Investigates, Discovers, Questions
This week: Who'd Own an Island?
What happens when a wealthy businessman, with a taste for adventure, buys a Scottish island, determined to make it pay? When modern private enterprise confronts ancient traditions of feudalism and benevolent patronage? What, at a time of national stringency, should the mainland do to subsidise the islands' way of life? Are they geographical lame ducks - beautiful, but doomed?
When Keith Schellenberg (who thought nothing of driving his 1930 Bentley across the Sahara) bought the Hebridean Isle of Eigg in 1975, he was seeking an opportunity to prove that democratic capitalism could work, that the island economy could begin to manage without government subsidy. Four years later the population has almost doubled, and Eigg is approaching solvency.
But success has highlighted major human problems - identical to those faced by mainland society. Gavin Scott reports on the price paid for prosperity by Eigg, its people and its Laird.
Film cameraman DAVID PEAT Film editor HEFNY ZAKI
Producer DESMOND LAPSLEY Editor TIM SLESSOR