Goingbegging

High summer in Leipzig, with the universities apparently on their break. Girl student doesn't know whether to get out of bed, and dozes for a while. Then she goes out, taking some books with her in a bag. Just as she leaves the block, a young man comes in, unseen by her. Later in the morning, she pauses to talk on her mobile, and he cycles past her, still unnoticed.

In a grocery store, she is examining the label on a jar of sauce, when he arrives at the same shelf, again unnoticed, and has to reach in front of her, almost rudely. In an outdoor café, she's reading her book when a girl-friend recognises her and rushes across to talk about her recent world travels. This time, they both notice the same man (favourably), but the student is too shy to approach him.

As she returns home, he arrives there at the same time, and she asks "Do I know you?", as though he looks vaguely familiar. The door opens and a new woman neighbour of hers steps out, with a friendly greeting, and introduces the man as her boyfriend.

You can call it a silly and inconsequential story, and I think there's at least one coincidence too many. But it's actually quite a good snapshot of a girl student's mind, at that youthful age when life is largely an aimless stroll, with many paths that cross, but with no outcome.

Almost thirty years have gone by since this 12-minute German award-winner was made, and much has happened in the interval to alter the consensus about Diversity as an unequivocally Good Thing. So this film may soon be nothing more than an interesting historical curio.

The story is told in a neat, economical way, using a city tram as a microcosm of a sensible, orderly society. An elderly white woman reluctantly allows a young black man to sit beside her, but soon finds a pretext for grumbling about the culture-clash between races.

Most improbably, the young black virtuously ignores her comments, as though he's in church, while the other passengers show a range of reactions, all of them passive. Soon the inspector comes round, and (again) most improbably, the young black brings out his ticket, smartly and promptly, like teacher's pet. When the old lady brings out hers, he suddenly snatches it and eats it - thus confirming every prejudice the woman has displayed!

The title 'Schwarzfahrer' (Black Rider) is a pun on the German term for someone travelling without a ticket - a role into which the old woman has suddenly found herself thrust, and I notice that most commentators on this page feel that it serves her right too. Meanwhile (unless I am wronging him) the black actor's name, Paul Outlaw, sounds to me distinctly made-up, for reasons that might not have much to do with pure virtue.

At sixteen, a kid from Harlem used to travel to work down Fifth Avenue, with a close view of both the slum tenements of the Upper East Side and the grand houses and galleries of mid-Manhattan. To him, this looked like the rich starving the poor, and he became a passionate Marxist (what I call 'falling at the first'). No sign yet of the bold, creative thinker who would one day blaspheme against virtually all the principles of the liberal welfare state, so sacred to the intelligentsia.

Ironically, his Road to Damascus came when he worked at the Department of Labor, initially because he was a keen believer in the minimum wage, but then saw how it actually created unemployment, and that these public servants, whom he had viewed as champions of the poor and humble, were in fact chiefly interested in preserving their own jobs, and generally not rocking the boat.

One by one, he questions the tenets of LBJ's 'Great Society' and the War on Poverty, and proves them to be entirely hollow. Affirmative Action just debases the currency, to the detriment of all groups. 'Racism' is essentially meaningless - just a good rabble-rousing word. And as for Reparations, he is not the only black speaker to lose patience with this huge gravy-train, based on economic theories that belong firmly in the kindergarden.

He confirms an unfashionable view that I had always held, that American race relations were at their best during the war and a few years after - the Jim Crow era - and that the new flood of human rights just seemed to spark-off violence everywhere.

He sees the same thing happening in England, a country he regards as a beacon of fairness and decency, and his views about the August Riots (2011) are definitely not in accord with the official explanations about lack of opportunities and racist policing.

Altogether a well-reasoned debate in the best traditions of the long-running Uncommon Knowledge series with the excellent Peter Robinson.

Nobody has ever looked like Edith Sitwell, or not for at least five hundred years, when an ancestor of whom she is unduly proud, and from whom she may have been cloned, was a prominent figure in the Wars of the Roses. It was, of course, Edith's mad and malicious father who started all this fixation with ancestry - a truly brilliant Renaissance scholar, to whom it never occurred to consider how many thousands of other people also came from the same stock.

John Freeman asks whether she would be recognised in the street if she wore an ordinary dress and coat. She says she probably would, rightly enough too, for that wonderfully medieval face, like a saint in a stained-glass window, does not look as though it has ever gazed on the industrial age. And so, appropriately, she parades for ever in those grand costumes, and the public wouldn't dream of having it otherwise.

There is a streak of silliness in her posturing. While accepting a Damehood, she claims to hate snobbery. But this is clearly a reaction against the miserable stately-home childhood that she prefers not to talk about, especially her father's plan to give her plastic surgery to make her look more like a conventional deb. She also, politely but firmly, declines to say why she is still single.

Among her dislikes, she mentions "Being asked silly questions" - which Freeman could have taken the wrong way, but didn't. You may be surprised to hear how perfectly Dylan Thomas behaved in her presence, when he is universally pictured as the swaggering shocker. And it is odd to hear her pronounce the word 'profile' in the French way ("profeel"), a clear echo of the mid-19th century.

She remains a good, though not a great poet, claiming (mysteriously) that a poem must have two parents. You can start writing it with just one, but the other must come into the picture before you can develop the poem as a whole.

The version I watched carried a useful retrospective view by John Freeman in old age, revealing that Waugh had planned a number of interventions to wrong-foot him in the course of the duologue. It was probably this that made Freeman appear quite nervous as the interviewer, often falling back on "How old were you when you first did... (this or that)", effectively talking in numbers.

Yet the overwhelming reaction is one of surprise at Waugh's genial manner and polite, helpful way of answering. When asked what is his biggest character failing, he promptly answers "Irritability", which is indeed how most of us perceive him. Yet he displays none of it here. Equally surprising is the degree of cognitive alertness in a man who had survived a serious mental breakdown.

Freeman devotes much of the interview to religious debate, of a sort that would not interest most of today's viewers, while never touching on his marriages and family or his military service. Towards the end, he refers to a recent journalistic jousting-match in which J. B. Priestley accused Waugh of being a poseur, because (supposedly) a country gentleman cannot also be a good writer. Waugh ends by dismissing this altogether. "Ask Priestley" he appears to mumble, barely audibly, before the programme ends on a pleasing touch of Berlioz.

This is a vivid portrayal of Hollywood's Jewish history, emphasising the importance of Jewish pioneers in the development of film, but possibly trying too hard to connect the early film-scripts to the East European shtetls (racial enclaves) from which most of them had emigrated.

So, for example, the Westerns, with so many native Americans being hunted down by the cavalry, are supposed to reflect the Cossacks terrorising Jewish villages. Yet not every Jewish producer was particularly fixated on the politics of old Russia. Most of them were just wanting to make a buck, and recognised that Western dramas were close to the heart of the cinemagoing public.

It is true that these pioneers were mightily glad to escape the big cities whose clubs and hotels were officially closed to them, the City Fathers of New York especially loathing the film industry for its brash arrogance. And Hollywood gives us quite a panorama of Jewish themes, from Al Jolson and Warner Brothers leading the Talkie revolution to America's reluctance to upset their German market in the 30's, to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) quizzing many of the original pioneers, trying to suggest a possible link between Jewishness and Communism.

Altogether, I think the film is right to question the over-used term 'Golden Age of Hollywood' to denote the ascendancy of the studios. It just meant pre-TV.

Rather surprisingly, the topic of Nigerian corruption can be discussed without embarrassment, ever since Ross Kemp discreetly raised the issue with his Nigerian hosts, to be met with gales of laughter, showing that they were proud of their distinction as the most corrupt people on earth.

So when we hear about an official bureau called AINSCA (All India Nigerian Students and Community Association), it doesn't exactly get us sitting properly in church. Sure enough, investigation by the BBC's 'Africa Eye' team reveals that it is headed by a noted sex-trafficker, Eddie, who tempts poor Kenyan women to work in Delhi for good money and the chance to own property.

The middle half of this video simply chronicles the miserable journey of one particular girl, Grace, who volunteers to work undercover, and we could be looking at anywhere on earth where the oldest profession is practised. The cynical 'modern' slavery routine is replicated in dreary detail. Her passport is confiscated (natch!) and she is then declared to be deep in debt, because of the cost of her flight (actually bought via a stolen credit-card, effectively for nothing), and that she must pay many thousand rupees to regain the passport and freedom, having to pleasure nine or ten men a day ("Even sitting down is a problem"), and then become a madam herself, to earn the privilege. Nothing very notable there, and it is not clear what the film is trying to prove.

Meanwhile they don't quite explain why a desperate girl in Kenya would get herself into horrendous debt, so she can fly all the way to India, to service the needs of Nigerians studying in the sub-continent. The basic dynamics of the situation - what we now call the Push/Pull - remain unexplained to the end.

At the end of the Biafran War, the Nigerian army was occupying a printworks at the time of year when they were printing the degree certificates for a prestigious national university. When they'd printed-out the correct quantity, the Commanding General told them to keep the machines rolling. Sure enough, all his soldiers ended up with the coveted qualification.

People chuckled at this, but few were surprised. A Third-World university is simply a shop where you buy a degree. As a girl of seventeen may not have the money, she simply has to pay in kind.

I don't know who is meant to be shocked at the revelations in this undercover report, where we eavesdrop on the crude propositioning of underage girls by two academics in a position of trust, one of them a church minister, the other a senior professor. The dialogue is more-or-less kindergarden level, causing us to speculate on the general standards of tuition at these two universities (one in Nigeria, one in Ghana) which are described as the most distinguished in West Africa.

The girls put on quite a good theatrical impression of vulnerability, sometimes weeping on cue, but I don't go for it. How could they not guess what would happen when they're left alone with a lecherous supervisor whom they've already been warned about?

Reasonably good piece of pantomime.

Failed writer and his wife in a cheap motel... husband wakes up and finds he's written a short story in his sleep... Wife submits the story to a magazine... Oh yes, we remember 'Dead Man's Tales' from the old black-&-white 'One Step Beyond' series. And this remake leaves us wondering why they bothered reviving the series at all, with so little to show for it. (It folded within months).

As before, the short-story mysteriously turns out to be an accurate account of two brothers venturing into the goldfields, where they quarrel and shoot each other. One of the widows reads the story and demands to know how they learned the details. Using the money he earned for the story, the husband finds his way to the remote location... and there we must leave it, partly because I don't do spoilers, and partly because I didn't quite grasp the scrambled ending!

Our host John Newland, looking only a little older and greyer, ends on a mini-sermon about greed of gold. Virginia Leith, as the widow, carries a bit more conviction than the unknown used on the earlier version. Apart from that, I don't see any virtue in the new full-colour production.

Best script I can remember from any of the 'One Step Beyond' episodes. Based on the most believable characters - possibly on real people. Your host John Newland always makes it his business to leave you wondering just how truthful these stories are ("drawn from human record" is his weasel phrase), but here, unusually, we have a full name for each character and a firm date for the paranormal event.

In the trenches of World War I, the night sky is suddenly lit-up by something like a flare, but which is soon seen to be much more, awakening all manner of dreamlike sensations, causing four French soldiers to drop their rifles and walk back to their base, as though in a trance.

The case against them seems irrefutable (we can't encourage cowardice and desertion in the field), and the sentence is death by shooting. Then doubts are raised by their defence lawyer, whose emotions are expressed most vividly by actor Bruce Gordon, arguing the case with his superiors. And John Newland reveals more unexpected findings - which, of course, we mustn't.

But perhaps we can offer one clue. They didn't run from the field. They just walked...

A whimsy of old Vienna, and possibly the silliest episode of 'One Step Beyond'. A beautiful young waitress feels sentimental about a retired postman who spends his days in her café, and she takes him to meet her family, who are less than impressed.

Whether or not by coincidence, a poltergeist also seems to disapprove of the match, and starts moving objects around the room in a very unmistakable way, every time they try to kiss.

This being Vienna, he naturally visits a psychiatrist, who tells him that no poltergeist has ever been known to change its behaviour, so he/they may be facing a lifetime of these disturbances. The ending is the most unlikely part of an unlikely story (though I suppose some might call it romantic), but it cannot be revealed here.

Otto Becher is not well-cast; he looks much more like a doctor or a professor than a postman. And there is a rather irrelevant piece of business about his admission to a retired postmen's hostel that just gets in the way.

A big, ugly one-eyed immigrant from East Europe gets passionate about his demure English teacher, and offers her the gift of a brooch. She instinctively refuses it, but he acts victim, claiming that she's rejecting him because of his appearance, and she feels blackmailed into accepting it. The next words she writes on the blackboard suddenly turn into a rapid stream of what looks like gibberish, but turns out to be a highly sinister, desperate message written in his native language (as only he can tell), and he rushes from the room.

What follows only makes sense if she's starting to warm towards him, yet there are no signs of this. He tells her that it's a message from his late girlfriend Clara, and in order to discover more, the teacher drives him to his boarding-house, running a red light and getting pulled-up, yet finds she can't write her name and address in the ordinary way.

Clearly the brooch is the channel for all this automatic writing (the catalyst, or what Hitchcock used to call 'the Macguffin') though its significance is much underplayed. The police doctor finds she's in better shape after a little rest without her jersey (or brooch). But the ending is indeterminate, fading out to reveal our genial host John Newland smoothly explaining his current take on psychic dialogue.

This is a remake of 'The Return of Mitchell Campion' from twenty years earlier, in the previous series 'One Step Beyond', also hosted by John Newland. It is hard to see why they bothered, as this is an even more obscure version of the story of a man (Cary de Witt) who is declared dead after a big operation, but suddenly revives, to the puzzlement of the doctors.

Once again, he is advised to go abroad for a good rest, and somehow arrives at a remote tropical island where everyone mysteriously recognises him. Once again, he is inexplicably punched in the face by a local man, whose motives are totally unexplained. But unlike in the earlier version, he is made highly unwelcome, and told to go home on the next flight. The only person vaguely familiar to him is the lovely Tiara, whose forthcoming marriage to the son of a prominent local family was apparently interrupted by his romance with her on his previous visit. And the key to the mystery is explained away only as 'Teleportation', presumably a new word for Astral Projection, while the story is claimed to be "based on an actual investigated and documented case-history of psychic phenomena" - of which we are allowed to hear not one detail.

This version lacks all the charm and intrigue of the original, much of the dialogue being drowned-out by the over-loud music track. It helps to explain why this later series 'The Next Step Beyond' lasted less than a year.

If you're wanting to warn a whole city to escape an imminent earthquake, it helps if you're not saddled with a reputation for alcoholism. Apparently a reformed character, Perkins has been allowed back into his old job as a distinctly middle-aged bellboy in a luxury hotel, virtuously performing humble duties for his betters.

Unfortunately on this very morning, as he receives his shocking premonitions, a crooked staff-member has framed him for watering the whisky ordered by a highly-paid theatrical star, so his warnings go unheard, and he is doomed to be the Cassandra of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Most of the story is simply Perkins trying to convince everyone he sees that the earthquake is about to hit, and being told to run away and play. This gets a bit monotonous, though David Opatoshu's performance is a minor tragic masterpiece. (We could imagine him singing 'Buddy can you spare a dime?') When a local newspaper editor starts to wonder whether the claims might be valid, an employee warns him not to believe a word from this man, who turns out to be his disgraced father, and advises his boss to send for the police.

Thus Perkins is sedated and strapped to a bed when the big moment comes, and dies without seeing his predictions vindicated. A nice coda is that the only people who took him seriously, a married couple staying at the hotel, did actually get out of town, and thus survived the disaster.

The destruction of the great hotel carries a touch of the Titanic story (also featured in an episode in this series), and it seems well possible that some of the original footage of the disaster may have been slotted-in here.

A young man goes out on a painting trip, but takes a wrong turn. Rather conveniently, a lovely young lady by the roadside explains to his amazement that he's fifty miles out of his way, but directs him to a nearby inn.

Approaching the inn, he hears the sound of a wild party inside, but when the door opens, there is nothing to be heard. A lady fiction-writer is staying here looking for ghosts, and won't leave until she meets one. Next day, he is chatting to her in the hotel garden, when the young lady joins them, but denies that she has ever met him. She is particularly friendly, however, and allows him to paint her portrait. Things get even more puzzling through the night, for reasons we can't reveal...

The film is an indigestible mix of Old Dark House clichés: the regulation spooky butler, the sinister candle-shadows, the secret room that's been locked for thirty years. Plus those party-sounds coming back and back. (One of the scenes looks like Dracula without the teeth!)

This is the revived One Step Beyond series, almost twenty years on, re-titled The Next Step Beyond, hosted by the same John Newland, only with somewhat greying hair. As in the previous series, he can't actually claim it's a true story. Where he previously used the masterly disclaimer "drawn from human record", he now goes a little stronger with "based on an actual investigated and documented case-history of psychic phenomena". I only wish the story carried more credibility to match, but it doesn't.

The most notable feature is the unusually high glamour-rating of the two ladies, especially Patricia Joyce as the young ghost, looking half her true age of forty-four.

This is one of those videos listed at 30 minutes on the relevant IMDb page, but only 25 on my YouTube upload, so one of the other critics in this review-section must have had access to knowledge that I don't have, revealing details of the family tragedy that sent a noted Shakespearean actress (Elena) into a nervous breakdown, from which she returns home at the beginning of the present episode.

Working only from what I have, then, the plot is obscure indeed - not helped by the sort of dim recording that goes with the territory after sixty years, and I can't say that it made easy viewing.

Rehearsing for a stage-play, Elena thinks she hears her late daughter's screams of "Mommie, Mommie!" and sends for an Audiologist (played by a most reassuring Ben Hammer), wondering if her hearing is at fault, which he says it isn't. Later in the rehearsal, she hears the genuine screams of a child, accidentally trapped by a locked stage-door... and there we have to leave it for fear of spoiling whatever remains of the mystery.

It's all pretty contrived, especially the business of the cat, who is meant to be the 'catalyst', all witchcraft and wonder, but mainly just looking as though it wants to get away from the camera and off the set altogether. And Elena's husband, who is also her manager, and their Irish housekeeper, seem quite redundant.

Equally contrived is your host John Newland apparently adding a new word to the language - 'Clairaudio' (the audio equivalent of Clairvoyance), or "the hearing rather than the seeing of things that are about to happen." As always, the story is meant to be 'based on human record', in other words, something vaguely truthful, with no proof required.

You'd have to be pretty much of a civil-war scholar to understand what is going on in this film, Monocacy not being one of the celebrated battles, though possibly it should be. This was the third and last attempt by the Confederates to invade the North (July 1864), in this case Washington itself. Although it was a Confederate victory, Grant was able to send reinforcements just in time to save the White House from occupation, driving-off an enemy force that had managed to shoot dead the soldier standing right beside Lincoln, who had insisted on coming out to watch.

The strengths of this film are splendid cinematography and some notably good casting, Robert E. Lee and General George Meade being uncannily lifelike. But it is the weaknesses that show up more strongly. The fieldcraft is not realistic - too gingerly altogether - though the deaths in the field are highly credible, with no attempt to pretty-up the reality of the final moments. The narrator, with her attractively soft Southern accent, is barely audible behind the over-loud music track. And I'm not sure that the Confederate wives and mothers were still dressing-up and cheering their menfolk in the old style as the hunger and misery set in.

Finally, you would not need to be a civil-war scholar to spot a caption reading 'Army of the Potomac Headquarters', when it is so obvious that we're in the enemy's Headquarters (Army of Northern Virginia).

Far out in the wilds, the manager of a mining company listens to the desperate last words of his pilot, apparently talking about an alien kidnap before disappearing from the air. The manager is sceptical of any supernatural talk, and assumes the pilot must be dead, sending only one plane to search for the wreckage, while he presses on with the urgent road-building project that is front-of-mind with him. The pilot's wife/widow accuses him of not doing his utmost, possibly because she had been the manager's girlfriend before rejecting him in favour of the pilot. (This makes for a strong sub-plot, which should have been developed further.)

Events now get rather confused, when a wreck is found, covered in a mysterious lacy ribbon they call 'angel hair' which disappears when touched: cue the familiar spooky music easily recognisable from other episodes to signal that something strange is happening. At the same time, the pilot is heard sending a message from 1000 miles away... and there we have to leave it, partly because I didn't really understand the ending anyway!

Strong performances by the English actor Robert Douglas as the manager and Michael Forest as his deputy. Another team-member seems rather too willing to believe in UFO's, apparently bolted on to Astral Projection as the theme of today's episode, rationalised with charm, rather than conviction, by our long-serving host John Newland.

A young man steals a glimpse, through a window, of his fiancée's family secret - her hidden freak-monster-brother, "something that doesn't belong in a house", and flees from the prospect of breeding anything similar. Next her father threatens to leave home unless his wife agrees to have the boy institutionalised, which she passionately refuses.

Left alone with her daughter and 'sectioned' son, the mother (played by an exceptionally well-cast Augusta Dabney, pain and wisdom shining through those fine eyes) consults a doctor, recently struck-off for dabbling in hypnotism. Played by David Lewis, he carries conviction through his strong physical presence, though his accent is the weirdest mix of Irish and almost joke-Scottish.

After a distinctly odd demonstration of his skill, which he calls 'mind force', healing a burn on the daughter's skin, he is allowed to start work on the son, of whose scaly-reptile hands we only get a brief but horrifying close-up view. Rasputin-like, the hypnotist is able to forbid the mother from seeing her son during the cure, which takes many weeks (leaving us wondering more than a little about the boy's daily living arrangements).

Then suddenly it's Christmas Eve, and the father is back, this time accompanied by the hospital administrator, demanding that the boy must be put away... when he suddenly emerges from his room, fully restored to normality, and then it's just like the end of a Jimmy Stewart film.

However unbelievable, this story is probably based on a real-life event, since they bother to give the family a surname (Parish) and set the scene in 1890's Boston.

This one starts as a credible story of a satisfactory marriage between a successful career-man and his glamorous wife in their luxurious London flat - satisfactory but not satisfying.

It is all too obvious that his career comes first and last, leaving her feeling neglected and emotionally vacant, fondly re-living her adventures in wartime Paris. The maid, who could be an understudy for Kathleen Harrison, tells her that it's no use getting stuck in nostalgia, but she can't help overhearing her apparently talking to someone called Jeremy, and mentions this to the husband, who bugs the flat, only to hear the same baffling dialogue.

He decides to place her under surveillance - not so much out of jealousy as out of concern about a possible scandal that could affect his business. This does not turn up any secret lovers, but reveals that she can often be seen talking to herself, clearly living a separate fantasy life. So he has her sectioned... and this is where fantasy may possibly touch hands with reality, but the surprise ending cannot be revealed here.

It's called Historiography - applying ruthless logic in the authenticating of so-called history, and evaluating the methods by which it has been reported and assembled.

Two of our critics on this page give conflicting verdicts about the well-known story of Lincoln's haunting dream, shortly before his death: that he heard the sound of weeping and saw a coffin guarded by a soldier who told him the president had been assassinated. One of them declares that no mention was made of any of this until twenty years afterwards, while the other repeats the standard version, apparently well-confirmed, that he spoke about it to colleagues in the few days' interval before the fatal theatre-visit.

Certain variations have somewhat blurred the Yes/No validity of the tale. It needs to be separated-out from the other (recurring) dream he had about travelling in a boat towards 'a vague, indefinite shore', which always left him feeling disturbed and distracted. Then we hear that his wife Mary appeared to have had a dream of foreboding at the same time, and was keen to stay at home on that evening, though we know that she was liable to nag him regularly throughout their marriage. As for the other psychic phenomena linked to the murder, reported from all over America, it is reasonable to treat these with scepticism, knowing the urge to fabricate legends in the wake of a catastrophe.

This makes for a somewhat untypical episode of OSB, not strictly in series (and the last minutes are affected by poor audio recording); also my YouTube upload at 20 minutes is ten minutes shorter than the running-time quoted by IMDb, so I may have missed some important clues. But it remains an interesting sidelight on America's supreme national tragedy.

"Whoever tampers with the brain does so at his own risk" warns our host, John Newland, at the beginning of this scrambled episode, set in a grand house in Milan, where a medical student is showing off a new piece of optical equipment that he has (most improbably) been allowed to take home and experiment with. Apparently the bright light can have strange effects on the "nerve endings of the brain", and when a divorcing English couple, Jim and Mary, arrive for cocktails, he asks Mary if he can use her for a demonstration.

Mary soon goes into an uncomfortable trance, where she is fixated on images of a sumptuous villa and the sound of someone screaming in the lift. Presently she happens to recognise a picture of this villa in a full-page advertisement in a magazine, and goes to the address. The agent explains that it's a guest-house where only two people have stayed in the last year. But the lift is just as she saw it in her trance.

We can't tell you more, but the ending is just as unconvincing as the rest of the plot, and in any case, we can never really tell who's who in the zoo - a disjointed group, apparently selling top-end furniture, fashions and perfumes, with Jim often absent at the factory, but sometimes using his absences to cheat on Mary.

The only bonus is a brief glimpse of the young, unknown Michael Crawford as the student.

If the 3-year old Margaret Mitchell had not allowed her nightgown to catch fire, there might never have been a 'Gone with the Wind'. For although she emerged unhurt, the shock had somehow exposed a rebel streak that would stay with her for life.

This did not keep her from espousing the deep race-prejudice of old Atlanta - for example, refusing to share a classroom with a black student, which some of her critics still hold against her. But she resisted the conventional coming-out routine for young ladies, forming a gang called the Rebel Debutantes and boasting "we're coming down off the auction block" (possibly an ironic reference to slave-auctions).

Having lost a fiancée in the trenches, she soon married her first husband, easily recognisable as Rhett Butler, who didn't last long, and then his total opposite, a kind and gentle person who turned out to be the perfect sounding-board when she got so deep into Gone with the Wind that she needed a second opinion.

The statement that "She clearly had the great plot outline" is at odds with my understanding that she could only deliver a mass of anecdotes that she had heard as an only-child in a house full of aunts and great-aunts who had lived through the war in Atlanta (furnishing her with much insight into the war's impact on women.) Meanwhile it was a sympathetic publisher who had to sort them into a proper sequence.

Nobody was more astonished than Mitchell herself when the book became a runaway best-seller at a hefty three dollars in the depth of the Depression. But the black community was quick to criticise what they saw as a romanticising of the cotton days - as many race-lobbyists still do. "Not characters but caricatures" says Afro-American historian Elizabeth West - an accusation Mitchell had faced in her own time, while protesting that she had endowed many of the slaves with admirable qualities. Another historian, Molly Haskell, says "People who believed in integration didn't necessarily believe in equality. It makes us very uncomfortable today." (Rather a partisan claim, I would suggest.) And playwright Pearl Cleage might convince more sceptics if she could get by without repeating "human being".

This was only the third episode in the long-running series 'One Step Beyond', so perhaps our host John Newland hadn't yet got into his stride. For once at least, we're excused his usual cod-psychic explanations of paranormal events. He just falls back on "You may believe it, or not. But the real people who lived this story - they believe it. They know. They took that... One Step Beyond."

A woman believed to be clairvoyant is not in the mood to do her party-trick at this small fashionable soiree in New York, until a self-declared sceptic taunts her into trying her special powers on him.

Soon she's deep in her trance, and considering that the actress trained with her brother Marlon Brando, her act is pretty unconvincing. But the message coming through is that he needs to beware of taking a particular sleeper-cabin on a particular train, where he will meet a dark-haired lady wearing a ring in the shape of a coiled serpent. He is able to laugh this off, because he is due to travel by plane, but when the weather turns bad, he is forced to take the train after all.

We can't reveal the chain of events that leads to the dramatic climax. But in any case, our attention is fixated on the sheer improbability of a woman half as glamorous as Paula Raymond accepting a drink in the dining-car from a total stranger acting as weirdly as Lin McCarthy, often staring in silent horror, as he recognises parts of the mystic forecast actually happening.

Contrived is the word for this one.

A married businessman and his married mistress are dining and dancing the night away, while debating some troublesome issue that will be forever unknown, partly because the latter's voice does not register clearly, and partly because the recording has weathered badly across sixty years.

But their disagreement seems to have been resolved, perhaps with the aid of the demon alcohol, by the time he drives her home, even canoodling with her at the wheel. Of course, the inevitable happens, and they find they've run over and killed a boy in the pitch-dark. Vaguely promising to report the accident, he drops her home, and then decides that as nobody witnessed the collision, he'll pretend it never happened. She feels, however, that they should stay apart for a year.

On the anniversary, he takes a call on his Dictaphone, and is startled to hear the boy's dying words, exactly as he heard them on the night. He becomes thoroughly distracted, as noticed by his refreshingly normal-looking secretary (Amzie Strickland), and sends for the mistress he hoped to spend the night with, who also hears the ghost-call. Yet when the tape is played to the police, they hear nothing. We can't reveal the ending, though we can promise you it isn't pretty, and it's as contrived as the rest of the plot.

Your eternally charming host John Newland gets away with his usual brand of blarney: "The conscience can create a voice of its own - the voice of doom, heard only by the guilty."