with Malcolm Muggeridge

A series of outstanding and memorable programmes to mark 40 years of BBCtv
Mother Teresa of Calcutta was the first recipient of the Pope John XXIII Peace Prize. Her Order, the Missionaries of Charity, which she founded in 1950, is dedicated to serving the poorest of the poor.
This film is a record of five days spent in Calcutta during which Malcolm Muggeridge looked at the work of Mother Teresa and discussed with her the faith- which made it all possible.
Cameraman KENNETH MACMILLAN Film ediitor PAUL O'DELL
Produced and directed by PETER CHAFER
Malcolm Muggeridge remembers Mother Teresa
Mother Teresa of Calcutta was first shown in 1969 and explored the work of a 60-year-old Albanian nun who had founded her own Order in the slums of Calcutta. The documentary was the idea of Malcolm Muggeridge, who also presented it. He remembers:
'I look back on our filming in Calcutta as a miraculous event. Not a high-faluting miracle, but a miracle nonetheless. For a start we managed to film the whole thing in five days - and a 40-minute documentary normally takes about three months. Then, when we got back to London, we found the film hardly needed editing; it was already in the right shape. And last, we shot a sequence in an old, derelict Hindu temple, used by Mother Teresa as a house for the dying, a place for people she'd picked up off the street where they could, in her words, "die with a loving face near them". It was enormously dark in there, so dark that the cameraman said it was impossible that the film would come out. But it did - brightly. A few weeks later the same cameraman used film from the same stock under conditions which were just as gloomy. Nothing came out. You must make what you like of it, but I believe that the atmosphere of goodness and love in that holy place was so luminous that it overcame the darkness.
'The impulse that led the Christian artist of the Middle Ages to give saints a halo was not complete fantasy, for it is often true that people who are enormously good do have a shining face.
Mother Teresa, I believe, has that aura of goodness. Her work has expanded tremendously since we made the film and the documentary has proved extremely valuable in making her efforts more widely known. She now has a leper clinic, schools and vocational training centres. A truly incredible woman.'
Interview: DAVID GILLAR