Television - Seventies squatters made a brave new world in Brixton. By Andrew Billen Lefties (BBC4)

Vanessa Engle, who last year made a series about alternative art in the 1960s, has turned her attention to the greyer subject of alternative politics in the 1970s and 1980s in Lefties, a series of three films (Wednesdays, 9pm). Fortunately the squatters of Villa Road, the heroes of the first film, Property Is Theft (8 February), prove more colourful than expected. It is not so much that they made some effort to doll up their corrugated-iron barricades when the bulldozers loomed. It is that, intellectually, they painted themselves in shades of deepest red you simply don't see on the left's swatch charts any more.

Villa Road in south London became the epicentre of the capital's 30,000-strong squatters' movement in the 1970s, when Lambeth Council, which had turned out its original tenants, did not have the cash to realise its plan to replace the Victorian terraces with high-rise flats. Using the abandoned houses for accommodation would, you might have thought, been smiled upon by a Labour local authority. Instead, it poured concrete in the loos and smashed the fittings. You needed serious commitment to turn these shells back into homes - which is perhaps why those who did so were not your common-or-garden homeless but political ideologues with ambitions rather greater than getting a roof over their heads (ie, revolution).

Rival groups amassed at two addresses, No 31 and No 12. In No 31 resided the hardline communists, middle-class Ox-bridge graduates sailing under the flag of international Marxism. The group's brain was an astrophysicist called Piers Corbyn, normally sighted carrying a bag of leaf-lets and peanut-butter sandwiches. He knew about such things as "transitional demands". A transitional demand was an apparently reasonable proposition that would turn out to be a Trojan horse for unsuspecting capitalists. For example, you would campaign for housing for all, knowing full well that capitalism would never be able to provide it.

The only problem, ideologically, was that Trotsky never mentioned squatters in anything he wrote about forces of the revolution. So was squatting, asked Engle, a revolutionary act?

Pete Cooper, then top dog at No 31, now a folk singer whose repertoire still features hits by that 17th-century boy band the Levellers, admitted he could not remember. Jack Jones was confused enough to appoint an Old Etonian from Villa Road, Xander Fraser, as the Transport and General Workers' Union's first squatting officer.

But there was even more confusion back at Villa Road the day Pete Cooper de-fected to No 12, which was where Freud, not Marx, held sway. You did not chant Marxist slogans at No 12; you screamed your guts out while naked in accordance with the theories of Arthur Janov, the primal scream guru. Back at No 31 rumours abounded that the primal screamers were deliberately sending out vixens to seduce good-looking young communists and recruit them to their cult. It was, they said, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The Villa Road experiment, or experiments, ended in 1978 with a deal to knock down the south side of the street but keep the north. The surviving houses now belong mainly to a housing association. Since leaving this Shangri-La, the ideologues have wrinkled and billowed into middle age, and their politics have ripened from red to green. Only, it seems, Piers Corbyn, who answers his phone with the mysterious words "World direction", still believes that the contradictions of the capitalist dynamic will bring it down. He still eats peanut butter, too. And only one old resident has stayed put, a bearded Scandinavian who lives in a tent at the top of one of the houses.

The next film in the series is called Angry Wimmin. The revolutionary feminists it interviews make the revolutionary squatters look like Tory modernisers. It offers us women who had sex with other women not because they fancied them but because it was ideologically correct; women who left their children because their communes would not accept males even in their infant form; mothers who sought to give away their sons on similar grounds; and women who set up girl-only creches. Some speak happily of a plan to segregate men and women into different hemispheres separated by a wall built along the equator.

The odd thing is that even the nuttiest women interviewed, like the crankiest squatters, come over as decent, likeable types motivated by altruism and justi-fiable anger. The second film does us a particular favour by redeeming Valerie Wise, the prim Deirdre Barlow look- alike so vilified when she chaired the GLC's women's committee in the 1980s. She is now a domestic violence worker in Preston. Britain would have been the poorer without these lefties.

I once wrote a feature about alternative therapists that my editor decided had failed because it did not deliver "a really good sneer". There are moments of wicked editing in these films that suggest Engle struggled in the editing room to resist the temptation for a good sneer herself. But she has been fair to her subjects, which is no less than their sincerity deserved. I award her the Villa Road Order of Merit.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

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