Alice – A Fight For Life is a documentary featuring 47-year-old Alice Jefferson, a British woman who developed malignant pleural mesothelioma thirty years after working for nine months at Cape Insulation's Acre Mill asbestos plant in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire.
[5][6] John Willis, an investigative journalist described by The Times as "a digger of the first order" and by The Guardian as "one of TV's most courageous documentary writers", had previously produced two critically acclaimed exposés for Yorkshire Television, the BAFTA award winning Johnny Go Home (1975) and Rampton - The Secret Hospital (1979), which received an International Emmy Award.
[9][10] The first was World in Action: The Dust At Acre Mill, produced by Granada TV and broadcast on ITV in June 1971.
The report, which was highly critical of the behaviour of the Factory Inspectors at Acre Mill, found that since the plant's closure in 1970 10% of the work force had developed asbestosis, a figure far in excess of the previously estimated exposure-risk relationship.
Dissastisfied with the findings of the report, which appeared to favour the asbestos industry's position and contained "deceptive" statements from medical professionals in the pay of the industry, John Willis, assisted by researchers James Cutler and Peter Moore, began work on Alice... in 1980.