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'A Life Apart'. Produced Directed by Mike Grigsby. E Tom Scott Robson. Granada. The convulsions of the current crises with the capitalists fighting for their lives against eonomic catastrophe and the working class preparing to fight for their lives against the ruling class and capitalism, provide the sharpest possible context for some remarkable filming shown on the documentary 'A Life Apart-Anxieties in a Trawling Community.

Within its carefully-defined limits the film revealed the kind of explosive situation, in microcosm, that exists in every industry across the country today The trawling industry happens to be one of the most nakedly exploitative in this country (a death risk 40 times higher than in mining; a basic pay of £20 a week for what the owners estimate as a 64hour week and the deckhands give as a minimum 100-hour Because of this and because it is a relatively small industry -885 men employed trawlers in Fleetwood, Lancashire, where the film was set and ditor —death imminent. The conditions are unspeakable; the work gruelling and backbreaking in icy water, knee deep in dead fish, gutting and cleaning. Clearing the nets this way and that while huge seas roar past threatening to take the men at work 'over the wall'.

All this was shown with film of rare quality and the men, the managers, the skippers, the union boss, the wives —all were allowed to speak for themselves. Apart from a brief introductory word or two, Fleetwood, the trawler men and women made their own hardened commentary.

The role of the union was sourly exposed as a paternalistic sham-a bankrupt scheme (the men are attached 60 per cent) with no leadership but still their only hope.

The wretched, waiting, watching, drab lives of the women, listening for ships' blowers and watching for the next tide, playing darts and bingo, enduring the constant anti-climax of their men's shore leave (72 hours on shore, three weeks at sea when the first day 'he's too exhausted for anything', the next is spend running round the offices, collecting pay and sorting out paperwork and the third day he's depressed at the thought of the morrow's trip 'everything tastes of the sea' And above all the director/ producer Mike Grigsby and his editor Tom Scott Robson captured the great contradiction of the working class themselves: the men's sheer desolation and their awareness of wasted lives.

'What's it all for?' asks the old Scot in the pub. 'Nothing nothing'.

At the same time there is a real ferocity, a hatred of what's done to them, a recognition of the power of the class, especially among the young (with en. couragement from the old who realize 'we stood for itbecause we had to' who are preparing for the big bust up they know has to come.

We saw the determination in more, We lose "but they lose the boy who said: If we're more' and others like him: 'We must stand together-it's the only way.' Meanwhile managers uneasily faced the camera and parried the questions with myth and evasion. 'There's no profiteering in this business, said one. The only sure investment he said was in something like gilt-edged. No, the men had always provided their own entertainment-after all they went to sea to work.

The men, locked in stifling, ill-equipped, confined quarters on board would bitterly agree with that at least. And insult to injury the employers claim it's a calling going to sea' 'there's a freedom about it' and 'it's always a fresh adventure'.

Poison like this seeps from management, keeping men in their place, making sure fresh layers of youth are drawn into the chains that bound their fathers.

The film, with its excellent tight-framed photography by Ivan Strasburg, caught the essential force of the working class in crisis from which there is no escape.

What it could not do was to carry this to the , explicit conclusion that there is nothing but a political answer to be made by the class, under the sort of pressures, which in one degree or another are being inflicted by the ruling class in every industry.

To the manager, desperate for secure profits in a hazardous industry which is not reaping the rewards it used to do, 'it's a problem of communication'-a matter to be resolved by 'educating' the But the men have other ideas.

'The ordinary working man in the street has reached point where he thinks—this is the end. We're not going to be knocked around any more. For him the education is already complete?

These days, television is not inclined to give anything much away about the real struggles of the hour, the political implications of the classes preparing for war. 'A Life Apart' was significant both for its effort to go against the tide and for its attempt not just to give something away, but to positively illumine the real problems which face the working class and - the force with which it intends to tackle them.