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

A Passage to Wisbech

Season 6

The Last Day

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

In Between Days

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

50 Years On

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

Schoolgirl Mum

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

Johnny Oddball

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

Forget-Me-Not

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

Searching for a Miracle

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

Page 3 Girls

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

Keep Taking the Rose Petals

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

Animal Crackers

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

Our Man in Shanghai

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

A House of Hope

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

The Gift of Life

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

Flight from Vatersay

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

Stop the Wedding!

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

Student Nurse

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

Emergency - Bloomsbury 3

The singles scene in Miami, Dallas and New York.

How to Find a Lover

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

Cry for Home

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

The Fishing Party

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

The Real Life of a Hollywood Wife

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

A Case of Malicious Wounding

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

Come Home Julie

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

Nuts!

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

Countdown to Today

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

40 Minutes was a BBC TV documentary strand broadcast on BBC Two between 1981 and 1994. The documentaries could be on any possible subject, the only connection being that they last forty minutes.

Some documentaries in the original series were revisited and updated in a 2006 version, Forty Minutes On.

A Passage to Wisbech

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Season 5 Episodes26

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