A weekly programme which focuses on people and the situations which shape their lives
Reporters: Jim Douglas Henry, Jeremy James, Jeanne La Chard, Gillian Strickland, Desmond Wilcox, Harold Williamson

This week: An Everyday Story of Country Folk
Most people have a view of life in the country that doesn't match reality...
Fact: One farmworker in jour earns less than £13 a week (the minimum wage is only £12.8s.0d.)
Fact: A peculiar wages permit system allows some farmers to have their workers' downgraded and pay them even less than this
Fact: One-quarter of general farm workers with more than three children live below the official poverty level
Fact: Because of the 'tied' cottage system, some farm workers' do not even have complete job security and freedom (if a man loses his job he can lose his home, too)
Fact: 35,000 men a year are getting out of farm work, leaving these conditions for jobs in the cities
Fact: The National Union of Agricultural Workers frequently has its hands tied and seems helpless, partly because it has so few members and partly because its members are so scattered
Tonight Man Alive comes from the Old Crown Court, Dorchester, in which, 135 years ago, six men of the land who became known as the 'Tolpuddle Martyrs' were convicted for trying to organise a protest against farmworkers' pay and conditions. Their sentence, then, was transportation to Australia. And tonight Man Alive asks: are farm workers still an oppressed minority a century and a half later?
(Colour)