some of the things they've learned here to be exposed here for their own work, but it's very difficult to tell. I mean we hope we're doing the right thing, and as I say the response we're getting seems to indicate that, but we have not erm followed through each of... we have a large number of participants every year, you see, in the order of about erm a hundred and fifty each year, so very difficult for you to try and follow through the fate of each of them.
[Geoffrey:] Thank you. Dudley, you've been involved with the Institute right from the beginning, since it was founded, and you're very heavily involved in its research programme. I wonder if you could give us some idea of the sort of topics that people are engaged in?
[Anne:] There's a very wide range of erm topics. Most of the are concerned with what helps or does not help development overseas in the way of local policies. For example in the health field there's been quite a lot of research at the Institute and, of course in the field, on the effects of different kinds of health policies. Should a government, which doesn't have much in the way of financial resources and technical resources, should it go for erm a big teaching hospital in the capital, for example, or should it put its priorities rather on the rural area, on smaller scale, more preventive medicine? That sort of choice is erm open to governments and erm research can throw some light on the implications of one route or another. Other fields that we've been working on particularly are the educational field and the content and scale of education, it's link with the unemployment problem and it would take too long really to list the whole range. I could perhaps mention titles only: technology, choice of technology and the link with the... again the unemployment problem; fields like rural development planning and erm the associated questions of rural industrialization of the balance between town and country, of migration from the country to the town and it's implications for both country and town. And of course another erm field is the effect of erm British and other rich country policies in aid and trade on countries overseas and what sort of policies are helpful to development — in a broad sense, not just to economic growth, but to social, political, as well as economic development of erm... of overseas countries.
[Geoffrey:] I know you've just recently come back from Uganda. Are the economic prospects for Uganda quite bright?
[Anne:] Well that is a very difficult one for anybody who erm has to try and sort out the ideological, tribal, personal rivalries in Uganda and to answer the question of whether these are going to get in the way of some sort of erm coherent government policy and political stability. Perhaps I should just say a word about that... that operation since you've raised it, because it is one type of job that we do, that is taking part in a rather large group, in this case sponsored by the Commonwealth Secretariat at the request of the government of Uganda after the fall of erm of Amin, to assess the rehabilitation needs of the country and to suggest what policies should be priority policies for their point of view and what contribution could be made by other countries through aid and erm other ways of technical assistance and fellowships for training and so forth, to help in this rehabilitation.
[Geoffrey:] Do you think that the prospects of... of erm economic erm future for Uganda are bright? Is it a rich country in resources?
[Anne:] They have, yes, they have potentially erm... they have potentially the natural resources for quite erm a lot of development. erm potentially, in a rich soil, in a wide range of erm crops, of course, coffee, cotton, tea, especially have been export earners in the past, but also they produce sugar and erm basic foodstuffs. And in addition to that, of course, they have copper, and coming up on the future horizon cobalt, and erm the possibilities of developing tourism on quite a big scale, as they were beginning to do in the nineteen sixties before Amin... Amin took over.
[Geoffrey:] Beana, you're a visiting research fellow. Where do you come from?
[Norbert:] India.
[Geoffrey:] From India. And I understand that your special interest is the role of women.
[Norbert:] Yes, that's right.
[Geoffrey:] Just in India, or in the world as a whole?
[Norbert:] I'm interested in the role of women all over the world, particularly in terms of what effect development strategies have had on women's position, not merely in India but in other parts of the world as well, because I feel that there are a lot of common experiences which impinge on the problem as it relates to India.
[Geoffrey:] mhm. Could you give me some idea of what you've found out, or what you feel on the subject.
[Norbert:] Well one of the aspects that I have been looking at is erm the impact of technical change on women's position in the rural areas, and particularly as it concerns women who belong to landless households, or women who belong to small peasant cultivator households. And in looking at the experience not merely of Asia, but also of Africa, what becomes increasingly apparent is that most development strategies have tended particularly when we look at technical change — erm have tended to bypass women, or in many cases one also notes that the impact of technical change has been detrimental to poor women, and examples of this can be found, for instance, in terms of adoption of certain kinds of technique, like mechanisation of rice processing in parts of Asia, where one finds that there has been a large scale displacement of landless women. Similarly, one can find examples where in the African context, women are the primary producers in agriculture and this non-recognition of this fact has often led to the incongruous situation where strategies erm for change... modernisation programmes have erm been directed to me and this erm has meant often the kind of bias in extension services, in training services, has meant that the target group, that is the women towards whom you should really be aiming those programmes, has not... have not benefited, and this obviously has detrimental effects on your potential for increasing a casual output and for solving problems of increasing erm productivity and income for these women.
[Geoffrey:] The whole idea behind the I D S sounds perhaps at first as if its a little bit like an old missionary organization which has been set up to help the natives. erm is that element there? Aren't people like yourselves being a little bit presumptuous and perhaps even arrogant in feeling that you can help people solve their problems in the rest of the world.
[Anne:] I would hope not. Not in the sense that the practical outcome of research on problems in developing countries would not, we hope, be positive. We hope very much it will be useful, but as I tried to stress at the beginning, we very much see the problems of developing countries, which we in the Institute are working on, as part of the problems of what's going wrong in the world at the moment, in which we in Britain very much have a stake too. Now I personally believe that most erm policy makers in Britain, and indeed in most other industrial countries, don't really believe the Third World matters to them at all. You see our most recent budget was largely constructed even neglecting what was happening in other industrial countries. It certainly gave virtually no attention to the impact of erm issues from developing countries, and yet within a matter of weeks we've had the energy problem bringing home directly to the reality of policy in Britain the need to understand and to establish new forms of economic relationships with developing countries. Its why I say because of this that we have a stake in terms of our own enlightened self-interest in understanding better developing countries. I might just say one other thing, though, that I think it's a great mistake to see the I D S, which as I said is a national institute at Sussex, as somehow just a British institution on its own looking at these problems. We have links with other... with the university of Sussex, but with other institutions in Britain. Equally, and in some respects more important, we have a lot of links with other institutions, equivalent institutions, in other countries, other rich countries and particularly other developing countries. So I would see it as something of a network, internationally, to try and provide research and study related to how all countries can move better to take account of the never greater level of inter-dependence within the world economy. And we have a stake in that. We also have a sort of partnership with other institutions in understanding better our stake in it and other people's stake in it.
[Geoffrey:] But isn't there a sense in which people in other countries really have to help themselves, at least in the first instance? I remember visiting a year or two ago a project in Mexico, where an American organization had moved in and made a careful study, decided that the ideal thing for the local people to do would be to raise chickens, so they put fences up, supplied them with goodness knows how many hundred thousand chickens; within a year they'd killed the chickens, pulled the fences down and used them to cook the chickens and they were back exactly where they were. Now isn't this a... the sort of problem that you run into if you try and impose aid from outside?
[Anne:] Of course, and if you go back to the answer Beana was giving, even within a country if you try... if we try and solve other people's problems, one is very likely, if not always, to end up with those sorts of difficulties. People have got to be involved in solving themselves... the problems themselves. But if it's a world problem, if there are international dimensions to our problems in Britain, or to Kenya's problems in Kenya, or to Mexico's... Mexican problems in Mexico, then somehow we've got to have international groups looking at the international aspects of those problems. That's particularly what the I D S is now concerned with.
[Geoffrey:] Is there a danger in actually introducing too much western technology into countries? I remember, again [LAUGHTER] a few years ago, visiting India and buying one or two beautifully carved tables, which had obviously been carved by an individual spending quite a lot of time doing it, and I was impressed at that stage, rather naively perhaps, that if in fact I'd bought a plain table, an uncarved one, it would have cost me about ten times as much, for the simple reason that that would require a milling machine which was not normally available, and such was the erm economy that it was cheaper for people to do this. Now in a sense erm the question I'm asking is by introducing lots of modern machinery, you could perhaps kill a particular trade or craftsmanship in a whole group of people which may, in fact, be their key for erm future survival
[Anne:] mhm. Yes.
[Geoffrey:] economically. This may be the thing that the world as a whole would want to buy from them at economic rates.
[Anne:] But erm I'm sure you should not look on the Institute as a sort of vehicle for introducing western technology. On the contrary, it draws attention to the dangers of introducing western technology outside, and even in the west it's a good illustration this of the extent to which or work in countries overseas has relevance for Britain, because we have done a great deal of work on the implications for the unemployment problem of having technology which requires too much capital, which has a very ratio of capital to labour. Well that also is a problem in this country as well. We clearly need to look very carefully at the implications of many new technologies for jobs in this country. The context is different, especially for an exporter of manufactures like Britain, but there's a basic common question which arises at the root of the problems of erm technology choice in Africa, in Asia, Latin America and in a European country like Britain. Basically everything we all agree at the Institute the question of improving the lot of the Third World is the responsibility of Third Worlders, and in fact a number of us would add that in very many cases, certainly not in all, it would not be achieved through slow incremental technical change, but would require in some cases very major social structural changes that in some cases erm will only be brought about very major social upheaval erm and there all we can do is add to perhaps the element of increasing consciousness and awareness of the problems, which furthermore is a two way street, I mean when we have this study activities we learn as much from the people who attend the seminars as we tell them. Now the one thing that I think is important is that one cannot look at the problems of any given society in the world in isolation from the rest of the world as a whole, and in particular, in the case of underdeveloped countries, their problems are very much linked to the situations that take place in the developed countries. I was co-ordinating operational activities in the Institute, an international project on commodities last year, and I had to visit a number of research institutes in Asia, erm in Africa and in the Americas, where they were conducting studies on the commodities they produced. Now I was... I wouldn't say surprised because the matter is already well know, but I found an additional piece of evidence for the proposition that while they knew a lot about what happened to their commodities in their countries — how it was produced, how it was distributed internally and how it was sold internationally — they generally didn't have very much information as to what happened afterwards. In other words, they didn't know. They didn't have any control, certainly, and not even very much knowledge as to how the commodity — and I'm talking about cotton, rubber, tea, copper, bauxite, coco, sugar, coffee and so on— what happened to it when it enters the market of a developed country. Now that's the kind of information that is absolutely vital for them to understand, in fact for us — I mean I myself am from the Third World — to understand what the problems are, but which can only be achieved with centres in the developed countries that are prepared to make this into a working programme erm for the benefit of both, because in very many cases improving erm the lot of the Third World on the question of revenue from commodities will also improve their position, or the British or the American, or the European consumer, by eliminating intermediaries and so on and so forth. So that's a good case in which I think an Institute of this kind can perform a very useful role which doesn't have any paternalistic undertones at all, because it will learn as much as it will teach, so to speak.
[Geoffrey:] We read lot in recent days and weeks about refugees, mainly Vietnamese refugees. Although it's a problem which has existed for a long, long time, do you do any work in connection with refugees?
[Anne:] Yes, we are erm particularly interested in academic refugees from the Third World. The case of the Vietnamese refugees has highlighted a very broad problem, but within it, of course, there are number of differences and have been particularly involved in the question of people from universities and institutes in the Third World are uprooted and whose work is interrupted by political upheaval. We've held two conferences on... on erm Third World refugees of an academic kind and made proposals, some of which have had very concrete results in the form of aid from the British government to some of these groups. We've also held a conference of a more general kind on the situation of refugees in the United Kingdom, in which a report was produced, that particularly highlighted the legal situation of the refugees, that had quite an impact among international organizations like United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which has served as basis for a number of proposals to change the present legal regime of refugees in the UK.
[Geoffrey:] There are many groups in the area who are committed to development. Do you do anything that's relevant to them.
[Anne:] I think we do a lot that's relevant to local groups and, as a local boy born in Hove if I may say so, I hope erm I bear in mind local groups. I think a lot of our research writing, directly and indirectly, provides very much the material which these groups are using — U N groups, church groups erm the Friend Centre, other local groups that are either studying development or promoting better attitudes in Britain and policies towards it. I think I should mention we have perhaps the best library collection in Britain on developing country material, and if there is someone with a specialist need, they would be welcome to use our library. And then our own facilities, as Carlos has already mentioned, have been used for conferences of... Third World First and other development groups occasionally have met in the Institute, and of course erm our own staff and students, and indeed sometimes Third Worlders spending a period at the Institute have given local talks and participated in local meetings. Perhaps I might just take the chance to say that if there is a local group that would like to hospitality to people from developing countries that are at the Institute, we always welcome that sort of opportunity and invitation.
[Geoffrey:] Thank you very much. Next week we shall be taking another look at education, and in particular comprehensive schools. I shall be talking to Stephen Ball and others about their studies of the effectiveness of this approach to education. Until next week, goodnight. [recorded jingle]
[speaker009:] Hello. One of the benefits of being at a university is the range of lectures that are put on each week on topics ranging from Chinese ceramics to nuclear power stations. One lecture I recently attended and very much enjoyed was given by Doctor Norman Vance on the subject of 'Moralistic Females and Victorian Discontents' . Norman, how did you get interested in this as a theme?
[speaker001:] I suspect that it started when I would read my grandmother's Sunday School prizes and my father's Sunday School prizes as a small boy. A lot of these were books written by moralistic females; books which erm reflected various kinds of Victorian ideas, and much later on when I did some research in Oxford on Victorian literature I found a way of putting these two sorts of things together.
[speaker009:] Who are the moralistic females you have in mind?
[speaker001:] The moralistic female I was particularly thinking of was George Eliot, because Nietzsche, the German writer, actually complained that she was a particularly moralistic female, but I was also thinking of people like Mrs Henry Wood and Amy Le Fevre and a few others like that.
[speaker009:] Why would a lady choose a nom de plume such as George Eliot?
[speaker001:] Well, she was actually called Marian Evans and was looking for a masculine name to writer under. Why exactly she chose George Eliot I can't actually think, but it's as good name as any I suppose.
[speaker009:] Was it a symbol of her discontent as a Victorian lady?
[speaker001:] I suppose there was an element of that in it. I think also there was the sense that the sorts of books that a lady was expected to write were perhaps rather different from the sorts of books that a gentleman is required to write, and George Eliot had already made a name for herself as a writer of erm considerable independence of mind who, I think, wanted to be regarded as a writer, rather than as a lady novelist. Some lady novelists were rather silly, and she herself had written a rather scathing article about silly lady novelists.
[speaker009:] So how would George Eliot compare with, say, a lady novelist like Jane Austen?
[speaker001:] I think that she had a broader ranger of interest than Jane Austen. Jane Austen rather prides herself on writing on things with a fairly restricted area of interest, whereas George Eliot, on the other hand, I think is interested to write about all sorts of things. She ranges historically as far back as the Florence of Savonarola's time in Romola, and geographically she actually encompasses themes such as Judaism in her last novel Daniel Deronda, and that, I think, you know, takes her both chronologically and geographically well beyond Jane Austen's range of interest.
[speaker009:] In what sense is George Eliot is moralistic?
[speaker001:] Well I'm not really sure that she is. This was an unkind remark made about her by somebody who disliked her attitude. She is certainly very concerned with moral themes, but I don't think that she's moralistic in the sense of hectoringly preaching at erm... at an audience to do such a and not to do other certain other kinds of things. I think that the adjective moralistic is really an unkind way of protesting at the fact that she seems to continue to be interested in moral themes which are often associated with Christianity, even if she has got rid of actual orthodox commitment to Christianity itself.
[speaker009:] In other words, you are saying that the morality to be found in George Eliot's novels is quite different from the more conventional Christian morality that's found in other novels of that period.
[speaker001:] I don't think that's quite what I was trying to suggest. I was trying to suggest that instead of actually definitely writing novels with a very straightforward moral theme, the theme of the novel being that you must do this or terrible things will happen, instead of doing that erm she is anxious to write novels which show you moral possibilities, that somebody or other may actually get into difficulty because they fail to understand something about somebody else and I think that these novels are intended to tell people more about themselves that erm they might otherwise realize. So to that extent they certainly explore moral issues; I think in a way that is not inconsistent with traditional Christian morality, but there is not attempt, I think, to thrust specific moral propositions erm, you know, down the throat of the reader erm in a way that more moralistic novels perhaps might do.
[speaker009:] The other half of your title is 'Victorian Discontents' . In what sense were these female writers discontents?
[speaker001:] Well, I think George Eliot in particular was discontented with the traditional frames of belief that she encountered in her time. She wrote an article about evangelical Christianity, in which she complained bitterly about a particular writer, a Doctor Cumming, who she said was not merely intellectually dishonest in attempting, by slipper means, to reconcile traditional Christian belief with certain new kinds of discovery in archaeology and so on, but he was also lacking in charity and the way which he hammered everybody who didn't subscribe to his particular form of religious believe didn't seem to her to be anything to do with the true spirit of Christianity, so she was discontented with that form of Victorian religion.
[speaker009:] Do you think that the novels that George Eliot wrote stand in their own right today?
[speaker001:] I think so. erm it seems to me that they are among the most important, most serious, novels that have ever been written anywhere.
[speaker009:] Which ones would you recommend to somebody who'd never read any before?
[speaker001:] Well, erm I think the first novel of George Eliot that I read was Adam Bede, and I think that that's actually quite a good starting point. It's her first full-scale novel, and I think there's a lot to be said for it. It's a simple story about village life, which nevertheless erm makes a lot of serious moral points. A much longer, but I think much more rewarding novel in the end, is Middlemarch. It is a very long novel; on the other hand it seems to be one of the best novels ever written, and I would strongly recommend somebody who has perhaps read a little George Eliot to go on to that.
[speaker009:] Do you think that women write different books from men?
[speaker001:] I think that they probably do. erm it's difficult to erm be sure of this. It's the sort of question that a man and a woman might very well give different answers to, but it seems to me that there are different sorts of things that erm some women tend to notice, different sorts of ideas that tend to assume prominence in the imaginations of some women, and erm to that extent I think that George Eliot's sympathy for other people, including people that she doesn't actually agree with, is perhaps a characteristic that one might tend to find more in a women novelist than in a male novelist, although I'm not sure that one can be absolutely dogmatic and say that one would never find a male novelist who could write the way that George Eliot does.
[speaker009:] You say that these books stand in their own right, and are important perhaps in the historical context of the development of the novel, but do they constitute what I'd call a good read?
[speaker001:] Yes, I think so. erm there are times, perhaps, when one feels this is a little bit dull and wants to skip on for a page or two, but I suspect that that is the case with most novels that one would want to read nowadays. erm I think that, you know, some bits of the book are actually funny; some bits of it erm are touching; some bits are exciting, and these are the elements, I would have thought, of a good read in any age.
[speaker009:] Could you give me an example of any nice passage in Adam Bede or Middlemarch to whet our appetites?
[speaker001:] I think my... one of my favourite passages in Adam Bede might be the description near the beginning of the novel of the methodist preacher, Diner, addressing a meeting of villagers and instead of giving you the entire speech, word for word, George Eliot gives you a little bit of what she said and then describes the manner in which she said it, and the manner in which it was actually received. That seems to me to be a very moving description of somebody who is preaching to people, not from any sense of superiority, but rather from a sense of human concern and caring about the people that she is addressing, and this makes the way in which George Eliot writes about her very different from the way in which other methodist preachers have been described either as ranters, erm or as people who are so caught up in what they are saying themselves that the fail to make any... pay any attention to the people that they are addressing. So that, I think, is one of my favourite moments in Adam Bede.
[speaker009:] How does the treatment of women in her books compare with the treatment of women, say, in books by Hardy. Is she more sympathetic to the woman's position in society?
[speaker001:] Difficult to say. erm in many ways I think she is. One strange thing about her books is that they nearly all tend to be set a little bit back in the past, so that the position of the women that she is describing and the society in which she is describing them isn't quite what's actually going on a the time she's writing. erm she is, on the whole, very sympathetic to most of the people that she writes about. I think one of my difficulties with Adam Bede is that she begins to lose interest a little bit in the figure of the beautiful, but not actually very bright, village girl, whose seduction is an important part of the story, and by the end of the book we feel that she's actually bored with Hettie, isn't really concerned any longer to explore Hettie's own sufferings as the other woman who has been badly treated by the rascally gentleman. So, she can, I think, have certain failures of sympathy for female characters. On the other hand, I think she is much less inclined to make her women examples of some particular sociological or historical development, which I think is Hardy's temptation all the time. So many of Hardy's girls are people who've had a little bit of education, and who are somehow or other caught between traditional ways and modern ways, and I think one has the feeling that Hardy is more interested in the sociologically transitional status of the people he's writing about than he is interested in them as people. I don't think George Eliot tends to make that sort of mistake.
[speaker009:] Switching, if I may, from Victorian novelists to more contemporary novelists, who do you think are good novelists of today?
[speaker001:] I think erm my two, or perhaps three, favourite novelists for today would be William Golding, Graham Greene and Iris Murdoch, and it seems to me that at least part of their importance is that they are really concerned with moral themes, as George Eliot was, even though, like George Eliot, they are shy about forcing a particular moral down the throat of a reader.
[speaker009:] Would The Spire by William Golding be a good example of what you had in mind?
[speaker001:] Yes, I would... I would think so. erm The Spire is erm a symbol that has a lot of meanings attached to it, and it's finally a book not about the building of a spire, but about a particular obsession in an individual human being, about the ideas that a man might have about ways of doing great things, which might actually be ideas that are rooted in some sort of self-deception. This, it seems to me, is a them that is of abiding significance, because we all of us do things for the wrong reasons, and yet it's all rather magnificently tied up with the attempt to build a glorious spire to a medieval cathedral.
[speaker009:] My last question is simply this. Supposing that I were to ask you to recommend a good, modern book to read, and I don't mean good in the sense of morally uplifting, but perhaps more in the sense of exciting or interesting reading. What would you suggest?
[speaker001:] I think a book that I have recently read and greatly enjoyed was, in fact, Graham Greene's The Honorary Consul, which is now available in paperback. That seemed to me to be a very good read, a serious book. It's got spies in it, so that it's got certain contemporary interest, but erm that did seem to me to be a very fine and very moving novel, which I'd strongly recommend.
[speaker009:] Thank you very much, Norman. Next week I shall be talking to Professor Max Clews all about computers and the human mind. Are we about to be taken over by the machine? Until next week, goodbye. [recorded jingle]
[speaker004:] Hello. This is another programme in our series from the university, in which we share with you news and views concerning activities that are going on here. In these programmes we're talking with people in the community who have particular contacts with us, and Graham Mayhew, who is my guest today, is a particularly good example of somebody who has contact with us at all sorts of different levels. Graham, I want to start by asking you about you being mayor. You look far too young to be a mayor, but you've just finished being Mayor of Lewes.
[speaker002:] Yes, I was the youngest ever Mayor of Lewes by a clear ten years. I'm the only one who's ever been mayor in his twenties, and I think that came about probably because the family had been in the town since the beginning of the century erm and I'd been involved in local politics since about eight or nine, taking numbers on polling stations and so on, and so when I got elected to the Council I think one or two people at any rate felt that it was quite natural that I should have the opportunity fairly soon.
[speaker004:] And so you were the youngest ever Mayor of Lewes?
[speaker002:] Yes. The previous youngest was thirty eight when he took over, and I was twenty eight.
[speaker004:] Well that's, as you say, a record by ten years. Did you actually enjoy being Mayor?
[speaker002:] Oh yes, I mean it's tremendous fun, actually, because it's one of those jobs which you can make more or less whatever you want out of. And providing you're sort of enthusiastic enough and you actually put the time in and the effort, then people respond.
[speaker004:] What are the things that you introduced that were different from previous mayors?
[speaker002:] Last year was the centenary of the Borough Charters, so on the one hand I was trying to restore the traditions of the thing — erm we tried to reintroduce some of the pomp and ceremonial — and then on the other hand I felt that the mayoralty often didn't seem terribly relevant to people of my generation, and so I tried to involve a lot of young people in various activities and the offshoot of that has been a Youth Advisory Committee which I've set up, which at the moment is in the process of trying to negotiate with the County Council for some premises to try and increase the sort of Youth Club type evening provision in the town.
[speaker004:] Well my son, Andrew, was involved with some of these discussions, so what I didn't learn first hand myself I learned second hand from him. I think that's an absolutely excellent idea to involve younger people. Do you regard your efforts in that direction as being successful?
[speaker002:] Well, it's really too early to say. I think it's been successful in trying to break down barriers a bit. I think at least some of the representatives — the head boy and girl and deputy head boy of Priory School, and some of the people from Ringmer School and so on— at least have contact now on a fairly regular basis with local councillors, local council officials and so on. I think it enables the young people that have been coming to those meetings to find out too the problems that Councillors and Local Authorities have in actually trying to carry out the sort of things they want. For example on the building that we're talking about shifting, first of all we've got to find a site for the thing, then we've got to get planning permission, then we've got to get the actual permission of the owner of the land, then we've got to make sure that erm electricity's laid on, that there's water laid on, that there's some sort of toilet or other facilities and so on, and when you add all that up it's quite a complicated sort of series of bureaucratic procedures you've got to go through and it's not a question of, you know, of people saying to us as Councillors well, you know, do this for us and we can magic it out in six months out of thin air there's an awful lot of paperwork that's got to be gone through and an awful lot of people to see and an awful lot of red tape, really, to get through first — I mean just to make sure that the thing's safe and complies with health and safety standards — and that's something which you have to get across to young people and if they're involved in the actual discussions on this and involved in the organisation, they begin to see the complexities and they're less inclined, I think, to automatically assume that erm people aren't on their side and don't want to listen.
[speaker004:] And of course Lewes is a small enough town that it's possible for ordinary people to be involved in central activities like Council activities and so on.
[speaker002:] Yes, I think it's a small enough town for people to get to know who their representatives are, to get to know each other, to get to know who runs which societies and organizations in the town, and that creates a sort of area of communal feeling that you don't get in a place that's, say, five or six times as big. You know, Lewes is about the right sort of size for that, people don't get too much on top of each other, but at least they can find their way around.
[speaker004:] I know that you're an historian by profession. Did this allow you to reintroduce, rediscover old traditions in Lewes that had been lost?
[speaker002:] Yes, I mean I run a series for one of the local newspapers on past Lewes mayors and the amount of work that I had to do for that meant that I picked up all sorts of pieces of information about what other mayors had tried in the past, and things that had been successful and things that had been disasters, and as it was the centenary I went to a lot of trouble to look up exactly what had happened a hundred years ago and to try and recreate the ceremonial connected with that, and then when we elected erm two people honourary freeman of the town I got in all of the other mayors from Sussex, asked them to come along with their robes and mace bearers and so on, and we had this very sort of grand ceremonial procession in the Assembly Hall, which was sort of packed out with about four hundred people. My only regret on that particular occasion now is that I didn't organise properly getting it videotaped, because it would have been a nice thing to keep, but as far as I could I kept to the traditions of mayoral ceremonial on those sorts of occasions. Lewes has only had a mayor or two for a hundred years, and so its ceremonial is somewhat new, but one was able to draw on the traditions in places like Rye, where it goes back to the thirteenthfourteenth centuries, and erm I used some of the phraseologies out of sixteenth century Rye documents and so on in my Lewes mayoralty on these sorts of ceremonial occasions, and introduced some of the ceremonial which I knew was authentic to mayoralties elsewhere in Sussex. And I think it sort of paid off in making people feel in the town during the year that they had a mayor, that the ceremonial actually meant something and related to them, and certainly I still find tremendous numbers of people who sort of come along and invite you to things — people who before would have probably said 'Oh it's a waste of money', and I think we did quite a lot to change that attitude.
[speaker004:] Why is it that mayors only existed in Lewes for a hundred years seeing it's such an old town?
[speaker002:] Primarily because the town's basically of Saxon foundation. It's sort of grid iron pattern streets on the south side of the High Street; on the north side that's all disrupted by the castle and, as far as one can tell, when the town and the area around it, the Rape of Lewes, was ceded to William De Warren, most of the local powers of the Town Council such as it was were taken away and subverted and the town became a minorial borough and although it sent Members of Parliament to Westminster from the end of the thirteenth century, it only had a very sort of ramshackle corporation, because the lords of the manor of Lewes kept control fairly tightly on what the town was actually allowed to do and on its internal freedoms. Although there was a sort of medieval corporation, it didn't have a Royal Charter and so in the end of the seventeenth century it was somewhat subverted, and really there was no proper town government to speak of until the beginning of the nineteenth century with the Borough Commissioners and then later on with the Mayor and Corporation which was set up in eighteen eighty one.
[speaker004:] Well you've obviously studied your local history very closely, and I believe you actually run local history classes, don't you?
[speaker002:] Yes, I've got four going at the moment, actually [LAUGHTER]. It's rather ludicrous really. I've got one in Battle on Tudor Battle, all about the dissolution of Battle Abbey and erm what happened to the town afterwards; one on Elizabethan Rye, which is erm... was notable because it was the largest place in Sussex at the time, a very important port, a lot of trade for London went through Rye, and there's a lot of stuff relating to piracy and erm warfare. For example, in fifteen fifty seveneight, when Queen Mary lost Calais to the French, the income of the town corporation doubled in that year from three hundred pounds to six hundred, and that's entirely because they pulled in awful lot of French boats and then charged them all a lot of ransom money before they sent them back to France. So that sort of thing's quite fun. erm I've got courses in Eastbourne and erm a course in Brighton, on medieval stained glass in fact. I've always enjoyed teaching it's something which I feel is very important for someone who's an historian. I don't like just doing research without communicating it, and I think if you've got an interest and you can communicate it well to people, then it stimulates their enjoyment and of course in a time when there's going to have to be more and more leisure I think that's very important.
[speaker004:] And you're doing these courses under the gist of the Centre for Continuing Education at the university?
[speaker002:] Yes, that's right. I mean the second main paymaster of myself, you know, is the university, in fact, and erm without them I don't suppose I could have sort of financed the extra side of sort of clothing and everything else for my mayoralty.
[speaker004:] And do I understand that there's a day school planned in the near future?
[speaker002:] Yes, I've got a day school on December the fourth. It's a Saturday. It's all day from ten o'clock to about five. We're going to be looking at Lewes in the period during the late middle ages, early modern period, when it had an unchartered corporation, how the town was governed and so on. We're going to be looking at the contrast between that and places like Rye, which did have a chartered corporation, and we're going to be looking at sort of trade, at the effects of epidemics on the town, erm and so on. I think it should be great fun.
[speaker004:] And you don't have to have a history degree to come along to one of these things?
[speaker002:] No, we don't expect any background knowledge at all.
[speaker004:] And details can be got from the Centre for Continuing Education at the university. I'm sure if anyone wrote in they would be sent an appropriate form.
[speaker002:] That's right, yes.
[speaker004:] How much does it cost?
[speaker002:] I think it's six pounds fifty for the erm... for the day. They have to buy their own lunch in the university refectory, but that's an experience in itself, so anybody who wants to come and play student for the day, it's great fun.
[speaker004:] Well that's sounds something to recommend for that December Saturday. Looking at other aspects of your life and work, you're official history activities are with the East Sussex Record Office at Pelham House.
[speaker002:] That's right, yes. I run the search room there, which means that erm people come into Pelham House, they usually meet me at a desk and the end of a telephone, and I put them onto the documents that they want to look at and I make sure that they're ordered up from where they're kept in one of the various repositories and strong rooms that we've got. Then I produce them for them and erm if they need any help reading them and so on I give them that.
[speaker004:] And are most of the documents in Sussex now kept in the East Sussex Record Office?
[speaker002:] Well the two Record Offices for Sussex — there's the East Sussex one, under the East Sussex County Council in Lewes, and the West Sussex Record Office at Chichester. An increasing number of official documents are being kept at Record Offices. All of the Parish Registers for the various East Sussex parishes are now held, with one exception, at Lewes. erm all of the Local Authority records, as far as we've been able to get them in, are held there. We're trying at the moment to get in non-conformist church records, or at least to get copies of them if the churches don't want to let us have them, because they're quite important for the nineteenth century history of East Sussex, and erm really any help that we can get from the general public who've got old documents relating to their properties, minutes of any organisation that they've been involved in, or that used to exist and that's now collapsed, anything like that that can add to the history of the county we're always very grateful to receive.
[speaker004:] And again, the Record Office is something that lay folk can just come in an look up books and ask questions if they wish to?
[speaker002:] Yes, it's open Mondays to Fridays, from quarter to nine through to quarter to five, and anyone can just walk in and we'll do our best to help them produce whatever it is they want to see, providing we've got it and we can find it.
[speaker004:] Well I've actually spent some hours in the Record Office, I don't think while you've been there, erm doing a bit of ancestor hunting, so I am familiar with your work and activities.
[speaker002:] Yes, well anybody can come in and trace their family, so long as they know that they came from Sussex at some point and they've got something to work on, they've got some idea of which town or which village they came from, then usually the Parish Registers and things like the Census Returns over the last hundred years are usually able to help them.
[speaker004:] One other contact that I think you have with us is that you sing in the Meeting House Choir.
[speaker002:] Well, yes. I haven't actually managed to make it yet this term because of all the teaching preparation I've been doing, but erm I've done that for the last two years and erm it's been quite an important activity because it enabled me, after I came back down to Lewes, to help to get to know a few people in the university and to sort of expand my contacts, and the Meeting House is one of those places which is open to the general public on Sundays for religious worship. There's a Catholic service at half past ten and an inter-denominational one at half past eleven. There is a choir which produces things — various medieval and erm renaissance and eighteenth century anthems and so on, and they do a Christmas carol service and so on — and it's really quite... I find it quite nice to come to, because it doesn't have the sort of narrow denominationalism that many of the local churches have.
[speaker004:] You've got experience of being at two other universities. You did your undergraduate work at York and then you did a doctorate at Oxford. How do you find Sussex compares with those two?
[speaker002:] Well, it's difficult really. erm architecturally I suppose it doesn't compare with a medieval university. I liked York very much, because it was set round a lake and it was the first one I went to, but I must say of the other modern universities that I know I would say that Sussex was erm... was the other best one that I've been to and the one that I felt most comfortable and happy.
[speaker004:] Thank you very much, Graham. Next week we shall have another member of the local community as our guest. Until next week, then, goodbye. [recorded jingle]
[speaker009:] Hello. This is another in our series from the university, in which I shall be discovering from people in the wider community what they know about us and what the points of contact are between the university and them. This week I have with me Meg Braga, a friend, and a lady of many interests and talents who is thoroughly involved in the local community. Meg, I think the first time I met you was when you brought a party of visitors from the British Council here, is that right?
[speaker003:] Yes, that was some time ago when I was working as a hostess with the British Council and used to collect... meet VIPs at the station and bring them here to the university.
[speaker009:] And that was when the university was very much on the British Council circuit. Do you think that still happens?
[speaker004:] I imagine it must do, yes. It's an absolutely fascinating thing to do, because they always have so much to offer — the people who are visiting from abroad — you learn an awful lot about them.
[speaker009:] Another point of contact that I know that you have, actually, is through the Brighton Festival Chorus.
[speaker004:] mhm.
[speaker009:] The Brighton Festival Chorus rehearses here, doesn't it, at the university?
[speaker004:] Yes, we have done since the beginning, about erm twelvethirteen years ago.
[speaker009:] And Lazlo Heltai, who used to be the Director of Music at the university, still is the Director of the Brighton Festival Chorus.
[speaker004:] Yes, he's our conductor. Absolutely marvellous person. We're very, very fortunate, I think, in being able to use the university facilities here because they really are ideal. We've been to most of the lecture theatres. At the moment we're in the biology lecture theatre and it's tremendous fun to be able to come all together like this. It's an ideal place too for those who come from Brighton and Lewes and the surrounding areas.
[speaker009:] Tell me about the Brighton Festival Chorus itself. I'm not sure that people know very much about it. How long has it been going
[speaker004:] I think it was sixty nine that we started. I think Lazlo introduced this, to us, very refreshing sort of sound that he wanted to achieve and we were able at the beginning to quite take people by surprise with this what was described as a young, fresh sound, and we did quite a number of recordings. Then, fortunately, the middle of the seventies, we were able to link up with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, and now, in fact, most of our concerts are done in London with the Royal Phil. at the Royal Festival Hall.
[speaker009:] It grew originally out of the actual Brighton Festival.
[speaker004:] That's right, yes, and we still do one, perhaps two, concerts a year in Brighton at the Festival, but then we were able to develop from there, which has been a tremendous erm thrill for everybody.
[speaker009:] And it's certainly been marvellous to come and listen to it, as I have been one of your loyal supporters over many years.
[speaker004:] Yes, I know, mhm.
[speaker009:] And it's been marvellous to keep going. You've been abroad quite a lot, haven't you, with the chorus. Is it... have you got any great trips lined up now — Athens?
[speaker004:] [LAUGHTER]. Well our lovely trip was to Athens last year, yes, erm when we did the Britten's War Requiem beneath the Acropolis in the old amphitheatre there and that was an experience that we'll all remember, and then previously we went to Lisbon, which was very exciting — it was a completely different sort of experience.
[speaker009:] Of course at the university you do your rehearsals, but the contact is greater than that. There must be quite a number of members from the university who are in the chorus.
[speaker004:] Oh yes, that's right. I mean there's a strong Music Department here and we have a number of music students who come into the chorus for the while that they're in the university — they often sing in the university choir, I think, as well and play in the orchestra, or perhaps the Meeting House Choir, and a number of members of faculty, I think, as well sing with us.
[speaker009:] Is it possible for students to sing with you, or are they here for too short a time?
[speaker004:] No, I'm sure that they... that so long as they pass the audition they are always welcome. We're very glad of them.
[speaker009:] Another point of contact is the New Sussex Opera Group. You are now one of the committee member and the certainly put on productions in Lewes, but also at the Gardner Centre. Here again, there must be a fair number of university people that are involved in one way and another?
[speaker004:] Yes, I think that's inevitable to some extent. The academic, intellectual types also have a cultural background and are interested in aspects of the arts, and erm we are very fortunate, I think, also in that people are able to give more time than perhaps business people, and so a number of the members of the committee are university people and we are able to use the Gardner Arts Centre, which has become quite an exciting area, in that it's open to experimental production, so therefore we attract a lot of the London critics.
[speaker009:] What's the next production that you have lined up for?
[speaker004:] Well that's quite soon. That's the Threepenny Opera, Bertolt Brecht.
[speaker009:] And when's that going to be on?
[speaker004:] That's the last week in November, the twentieth, that week. And that's not really opera, it's theatre, musical theatre, and we're experimenting quite considerably with the theatre in that case and doing it almost in the round.
[speaker009:] Oh, that's very interesting. So there'll be a change round of the... the staging and seating and so on.
[speaker004:] Yes, yes, yes.
[speaker009:] It's interesting how, although the Gardner Centre was built as a theatre that was very flexible in terms of seating, it's not used all that often, is it?
[speaker004:] No, no, but I think that the present producer has seen it's potential and is going to explore it much more fully.
[speaker009:] mhm. Who is the producer of the...?
[speaker003:] Peter Reynolds this time.
[speaker009:] Yes.
[speaker004:] mhm. We employ a number of professional producers and this time Peter — he's a very experienced drama teacher — and he is working with Julian Elloway, who is a local musician.
[speaker009:] Oh Julian, of course, was at Sussex.
[speaker004:] That's right. Again and again we find this link.
[speaker009:] Yes. And what are you actually doing? I know you've got some responsibility with this opera.
[speaker004:] [LAUGHTER] Well I'm not on stage this time, I'm going to have a go with the costumes.
[speaker009:] Oh, well something to look forward to. Another point of contact I know that you have is erm through the Town Gown Club. This is an organization that listeners may not realize, which meets probably a couple of times a term, and which members of the university and people outside community meet, have some supper together, perhaps, and actually hear some talks, either from people inside the university or outside, about topics of current interest. We've got one coming up this term given by John Maynard-Smith about whether Darwin is still true in this day and age or not. You've come to a number of those I guess?
[speaker004:] Yes, I have over the years. I think it's a very useful point of contact, because there are areas in which there are obviously differences, different styles of life, different ways of life, different erm time commitments, and it's very good that this something that tries to bridge the gap. It's very helpful for both sides of the community, I'm sure, to have contact like this and I think that the programme is usually very well devised in that you do have something either of mutual interest or one area and then the other area so that we can be informed about erm what's going on in the other section of the community.
[speaker009:] I know you're also very much involved with social work generally. What are you actually doing at the moment?
[speaker004:] Well, I help in general areas in Lewes within the community. The thing that's really helped enormously recently has been the Phoenix Centre and the development of the Phoenix Centre, and there's room there for a lot of volunteers to work in various capacities. Also the project that has hit the news quite a bit recently is the talking newspaper for the blind. Our present mayoress of Lewes, Mavis Askew, who's done a sterling work as secretary of this new association, and that's a very worthwhile project, and I believe she works in the library here.
[speaker009:] Do you find any of my colleagues involved in that?
[speaker004:] I'm sorry to say I don't, no, but I very rarely find anybody from the university, with one exception — Homeless in Sussex, I think there are two or three people there. But I don't know quite why it is — maybe that's one area where I do find there's a bit of segregation, or maybe it's just that people don't have the time available, but it's a different sector of the community who are working with the basic things like helping the old and the infirm more, just being able to give cups of coffee to people, or chatting to them, or visiting them, or whatever.
[speaker009:] Well that's an awful shame that we're not involved in that.
[speaker004:] I may be completely wrong. I mean this is just the areas that I've touched on, and again it's... in many cases it's only fringe.
[speaker009:] When we were talking just now before the programme started I think you said that you weren't sure that you'd had a great deal of contact with the university one way or another, but surely you've been surrounded by university people?
[speaker004:] mhm.
[speaker009:] You've lived in Brighton and you've lived in Kingston, and now you live in Lewes. All these areas are absolutely fully of university types and you can scarcely help but bump into them all the time.
[speaker004:] mhm.
[speaker009:] How do you think they're fitted in generally?
[speaker004:] My personal observations I can make a comment on, for example, the cultural area. I think that what happens in a place like erm Kingston, or a place like Lewes from my observation is that the general aspirations, the pretensions, change. Lewes and Kingston area are very different from Brighton where everything is very commercially based and rather materialistic. I think perhaps it's the influence of the university that makes a town like Lewes perhaps erm... the aspirations may be more intellectual or cultural. You notice more book shops. Generally the whole level changes.
[speaker009:] Can you see any disadvantages of the university being here?
[speaker004:] I don't have enough contact to be able to say the disadvantages. I think in a community one does come across practical snags, like for example the differences become very marked between the businessman who goes off at eight in the morning and comes back at six, week in week out, year in year out, with perhaps sort of three or four weeks holiday, and the university men who appear to be around an awful lot of the time and appear to have a lot of holiday. Probably both sides are not well enough informed about what's going on on the other side. One doesn't realize that there's a lot of research to be done or ruminating time, or whatever, and so that can be an area of misunderstanding or it can build up unfortunate prejudices.
[speaker009:] I think, actually, from the university point of view it's a job which is very ill-defined in terms of time. It's very difficult to reduce it. Some people reduce it to a sort of nine to five or a nine to six type job, but I think many of us feel it's so totally open-ended we're never quite sure when we ought to start and we're never quite sure when we ought to finish. And of course we only spend a minority of our time actually teaching. The rest of the time we are supposed to be thinking these big thoughts
[speaker004:] mhm.
[speaker009:] and doing the research
[speaker004:] mhm.
[speaker009:] and so on, so I'm not surprised that people have these ideas about us.
[speaker004:] erm yes, to some extent. It's easier for someone who has a timetable laid out for them very clearly during the day. They don't have to make those initial decisions of how to plan their time and their work.
[speaker009:] As a university member, I think the thing I would most like to have happen is to be accepted as an ordinary person in the place I live and the people I meet with. Do you think there are features associated with university types of the kind that I'm worried about?
[speaker004:] They do tend to be labelled, yes. I mean I'm speaking of someone whose work is of a different kind, and they do tend to be labelled probably because they seem to be around a lot, and obviously have some political influence on the area. I don't know how far people can be integrated, because to the businessman it appears that the businessman is dealing with the nitty gritty of life and the responsibilities of every day life and the university man is someone who is detached from them, maybe the ivory tower sort of pictures still holds true.
[speaker009:] I think that probably is true to some extent. Do you have any sort of tangible suggestions as to ways in which university people could actually become more part of the community?
[speaker004:] Well is there any point in anybody trying to be what they're not? I think you've just got to live the way of life as you find it. I'm not suggesting for a moment that university people aren't as integrated as anyone else.
[speaker009:] I think one of the fallacies erm that you touched on is this question of political bias. I am sure that the wider world think of us as all being terribly left wing, whereas in fact we're awfully liberal and conservative and with a spectrum distribution of political allegiances which I suspect are very little different from the community as a whole.
[speaker004:] Yes, I'm sure what you say is true and, knowing as many people as we are privileged and glad to know, I agree with you that there is a wide spectrum, but it's always the case that the vociferous ones are the ones that set the tone, and often in wrong light.
[speaker009:] Thank you very much, Meg, for talking to me. Perhaps I should say a little bit more about the Phoenix Centre for the benefit of those of you who are unfamiliar with Lewes. It's actually a multi-purpose building, located in the centre of town, and used for all sorts of purposes, for all sections of the community. It's run by the Social Services Department, but it also relies heavily on contributions and voluntary help from local people. Next week I shall be talking with Graham Mayhew, who has recently completed a period in office as Mayor of Lewes. Well, that's all that we have time for today. Until next week, then, goodbye. [recorded jingle]
[speaker005:] Hello. Today I have with me two ladies who have embarked on a career in science. Pam Murphy has recently enrolled as a postgraduate student in experimental physics, and Carol Wallis, having got a degree and a postgraduate degree at Cambridge, and taught in various places, is now working as a Research Fellow in biochemistry at the university. It does seem to me that there are still relatively few women who become professional scientists, and today I hope that you two ladies will help me explore perhaps some of the reasons why this is the case. But first, Pam, how did you get into physics in the first place?
[Geoffrey:] My father's a physicist and my mum's a science teacher, and although at school I was interested in all things, most subjects, erm I think maths and physics came particularly easily to me. Since I was becoming a scientist they encouraged me
[speaker005:] Yes.
[Geoffrey:] to do that.
[speaker005:] And, Carol, did you have the advantage of that sort of background too?
[Norbert:] My mother, too, was a science teacher and I was good at science, and I always continued with that line because partly of the family background and partly of my own interests.
[speaker005:] So what came first, your own interests or your family's encouragement to go into science I wonder?
[Norbert:] Very difficult to decide. I think the two go along together.
[speaker005:] Did you find this difficult to do at school? Did you go to the sort of school where it was made easy to go into science, or did you go to the sort of school where nice girls did the arts or something quite different?
[Norbert:] No, in my school it was very easy to go into science. I went to a co-educational school and I was not aware of any pressure for girls to go into arts and boys into science. I found it very easy to go into the science sixth and nobody suggested that it wasn't a ladylike thing to do.
[speaker005:] And how about you, Pam, were you fortunate at school too?
[Geoffrey:] Oh yes, erm I went to a comprehensive co-educational school and found exactly the same thing.
[speaker005:] Let's move on a little bit to university, perhaps. Did you find that at Oxford, Pam, there were many other girls doing physics?
[Geoffrey:] No, there I started to notice that there were a lot more men than women in the lectures erm
[speaker005:] And did that make it harder for you to do physics?
[Geoffrey:] Not at all, no. By that time I'd really stopped noticing whether people are male or female and just got on with the physics.
[speaker005:] mhm. How about at Cambridge? Did you have a feeling that you were alone? There are rather more women, I think, that go into chemistry on the whole, aren't there, than perhaps physics, and certainly engineering.
[Norbert:] Yes, and of course biology. I was doing zoology and botany as well as biochemistry and chemistry.
[speaker005:] Oh yes.
[Norbert:] And there were a fair number, though of course the numbers of women at Cambridge are, or at that time were, very low. I mean now there are more mixed colleges.
[speaker005:] mhm.
[Norbert:] The proportions are different, but I think when I was there there was one woman to every eleven men, so that even in the arts subjects [LAUGHTER] there were a lot more men than women. But it certainly never bothered me, or didn't make any difference to one's work.
[speaker005:] Certainly statistically, then, many more men on science.
[Geoffrey:] mhm.
[speaker005:] Do you think there are any disadvantages?
[Geoffrey:] The apparatus is built for people over six foot tall [LAUGHTER]. I can't reach most of it [LAUGHTER].
[speaker005:] That's pretty fair, yes.
[Geoffrey:] I haven't come across any disadvantages yet.
[speaker005:] So you don't think you're going to have any problems in your career by having sort of the men getting the juicier jobs or dominating you in any sense?
[Geoffrey:] I hope not. I don't think so.
[speaker005:] Well you, of course, Carol, are a little bit further down the line. You've got rather more experience than Pam and you have taught at — it was Queen Elizabeth College you taught at?
[Norbert:] Yes, that's right.
[speaker005:] And in the States as well?
[Norbert:] erm no, I was doing research in the States.
[speaker005:] You did research in the States.
[Norbert:] mhm.
[speaker005:] You've done some teaching at Sussex. How do you feel about your career as a chemist or biochemist, as a woman as well?
[Norbert:] Well I don't think that it's primarily being a woman that affected my career. What affected my career was having children, which immediately means that you can't devote the amount of time to your career as you can if you don't have other responsibilities, and the reason that I'm now a Research Fellow here, and I work part-time — only eighty per cent of the time — is because of trying to tie in one's responsibilities as a mother with those as a scientist, and this has obvious effects. At the present time jobs are not easy to come by, and if you're on permanent, or rather short-term contracts renewed all the time this makes a difference to where you can get to compared with a man with the equivalent training. But I think that being a woman never affected what I was doing, it was having children which did that.
[speaker005:] And that's an obvious erm fact of life, if you like, that you really can't get round [LAUGHTER] in any practical way.
[Norbert:] No, I think that all women in all jobs, and particularly in professional jobs, have this problem that at a time when you should be doing your... perhaps your most original work, building up your reputation, then you're also tied up with problems of looking after children. But unless you hand them over to somebody else completely, which most people don't feel is a very satisfactory arrangement, you're left with that problem. There's no way round it. I have been able to continue doing research, which I enjoy very much, and I think it's worked out very well.
[speaker005:] And presumably there are rewards in having children anyway, as a women, quite apart from
[Norbert:] Oh yes.
[speaker005:] the other effects.
[Norbert:] Yes, I mean it would be nice if it was possible, you know, after having taken time out, or some time out, over a period to be able to get back into a more permanent career structure, but maybe in the future this' ll come.
[speaker005:] Yes.
[Norbert:] At the moment there are difficulties for everybody.
[speaker005:] Do you think... you say there are difficulties for everyone, are you aware of any way in which erm men make it difficult for you, as a women, in a career sense?
[Norbert:] Not really, no. I've always found the men that I've worked with either it has made no difference that I was a woman so far as I was aware, or else they've been very helpful. I mean I've certainly been very much helped in the time at Sussex when I've been working part time by the men that I've worked with
[speaker005:] mhm.
[Norbert:] in making it possible for me to do part-time research.
[speaker005:] What sort of physics are you actually going to do. What sort of research project are you going to do, Pam?
[Geoffrey:] I'm going to look at what happens to helium at low temperatures, and in particular I'm going to see what it does when it's stuck onto carbon, which it will do very readily.
[speaker005:] So it's really something at very low temperatures, and it's a bit of fundamental physics research. Are there theories which describe what might happen?
[Geoffrey:] Yes, there are theories at to what happens at... well the temperature's in fact just about as low as you can get.
[speaker005:] What, just a fraction of a degree above absolute zero?
[Geoffrey:] Yes, yes, that sort of thing.
[speaker005:] And we have a very large low temperature group in physics at the university, don't we? It's one of the major places of low temperature research in the country.
[Geoffrey:] Yes, that's why I came here [LAUGHTER].
[speaker005:] And that's why you came here, indeed. How about your particular research interests, Carol?
[Norbert:] Well at the moment I'm working on the mechanism action of vitamin B twelve dependent enzymes. In fact the enzyme that I work with is a bacterial enzyme. It's simpler to obtain large amounts of it and one hopes that if one finds out something of the mechanism through this enzyme one would be able to apply it to other enzymes dependent upon the same coenzyme.
[speaker005:] This will have an application ultimately, perhaps, to treatment of anaemia in people, although I know you're working large on bacteria?
[Norbert:] Not... not directly. The treatment of anaemia is more concerned with the uptake of the co-ential vitamin than what it does when it gets to it's site of action.
[speaker005:] Let's talk about what you ladies to when you're not actually being scientists. I've labelled you very strongly a scientist. Pam, you used to do a lot of rowing, didn't you, at Oxford?
[Geoffrey:] Yes, coxing.
[speaker005:] Did you, where did you cox?
[Geoffrey:] Well in my second year I coxed one of the women's university boats against... well underneath the famous Sue Brown. That took up an awful lot of time in my second year, although it was good fun. We raced against Cambridge at Henley.
[speaker005:] Did you?
[Geoffrey:] Yes.
[speaker005:] Did you win?
[Geoffrey:] No, we lost.
[speaker005:] Oh well, never mind.
[Geoffrey:] [LAUGHTER]. But it was worth it.
[speaker005:] And I also know that you spent a summer on rather a long walk. In fact, you walked from Lands End to John O'Groats. Now why did you do that?
[Geoffrey:] Well, I went with a friend from university and we both enjoyed walking and in particular we enjoyed walking from one place to another place, and last summer was the only last long break either of us would ever really have and erm
[speaker005:] How long did it take you?
[Geoffrey:] we spent it walking. Ten weeks.
[speaker005:] Ten weeks. And where did you stay?
[Geoffrey:] We carried a tent, which we used mostly. We stayed in a few bed and breakfasts when we thought we needed a wash, and a few youth hostels.
[speaker005:] Did you find it very difficult? Did you find you feet were covered with blisters?
[Geoffrey:] erm not blisters, no. My feet just got battered. They... I think they got about twenty per cent bigger [LAUGHTER].
[speaker005:] Did you discover a lot of Britain you didn't think existed?
[Geoffrey:] Oh, yes. Scotland in particular was beautiful. We saw herds of stags and although we never actually walked for a day when we didn't see anyone else, there was a week of walking when we only saw one other person for every day. You just got the feeling of such complete isolation and wilderness. It's beautiful.
[speaker005:] mhm. And, Carol, I suppose your spare time activities are largely taken up with your family these days?
[Norbert:] Yes, yes, they are. I'm hoping to get them walking.
[speaker005:] How old are your children now?
[Norbert:] Well the elder is thirteen at the end of the week, and the younger one is ten.
[speaker005:] And erm are they going to become... are they boys or girls?
[Norbert:] They're both girls.
[speaker005:] Now are they going to be chemists?
[Norbert:] Well I think they both have a scientific sort of mind. The elder one is particularly interested in science and I shouldn't be at all surprised if they don't become scientists [LAUGHTER]
[speaker005:] mhm.
[Norbert:] although I wouldn't push them into it. I think this is something which everybody has to work out for themselves. I'd encourage them.
[speaker005:] mhm. Well I think you two ladies are very fortunate, and you obviously have come from homes that have encouraged you very much, and have come from schools that have encouraged you very much. erm but I would say, on the whole, my guess is that there are many girls that perhaps could go into science and could make contributions to science but don't do so simply because their families don't understand it and the schools don't support them. Do you think that's fair?
[Norbert:] It's so hard to say when all along the line I've been encouraged.
[speaker005:] mhm.
[Norbert:] Of course I can only say from my own experience.
[Geoffrey:] Yes and one can imagine that it might be like that, but of course the women that we meet at university are those who have become scientists [LAUGHTER] very often.
[Norbert:] I think it's true to say that, certainly at my school, about the age of fourteen of fifteen the girls suddenly decide that they can't do maths and there's no way that they could understand anything scientific, but that, I think, is a lot deeper than just encouragement at school anyway.
[speaker005:] Maths is absolutely the fundamental stumbling block, isn't it, in a sense? If you can do maths you can probably do most of the rest
[Geoffrey:] Yes.
[speaker005:] I feel and people get very emotional about maths. They suddenly, whether they're boys or girls, they suddenly decide sometime in their teens perhaps they can't do it.
[Geoffrey:] It's not because it's the tool of, well, physics anyway and engineering, it's because you have to think in a way that is probably entirely foreign to you. It's not like reading a story, which you have been doing because you're a child and you read children's stories in which you have people and things, it's about entirely abstract ideas and
[speaker005:] And it's whole new language which is unfamiliar, perhaps?
[Geoffrey:] Yes, and a whole new way of thinking about doing abstract things with abstract ideas, which probably at that age you suddenly realize it is abstract and, help, you suddenly can't do it any more.
[Norbert:] And so far as I can tell, you know, from looking at my children's schooling, the girls seem to be good at maths in the early stages. On the whole the girls are ahead of the boys, so this is a change that occurs in the teens.
[speaker005:] Well maybe they will follow their mother into chemistry or biochemistry too. Thank you very much erm Pamela and Carol. That's all that we have time for on this subject today. Next week we're going to start a new twelve part series on opportunities in education, in which we shall be looking at various aspects of schools today. Do we have too much education? Are we teaching the right subjects in the right way at the right time? Could parents do more to help their children in school? These are some of the issues that we shall be exploring. For details of the series look in the Radio Times or get a list of the programmes, either from Radio Brighton or by writing to me, Doctor Brian Smith at the Physics Building in the university. I hope that you'll join us next week. Goodbye. [recorded jingle]
[Geoffrey:] ... university this term, at least so far as the community is concerned, is our Open Day on Saturday June the fourteenth. On that day, everyone and anyone is invited to visit the campus to see what we do here. One of the features of the day will be a series of mini-lectures on just about every conceivable subject, and during the next few Ideas in Action programmes, I shall be talking to some of the lecturers about their topics and, hopefully, whetting your appetites sufficiently to want to join us on June the fourteenth to hear more. I have with me today Ian Miles, who's a Senior Fellow in the Science Policy Research Unit and an expert in unemployment, that is to say you're not unemployed yourself, but you study people who are.
[Anne:] I have done, yes.
[Geoffrey:] Welcome, Ian. First of all, is high unemployment here to stay do you think?
[Anne:] This is a topic which, of course, generates considerable argument and passion. My own belief is that we have had a sea change in the nature of employment in Britain and in other western societies. Certainly, some unemployment now is a result of depressed demand. erm there are a lot of social needs that remain unmet, and meeting those needs would generate more employment, but in many areas of the economy I don't think there's so much need for work as there has been in the past, especially as we're applying new technologies that increase productivity dramatically. We can be producing the same quantity of electronics goods, of many household appliances and so on, with many fewer workers than have been used in past. So I think there's a change in the amount of work that's going to be required in our society. Whether this means high unemployment depends partly on how this work is distributed; whether we keep the same working hours that we've had in the past, for example, whether we work for as many years. If we do keep up our past patterns then I think that inevitably means high unemployment is here to stay.
[Geoffrey:] We tend to talk about unemployment in terms of purely economic factors;
[Anne:] mhm.
[Geoffrey:] what it does to our economy, whether people can afford this that and the other, but surely it has quite a considerable social impact on people's lives being unemployed?
[Anne:] Yes. This is, in fact, exactly the topic that I'm going to be addressing in my lecture on the Open Day. I've been doing research that's been inspired by the work of Marie Hoader, who's Emeritus Professor at the university, a social psychologist, and she had researched unemployment back in the nineteen thirties; she studied an Austrian village called Mariental, where practically everybody was unemployed, and late in the nineteen seventies as our group began raising questions about the future of work, she engaged in a review of the research between the thirties and the seventies to see if things had changed. Now the economic circumstances of unemployed people we know have changed a lot. erm we have a welfare state, which erm ensures that very few people are living at absolute poverty — you do have shoes to wear, you do have some sort of food to eat — which wasn't necessarily the case in the nineteen thirties — and people have had different education and training, their lives are very different. So you'd expect there to be a big change in the social impacts of unemployment. In fact, she found in her review that there seemed to be a great of continuity, that again and again over these forty years researchers were reporting similar sorts of social and psychological impacts of unemployment. It was having the same sorts of mainly damaging effects on people's personal lives and on their family lives and so on, and in research that I carried out in Brighton erm over the past three or four years we were looking at these effects — how they were affecting unemployed people in Brighton — and trying to explain them. If it isn't just the money problems of unemployment, what is it?
[Geoffrey:] Let's have a look at some of the features that are associated with being unemployed. First of all, presumably, you lose your normal time structure of having to go off and do something on a regular basis.
[Anne:] Yes, that's right. That's a very important feature of being unemployed. erm employed people have a regular activity erm on a daily basis, and that activity is carried out with a time structure, so that the hours of the day are different from each other, the days of the week are marked out as being different from each other, the weeks are marked out by being different from each other as well, and also you're situated in time in a different way — you're on some sort of career, you can see some way in which your life is progressing. erm and this tends to disappear when you're unemployed. Although people sometimes think of unemployment as having lots of leisure, in fact leisure only has its real meaning when it's set against work. For unemployed people the free time becomes rather like an empty desert with very, very few oases, and one of the results of our research was to find that, well first of all that unemployed people tend to describe their time in very negative ways, as being empty, as having nothing to do, little activity and so on in it. Those people that had found ways of structuring their time, of organising themselves round routines, or having particular sorts of appointments to make and this could take many forms, like, for example, just getting up early in the morning to play a sport game, for example, or arranging to meet other people at particular times those people that had got some sort of time structure in their lives and some sorts of regular activities to carry out in their lives erm tended to be a lot less severely affected by unemployment than those people that didn't have these sorts of activities, this sort of time structure.
[Geoffrey:] Presumably another effect is that when people work, assuming they enjoy what they're doing, they're doing something which they regard as being reasonably important.
[Anne:] Yes.
[Geoffrey:] Good work, that is to say, is work that you do because you actually see the point of it and you actually get some pleasure and personal benefit by doing it.
[Anne:] Yes. erm I think that's another important thing. In fact, Marie Hoader tried to account for the negative consequences of unemployment in terms of five things that employment provides in our society, five sorts of experience that more and more, as we are industrialized and as more and more people are involved in working in employment, erm have come to be important and provided via employment, and we talked of two of those earlier — one's activity and one was time structure — and you've just raised the issue of feeling that you're contributing to society in some way, that you're part of a collective purpose, that you're not just drawing things out, you're also doing something useful with your time. And the other two things I could mention at this point is that erm this activity, this useful time-structured activity, brings you into contact with other people. It takes you out of your home, out of your immediate family environment and brings you into contact with a much broader range of people, and it provides you with a sort of status. And although we often hear about different jobs being of different sorts of status, they're on a ladder of status, its... for unemployed people the situation is very often as if you've actually been kicked off this ladder and this is what people say when they describe being unemployed as being on the scrap heap and so on, it's as if you've been expelled from this particular world where erm people respect you for having a job and know that you're contributing. And we found that all five of these sorts of experiences were expressed much more by the employed people we interviewed than by the unemployed people. We asked people 'Do you meet a broad range of other people in your daily life?'erm 'Do you feel that your time is structured, that you have erm things to do at different times of the day?'and so on. For each of these five areas, employed people would always say 'Yes, I have a lot of this' and unemployed people would usually say 'No, I have very little of this' . The lack of status issue, I think, is very important. Many unemployed people are actually quite invisible in the sense of one of the things that happens when you're unemployed is that you're not actually being taken out of your home environment so much, and unemployed people spend a lot more of their time at home than erm do employed people. There's another piece of research looking at unemployed people around the whole country, which was titled 'Out of sight and at home'. We asked people to keep a diary of what they were doing and to fill in this diary every half an hour, saying where they were, who they were with and what they were doing, and we were able to see erm first of all that the range of people that you meet decreases when you're unemployed, that you're actually spending more time alone, less time with friends and other people. I think at any particular moment in the day we found that half or more of the unemployed people that we were able to interview were at home at that point in the day erm which is much, much more spent indoors and
[Geoffrey:] mhm.
[Anne:] out of sight than for employed people. And a lot of the contacts, the social contacts, that were being made by unemployed people weren't very positive ones. They were the sorts of contacts that you have when you're signing on at the Employment Benefits Office, when you're going to a job interview erm and often these are very negative because the experience of signing on isn't a very pleasant experience at all; most job interviews, unfortunately, end with a rejection erm so a lot of these non-routine contacts were quite negatives ones for people. And it's hard, very often, for unemployed people to erm maintain their previous range of social contacts. You feel that you're a bit of burden on your friends, perhaps, because you can't go to the pub and buy a round of drinks, because you're bit of a drag on a lot of activities which involve spending some sort of money. I realize I'm sort of giving a very, very negative impression, and I don't want to give the suggestion either that being unemployed has to be always bad, that all unemployed people are having a totally horrible time all of the time and are feeling very depressed all of the time — that's not the case — but I'm afraid that is more like the average erm situation, the typical situation, than otherwise. People who are erm bright and optimistic about unemployment are really talking about exceptional cases.
[Geoffrey:] Ian, I wish we could go on talking endlessly about this because I find the subject quite fascinating and we haven't really talked about the details of your research. I wonder if we could just finish with a very brief comment from you in a positive sense as to what would be your advice to somebody that's unemployed?
[Anne:] Speaking as someone with a job I've got to be very careful about giving advice to people who are in a much worse situation than myself, but from the research we did erm it is clear that it's very important erm not just to sink in and dwell on your problems, not just to erm stay at home, not meeting other people, not engaging in activities. In fact, the one thing that erm showed a very high relationship with being depressed was actually sitting watching more television. The more television you watch the more depressed you seem to be [LAUGHTER]. It's important to erm find activities that can bring you into contact with other people and give you a time structure and a sense of status and erm self-esteem. From the research it's clear that there isn't one golden road to these sorts of things. We found all sorts of different ways that different people were achieving these experiences. For some people it would be sports, especially team sports activities. For some people it would be cultural activities. Quite a lot of the young people that were coping erm better with being unemployed were involved in things like erm playing in rock groups, or being involved in erm theatre groups and things like that. People who were involved in voluntary work, or community work, or with the unemployed workers' centre, were also sort of being taken out of themselves more, and these things are important in and of themselves. I think they're also important in terms of not losing your links with the wider society. If you do lose those links then you're much less likely to be able to find a job in the future because still most jobs are actually found through personal contacts of one sort or another. erm but you're also going to know that you're contributing to the society erm and that even if some people in the newspapers and some politicians are dismissing unemployed people and saying that they're scroungers, that that isn't the case for you, that you are erm making a positive input into society, probably a much more positive input than a lot of those people that are critical of erm unemployed people.
[Geoffrey:] Ian, thank you very much indeed. We look forward to hearing more from you on the fourteenth of June erm but next week my subject will be based on another lecture topic, quite a different one. John Farrant will be talking about the development of Brighton over the past three hundred years and how patterns of trade and commerce have tended to repeat themselves. Maybe we've got some thing to learn here for the nineteen eighties. Join us next Sunday for another Ideas in Action programme. Until then, goodbye. [recorded jingle]
[speaker009:] Earlier this week I received a letter from the headmaster of the Cardinal Newman School in Hove. Commenting on our current series on education, he said 'I think that the series is an excellent idea', but he then went on to say 'It does seem to me rather odd that such a series should have such a heavy university representation and so little input from the teachers' . Well Mr. Feeley, now's your chance. How do you think schools ought to be?
[Anne:] Well I think that schools ought to be open. I think that we should have access to the schools for everyone who is interested in education, and I think that includes teachers, so that is why I was very grateful to receive your invitation today, and I think the series is good, but I think that why we want an open society within our schools is because everyone has got a tremendous interest in education until people begin to surround it with jargon or to build walls and barriers which create a closed society. I think that what we're really looking for is a stimulating, exciting involvement of parents, of students, of teachers, of everyone who has an interest in the success of a school, and I think for some years at Cardinal Newman we have been trying to create this open society, which gives access at all levels to all the children and to their parents, and we don't want to close the society in any shape or form. And that is why I think this sort of discussion, this sort of involvement of a wide range of people can create an excellent school and I think that it is the input of the wisdom and the care that we're seeking.
[speaker009:] Well that, of course, is an excellent advert for Cardinal Newman School. erm Juliette Hunting is a teacher and also a governor of the school. Is it such as a good school as that? Are you such an open society. I mean do you, for example, gives girls a fair chance in your school? Yes, I think we actually positively discriminate to encourage girls to take advantage of this open school. We have almost as many girls as boys in the first year in the sixth form, for instance, which I think is a measure of this success. And are you actually training girls to be girls, or are you training them to be people. We're training girls to be people [LAUGHTER], as we're training boys to be people. [LAUGHTER]. But don't you find that it's an uphill struggle. Don't you have all sorts of cultural traditions you've got to fight against. I mean girls, their places are in the home aren't they, really? I think that the schools have to fight this image, but I would say that the girls themselves more recently are also changing their ideas of themselves and we are making progress. Ann English is the head of the English Department at the school. This school is an open school, Ann, but is it open after hours? I mean don't you shut your doors and four o'clock and keep people out?
[speaker001:] [LAUGHTER]. Sometimes I wish we did, but our school, in fact, is open fivesix days a week and very often there are activities going on well into the evening. For example, study. Pupils who have had perhaps difficulty in studying at home can stay in our school library until quarter to six. The advance learning unit is open for them to stay on after school and study there as well, and it's also open for all sorts of activities every night of the week. There's are club, creative writing club, a literary club, a book club, as well as two drama workshops — one producing smaller plays with a small group of sixth formers and others concerned in the major school production. As well as being open for activity with the pupils, we're also open for visitors. We like having people into the school, both during hours and after hours. Recently we've had Danny Apsey, the poet, come to talk to a group and next week we're having Ted Hughes, who's going to come and read his poems to us. Nan Ron from the erm London Centre for Dance, he's been and given master classes, and all that kind of activity is going on, which I think makes a very lively and exhilarating school.
[speaker009:] I'm not a parent of children at your school. However, if I actually wanted to come along and learn some English — I did 'O'level English, I enjoyed it immensely, but then I did science in the sixth for and went on to a science career — can I come and study English at your school?
[Anne:] Yes, I'd be delighted if you would. I think that we have been, for some considerable time, very interested in having open access to courses for parents and for people who are not of the considered normal age group, and I think that is one aspect of the closed society, and I think we should break free from it. I think we should encourage more people of mature years, may I suggest that, to join the school in a learning capacity and join it during the day if we can. If I may broaden it away from erm the Cardinal Newman School and think probably of a lot of East Sussex Comprehensive Schools, I think we have all been, in the schools, in the last few years, working hard to establish this openness, and I think that the closed concept of the school, the school that locks children out at break or locks children out at dinner time, which only allows parents to come in for a phoney Open Day when there are a few children there, they are things largely, I think, of the past and they are the closed society. I think the closed society is also one in which you have the Grammar School, the Independent School set up, and really they are based upon fear, that if you have an open society academic standards will fall. Over-emphasis on differences leads to the segregation of wealthy children in private schools. It was a philosophy that I think led to the eleven plus. It's the cause of the divisive broad band streaming which I think some comprehensives have been persuaded to use, and I'm forced to say how can a child really value himself or herself if they are placed in the bottom band of such a school throughout the time when they are at that comprehensive? On the other hand, I think there's arguments the opposite way. If you have a completely loose system, if you have complete mixed ability, you're merely going to cause confusion and I would think there's also a likelihood that you will be unfair to your gifted or your talented children. So in a way, what my teachers here and what we are arguing about is that we want a school which cares for individual children, which rejects both extremes that I've mentioned. I think it argues for open access to individual programmes of learning. These can perhaps be achieved by setting in individual subjects. It's a plea which we suggest should make the timetable serve the child and not the reverse, and so what we're doing is we're saying to children erm 'Yes, you are of the same worth, you are of equal value, you should have the same care, love attention and the same resources' . I think the inadequate yardstick of 'O'level is often applied to us to see whether schools that practice this sort of establishment are in fact succeeding, and they are succeeding again and again and again by getting better results than the Grammar Schools did, but by much more important criteria, by the criteria of teaching skills and values. I think they really excel.
[speaker009:] But are we being realistic? It's all very well in theory, but in practice does it work? Surely children do have different abilities. They are at very different stages. They have very different capacities for study and for education. Surely in a sense you're unfair, for example, to the gifted children by putting them through this mode.
[speaker001:] If I could just come in here, there are many opportunities for them to express their individual talents. For example, we have withdrawal groups for music, not that their ordinary subjects are disrupted in this way, but it can be so organized on the timetable that they are withdrawn at a different period each week, and getting together, for example, to play in the school orchestra erm is of terrific value. Similarly, children who are gifted perhaps in dance are taken out for a master class and so on. And then with writing, too, they have the opportunity to develop those talents, perhaps in addition to their own erm school writing. They can write at home, they can write after school, they can read it to each other and I think this is tremendous benefit where they're open with each other too and can discuss round the table and evaluate their own work. I think that's a good step towards excellence.
[speaker009:] Juliette, it seems to me that openness must be represented not just in the way a school carries out its activities, but also the way it's run, the way it's governed. Do you have openness in your governors? Yes, we have a parent governor, a teacher governor and a student governor and I think it's worth saying that our student governor was elected by thirteen hundred out of our sixteen hundred children this year. And I'd also like to come back on this of closed schools in that if we look only at chronological age, which puts a limit on 'O'levels, we are shutting doors, because many students — and I see this in the sixth form — are not ready for these examinations at the prescribed age. There's a difference between chronological age and developmental age and we at Cardinal Newman, and many other schools, have this open access sixth form where the children can mix or the students can take courses, not only 'O'levels, but there is a wide range of subjects. I would like to ask you a slightly different question. For many years I was a governor of Port Slade School and Comprehensive College and I thought that was a very impressive school, as I am sure you would agree. What I found, though, was that what appeared to be a very good erm system from an ideal point of view was actually terribly hard to cope with so far as the teachers were concerned. It's a very demanding thing. I mean teaching is a demanding job, isn't it. Now how can you cope as teachers with a school in which you are almost on call to all the population twenty four hours of the day, which is, it seems to me, what you're saying?
[Anne:] With difficulty, but I think it is fair to say as well it has got great compensations, because if you build walls, if you're hiding, if you're pretending, if you're always subscribing parents and stopping them from coming in you make problems; parents worry and suspect that there are problems behind those closed doors, and I think this is why we have established fifteen different parent teacher groups which meet regularly in different parts of Sussex, from Seaford to Shoreham, to Hove, to Brighton, and in small groups of tenfifteentwenty they'll sit down with a teacher and they don't just do fund raising they thrash out the different aspects of their children's education and then they come in and meet in a main committee and I think it is this involvement that enables the parents and the teachers to work very closely together.
[speaker009:] I think, too, if you know your students, if you meet them outside the classroom in activities, then it makes life in the classroom as well. There is a tremendous spin-off from one to the other. You see them much more as people, you know their interests much more than if they are just there listening to the lesson and so in a way this open access to the teacher, I think, although at times it does give extra pressure in the long run I think it's tremendously beneficial. This series is really about schools, but I think I ought to close by giving you and opportunity of saying something about universities if you want to.
[Anne:] [LAUGHTER].
[speaker009:] What do you want to say?
[Anne:] I think I would say about universities that they are in this country offering a uniquely good service to our children. What a tragedy it is that so many of our talented sixth formers, who really would do well in your universities, who are dying to get there, who queue, fight, struggle, work hard to get there, who have tremendous talents, are denied access, not because of lack of ability but perhaps because people don't realize what a great wealth of talent there is. If I can give one example: everyone knows there is a shortage of doctors. In the last decade at Cardinal Newman School, and I am sure any comprehensive school head could give a similar figure, we must have had six or seven very talented youngsters who got grade AsBs at 'A'level have tried to get into medicine and only a small number have got in. I think they would have made excellent doctors, now they are not doctors. In the same way, we can point to every single course there have been people who are highly qualified, excellent youngsters — and that is where I fear that the universities are not always given the opportunity to get these talented children in the numbers that I think they deserve.
[speaker009:] Well thank you very much ladies and gentlemen. That's all that we have time for this week. Next week we're going to take this discussion a bit further. Professor Ron Dore will be talking about the boundaries of education — do we teach the right subjects to the right people at the right time? And of course at the end of this series we have a listeners' forum, and you will have an opportunity of putting your questions to a panel of speakers from the university and from outside the university. Until next week, then, goodnight.
[Anne:] Thank you very much indeed.
[speaker009:] Thank you. [recorded jingle]
[speaker002:] Hello. As I promised you last week, this is going to be a second look at that very British of institutions, the Magistrates' Court. I recently found myself speaking to Geoffrey Norman, the Secretary of the Magistrates' Association, about court procedures.
[speaker003:] As you probably know, about ninety eight per cent of all criminal cases are dealt with by magistrates' court, which is a truly remarkable figure, and I think you have to think about it twice when it's first said. I think the other feature of the system is — and I think people generally don't realize what a remarkable it is — we're just about the only country in the world that has this system, and we are remarkably successful in involving ordinary members of the community in the administration of justice, both in our lay magistrates system and in our jury system. And erm I think generally people don't realize how quite unique that is. erm one thing, of course, which is also not erm very readily understood, is the involvement of the legal person, the Clerk to the Justices, in the system, so that with the three Justices you'll having sitting you'll have sitting below them the legally qualified Clerk, and I suppose it's this particular feature of the system which is difficult for people abroad to comprehend how a legally qualified person can be sitting there without dominating the proceedings. I think these days, with Magistrates properly trained, that the position is that the Clerk is not seen to dominate the proceedings. erm people who were in court, say, twentythirtyforty years ago perhaps did see scenes where the Clerk was over involved and appeared to be running things, but you don't see that these days. The Chairman will take control on behalf of this two colleagues, and the Court will be seen to be run by the Magistrates, and the Clerk will be there as their legal adviser on procedure and any legal points that arise.
[speaker002:] So a Court would consist of three Magistrates, one of whom sits in the centre and acts as Chairman
[speaker003:] That's right.
[speaker002:] a Court Clerk, who is legally trained and can advise Magistrates about matters of law, but who doesn't take part in the actual decision of the Magistrates?
[speaker003:] No. The decision, both as to the facts and the law, is for the Justices alone, so it's unlike a judge and jury trial where the judge deals with the law and the jury deal with the facts. In the Magistrates' Court the decision as to verdict and sentence is entirely for the Justices acting on the advice of their Clerk, and of course it is erm true to say that generally speaking Justices will follow the advice of their Clerk, but they don't have to. The decision finally is theirs and they take full responsibility for that decision, and may erm in exceptional circumstances not follow the advice of their Clerk.
[speaker002:] We seem to have two layers, two levels. There's the Magistrates' Court and then above it there's the Crown Court. Is there any contact between the two? How can there be consistency, perhaps, between Judge and Jury and the magistrate system?
[speaker003:] Again, it's a very interesting feature of our system and not widely understood I don't think that magistrates are also judges of the Crown Court under the legislation setting up the Crown Court and magistrates do sit in the Crown Court, but these days there's considerable contact between the magistracy and the Crown Court. There will be a liaison judge in the Crown Court who will see it as part of his function to liaise with the lay magistrate and to meet them and to discuss erm such matters as erm sentencing principles with them. And erm oh for many years now there's been a great interest in consistency in sentencing. For example, the Magistrates' Association produce suggestions for these many road traffic cases you've spoken about, which list about fifty odd of the common road traffic offences and make suggestions as to the penalties that might be adopted throughout England and Wales. Now that's an effort in consistency. It doesn't lay down rigid guidelines to be followed, it just suggests erm penalties for average offences committed by first offenders of average means, and it provides a starting point for magistrates to think about. And then of course they exercise their discretion on the actual facts of the case when fixing the sentence.
[speaker002:] Let's get back to courts just for a moment. What percentage of people actually plead guilty to charges against them?
[speaker003:] I don't know the actual percentage erm but it's pretty high. I'm afraid you'd have to look up that figure. It is available, of course, in the statistics.
[speaker002:] It's probably something like eighty or ninety per cent perhaps.
[speaker003:] I would suggest that it's probably in that region, yes.
[speaker002:] What happens if somebody wants to plead not guilty? Does it cost them at lot more money?
[speaker003:] Not at all. It needn't cost them erm any more at all. erm they can conduct the case themselves
[speaker002:] They don't have to have a solicitor to represent them?
[speaker003:] No, indeed, and in many cases people erm if the case is relatively straightforward, an ordinary moating case, they do perfectly well doing it themselves because the Court would assist them with the procedure, the Clerk of the Court would assist them with the procedure, and every effort would be made to assist an unrepresented defendant with the procedure as it goes along. If he can't afford a Solicitor and he feels he ought to be represented by a Solicitor, he may apply for Legal Aid, and of course it's public money concerned so I suppose in an ideal society everybody would be legally assisted who wanted to be, but obviously we can't afford that as a country, so that erm generally erm his application would be judged according to certain criteria erm which would suggest perhaps he needed to be represented. Certainly if a legal... if a custodian sentence was likely you'd get legal aid. A person who had difficulty with the English language would get legal aid. If there were difficult legal points to be resolved he would get legal aid. So there are two tests basically; one the means test — can he afford it or not, and two the interest of justice test — is it in the interest of justice that this person should be legally aided, and any doubt on that is resolved in the defendant's favour.
[speaker002:] I think some people rather suspect that magistrates take the side of the police in cases. Is there any basis for that do you imagine?
[speaker003:] Well of course erm the basis used to be that many courts erm had written above them 'Police Court'and I think some of the older courts where this was sort of carved in stone may still have this above them, but Magistrates have gone to great lengths erm in recent times to emphasise this is not a police court, this is a magistrates' court. The police appear before the court as witnesses, of course, in many cases, but their status before the court is just like any other erm witness and they have no greater standing before the court, and their evidence is judged by Magistrates on the same basis as that of any other witness.
[speaker002:] How do Magistrates decide what penalty to impose? You say they've got some sort of guidance, perhaps through the Magistrates' Association, or maybe through some local starting point tariff if I could put it that way. How do they actually decide in the end what penalty to impose, assuming a person's found guilty of course?
[speaker003:] Yes. The first consideration, I think, is how serious the offence is and there will be some offences which are so serious that custody may be the only proper sentence. In that type of case erm perhaps the Court will not pay too much regard to the defendant's personal circumstances because they're not going to make that much difference, but if it's not that serious a case the other main consideration that comes into play is the defendant's own personal circumstance. So the first choice really is between erm a sentence which is not an individualized one and one which can be individualized in justice and all the circumstance of the case. And of course what very often happens these days, with such a high level of unemployment, is if it's a fine that's decided upon — and I think something like in three-quarters of the cases dealt with by Magistrates do end up with a fine — that it has to be scaled down because of the erm poor circumstance, poor financial circumstance in which the defendant is. So you may start off by saying well two hundred pounds fits this case according to it's seriousness, but you find that the defendant couldn't possibly afford to pay that and realistically, say, only a fifty pound fine can be imposed. Sometimes that's not quite understood by the public. They just look at the report in the paper and say how on earth was this man fined fifty pounds for this offence. So in those circumstances it is very often wise for a court to explain — look, normally, you'd have got erm two hundred pounds for this offence, but because of your poor financial circumstances erm we're imposing a fine of fifty pounds in your case.
[speaker002:] We're always reading that prisons are far too overcrowded these days. Do you think magistrates send too many people to prison?
[speaker003:] No, that is a complete myth, actually. I haven't met the type of Magistrate who enjoys sending anybody to prison. erm Magistrates only send people to prison because they feel the circumstances of the case justify it and erm I think in the public mind erm the criticism is more often the reverse, that Magistrates are too soft, and I've heard Lord Hailsham say more than once that if we do pay a price for the lay magistrate system it is leniency because what happens, and the difference between the lay magistrate system and the stipendiary system or the Crown Court system is that Magistrates do sit in threes, and what that tends to do is lead to compromises in sentence because discussion between three people irons out extreme views and you do tend to end up with a very well considered compromise view, which probably does tend to be more lenient than a sentence imposed by any one person who might himself take a very serious view of the circumstances.
[speaker002:] Over the years some penalties have been done away with and others have been introduced. Would you like to see any new type of penalty introduced?
[speaker003:] I think yes. I think the one type of penalty we lack is something between full custody and non-custody. We have far too great a gap between these two states which I think all magistrates are very conscious of and which all defendants are very conscious of, and particularly from the public point of view again erm the present alternatives to custody are seen by members of the public as soft options, are seen as a let off. I think we do have room in our system for some semi-custodial measure.
[speaker002:] Sort of weekend prisons?
[speaker003:] The Magistrates' Association put forward day imprisonment. The All Party Penal Affairs Group of the House of Commons and others have put forward weekend imprisonment. Something like that. I mean perhaps it could take the form of Adult Attendance Centres, but erm we need something which is seen to be punitive but which falls sort of full deprivation of erm liberty.
[speaker002:] You are Secretary of the Magistrates Association and you have something like twenty five thousand members out of a total of something like twenty seven thousand Magistrates.
[speaker003:] That's correct.
[speaker002:] And you obviously believe in the system?
[speaker003:] Oh, indeed, yes. I think that erm it's a very healthy system. I think erm... I think it's a very desirable object to involve members of the community in the erm administration of justice. I think our discussion here has come a full circle really. I believe that we achieve this very successfully, and when you bear in mind the pressure under which the Magistracy have been in recent times, with erm industrial action, demonstrations, which have brought them to the forefront of the attention, I think it's a remarkably achievement that the Magistrates have come through this with the public in general terms satisfied with the performance of Magistrates in the discharge of these very onerous functions.
[speaker002:] And you believe that it will survive into the future?
[speaker003:] Well I certainly hope so, yes.
[speaker002:] Thank you very much Mr. Norman.
[speaker003:] Thank you.
[speaker002:] Well that concludes our look at Magistrates' Courts. Next Sunday we shall be bringing you the last Ideas in Action programme before Christmas. It'll have a special winter flavour and feature Amos Chatfield as he talks about Christmases past and his boyhood encounter with the ghost of Stanmer Woods. Join us next week. Until then, goodbye. [recorded jingle]