1971: The Alternative Press

Man Alive looks at The Alternative Press. The national and established press is being challenged by a new kind of journalism. Few of us can fail to have noticed the growth of so-called ‘underground’ papers. Many are shocked. Others applaud the presence of a radical, anti establishment, journalism. The people who produce these publications see them not as underground but as alternative. They are committed to the belief that the existing press is too wedded to the establishment and ignores, or misrepresents the realities of ordinary people’s lives and their problems. Jonathan Dimbleby and the Man Alive team have looked at three alternative papers: IT – the founding father of the London tabloid underground; Socialist Worker – a revolutionary weekly aimed at the working man; Tuebrook Bugle – a militant community paper produced by the people of a Liverpool twilight zone. Who runs them? Who reads them? Can they survive? In the Man Alive studio, Desmond Wilcox chairs a feisty debate between representatives of the mainstream national press – including John Whale of the Sunday Times, and Peregrine Worsthorne and Brian Roberts of the Sunday Telegraph – and representatives of the alternative press – IT’s Mick Farren and Paul Lewis, Roger Rosewell and Roger Protz of Socialist Worker, former OZ editor Felix Dennis, and Chrissy Maher of the Tuebrook Bugle. Clip taken from Man Alive, originally broadcast on BBC Two, 1 December, 1971.