2 MARCH 1985, Page 36

Television

Campaigners

Alexander Chancellor

The ex-footballer, George Best, recent- ly discharged from prison after serving a sentence for being drunk and resisting arrest, appeared on the Wogan show (BBC1) last Monday to say that he found his time in Pentonville 'quite enjoyable'. I thought I had read him in the Sun news- paper saying exactly the opposite — that prison, in fact, had been unmitigated hell — but then people writing in the Sun newspaper do not necessarily give us the benefit of their true feelings. The inmates of Pentonville had been nice to him, he said, because he had done the two things they admired most: he had got drunk and he had assaulted a policeman. Although Mr Best felt he had been too severely punished for the offences he had commit- ted, his resentment was directed not so much against the judicial system or the prison service as against the press, which he claimed — quite rightly, I would think — was interested only in seeing him humiliated. He is cast in the press as a popular hero turned rake, and the press is only interested in chronicling the rake's pro- gress. According to Mr Best, it accordingly suppresses any information which might redound to his credit, as for example the fact that he spent a day in Pentonville with handicapped children. (He did not explain what handicapped children were doing in Pentonville, but doubtless there was a good reason for them to be there.) The modern word for 'rake' is 'playboy', a description which Mr Best optimistically believes is attached to him only by the envious.

It will be interesting, if the opportunity ever arises, to compare Mr Best's reflec- tions with those of our colleague Taki Theodoracopulos, who was released from Pentonville only on Tuesday. Taki had been inside for trying to import cocaine into Britain and by all accounts did not find the experience enjoyable in the least. But he and Mr Best have at least a couple of things in common. Both have been called playboys and have had to endure much public gloating over their humiliation; and both (which may be some sort of tribute to the effectiveness of custodial sentences) have turned strongly against the habits which landed them in jail. Taki wrote in these columns before his imprisonment about his current view of cocaine and will doubtless return to the question in due course. Mr Best told Terry Wogan that he had only recently come to recognise the seriousness of his drinking problem and the damage it had caused to others. The breakthrough for him was recognition that alcoholism was a disease, something he had never understood before. Personally I find it hard to see how excessive drinking can be considered a disease, any more than the misuse of drugs, and I feel sure that Taki (who even during his cocaine-snorting days was certainly not an addict) would agree on that. But this is not really an important point. If alcohol 'abusers' find it helps them to curb their habit if they regard it as a disease, let them by all means do so.

If heroin-taking is a disease, it is certain- ly a difficult disease to cure. Two out of three heroin addicts who undergo treat- ment and rehabilitation are back on the drug again within five years. This is one of Right, today we're going to learn how to make strike placards.' the reasons why the Government is taking the controversial step of launching a televi- sion propaganda campaign to discourage young people from dabbling in the drug to begin with. The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs was opposed to this proposal on the grounds that any sort of publicity for heroin, even negative publi- city, was more likely to get rung people interested in the drug than to scare them off it. Nevertheless, the Government clear- ly feels it must be seen to be doing wine' thing about the rapidly growing heroin menace and has decided to ignore the Council's advice. The main precedent for this sort of thing is the television campai against smoking, which may well have contributed to the decline in the number of smokers in recent years. But the cases are a little different. There was perhaps a case for warning people against the various dangers to health which cigarettes could cause, but there can be hardly anybody in the country who is not aware of the far more serious dangers of heroin. The idea, as I understand,it, will be to emphasise not, So much the potentially lethal effects ot heroin (few people, in fact, die of over- doses) but that the drug makes you gener- ally ugly and unfashionable. It doesn't sound a very promising project to me, but we will suspend judgment. The Burston Rebellion (BBC2, Mond' was an extremely enjoyable dramatisation of 'the longest strike in British historY' or so it was described, for whether mass_ truancy by schoolchildren for a period ot 25 years can exactly be called a strike seems to me to be open to question. The, story begins in the Norfolk village ni Burston in 1914 when Mr and Mrs Higdo' a couple of Christian socialists, are appointed to run the little village school. They quickly fall foul of the local squ archy by insisting on regular school attend- ance, even when children are required to help in the fields, but more especially bY showing insufficient deference towards their social superiors, in particular, the rector. They are eventually dismissed bY the school's governors, and the children ge, on strike in protest. The official schoca remains almost empty, while Mr and Mrs, Higdon (splendidly played by Bernard Hill and Eileen Atkins) carry on teaching 011 the village green and in a carpenter's shcP until eventually, with the help of trade union contributions from all over Englatiq' a permanent rebel school is built. Th's continues in operation until 1939. The interpretation of this true storY heavily biased in favour of the rebel schoolteachers and their peasant suptvar" ters (whom they try incidentally to union- ise), but so it had to be if it was to work as drama. If the Higdons had been anything less than heroic, it would all have been a bore. 'Education is the only thing in the world they can't take away from you, sal Mrs Higdon, who proceeded to cart"' teaching without a salary. This week tne National Union of Teachers has started a series of strikes for higher pay.