Studio introduction from Jon Lander. Reg Harcourt profiles the Labour MP for West Bromwich West, Betty Boothroyd. We first see Boothroyd visiting the Wednesbury dance centre in her constituency. She is a former professional dancer and joins in with a children’s tap dance lesson. Reg Harcourt interviews her about her early life which led her to join the Tiller Girls dance school. We see clips of the Tiller Girls performing on Sunday Night at the London Palladium (this would have been after Boothroyd had left) and a series of b/w stills beginning with family photographs and also showing stills of her visiting Vietnam in 1957 as part of a Labour peace mission and campaigning in the Leicester South East by-election seat in the same year. We then see Boothroyd shopping in Wednesbury (she lives in Cambridgeshire but visits frequently) and then looking around the site of the former Patent Shaft steel works in the town which closed in 1980 and is earmarked for redevelopment followed by a visit to Metal Closures in West Bromwich who are a successful firm making bottle tops. We then see views of housing in her constituency - she has been involved in a campaign for home owners to receive compensation for living in now defective houses built in the 1950s in the Smiths System which used reinforced concrete and steel girders. We see her visiting Dorothy Jones who is leading the campaign for Smiths residents.
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