' Nobody seriously questions the need for planning in the management of a western Industrial democracy ...' The trite truisms flow from the planners. The people to whom the planning is being done use a blunter vocabulary, as in the pit villages in the North-East. What does all this planning mean at the human level? What is it like to be one of the miners threatened with unemployment? Man Alive travels south from a pit village in Northumberland with two miners who have had to pack up and move out with the wife and kids.