Preceded by: Director: Alan Clarke (UK, 1991): Playwright David Leland introduces this documentary on Clarke, prepared for the posthumous "Alan Clarke Season" on BBC. Writers, producers, actors...all share their observations on the style, humor, controversy, and significance of this artist who was idolized by his peers. Clips illuminate Clarke's ever-present "commitment to changing people's lives." (50 mins, Color, 16mm) Scum confronts the inherently Dickensian nature of "justice" in the Thatcher era. Behind closed doors at a Borstal, a prison for young offenders, corrective behavior begins with having their balls broken, literally and figuratively. Clarke elicits strong and sensitive performances from his youthful actors: we sense the frightened child being gradually covered over by a tough veneer. For the lucky ones, that is. Prison officers-thugs in suits and ties-use the boys to their own ends of intimidation and racial vengeance. They may be trapped, too, but playwright Roy Minton and Clarke spare them little sympathy. Amid the tension there is humor and tenderness in the character of an intellectual youth passing himself off as a Mecca-seeking vegetarian, a non-violent (therefore inviolate) way to screw the "screws." Scum's examination of institutionalized violence was ye olde "embarrassment for the Home Office"; measures were taken. Accused in the same breath of being "a work of fiction" and looking too much like a documentary, Scum was banned and shelved for fourteen years by the BBC. Clarke, not to be stopped, made a second, feature-film version in 1979, but this original BBC play was not aired during his lifetime.