Original title
Whicker's World
Released
6/17/1969
Origin country
GB
Genre
Documentary
Status
Returning series
Number of seasons
6
Number of episodes
22
Whicker's World is an award-winning British television documentary series that ran from 1958 to 1994, presented by journalist and broadcaster Alan Whicker. Originally a segment on the BBC's Tonight programme in 1958, Whicker's World became a fully-fledged television series in its own right in the 1960s. The series was first shown by the BBC until 1968, and then by ITV from 1969 to 1983, when it was produced by Yorkshire Television, in which Whicker himself was a shareholder. The series returned to the BBC in 1984, and to ITV again in 1992.
Alan Whicker takes a journey on board the world's most prestigious and luxurious train, the Orient Express, from London Victoria to Venice
2nd Documentary is aboard Eastern and Oriental Express
Papa Doc - The Black Sheep Hatti was the world's first black republic, ruled from 1957 to 1971 by 'President For Life' Dr Francis Duvalier - Papa Doc. Whicker meets Papa Doc in his Presidential Palace at Port au Prince in the company of his Tontons Macoutes - murderous civilian thugs. This show won the Dumont International Journalism Award at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1971.
Whicker In Stroessner's Paraguay - The Last Dictator Alan Whicker comes face-to-face with the last of South America's old style dictators - Don Alfredo Stroessner who has been absolute ruler of Paraguay for 19 years. One Paraguayan in ten is sold to be a paid informer and the Minister of Information has admitted there are so many informers that they run out of information and have to make it up.
Harold Robbins - I'm The World's Best Writer Harold Robbins, 56 and five times married, is the orphan who became the world's best paid writer. In New York he takes Alan Whicker round the Devil's Kitchen district of his youth. This won the Best Interview Programme Award at 1973's Hollywood Festival of World Television.
I'd Like To Think I'm Nearer To God Than Frankenstein In California they change faces as casually as we change clothes and cosmetic surgery is no longer only for the rich and famous. Whicker meets plastic surgeon Kurt Wagner and his wife Kathy, a walking example of his surgery skills.
I Haven't Taken My Own Shoes Off For 45 Years Whicker arrives in Penang for the island's spectacular Thalpusam festival, where entranced pilgrims pierce themselves with giant spikes. He also meets a Scottish doctor still living in the style of the British Raj.
He's Been Hunted All His Life - Now He's Going To Rest In Peace Butch Cassidy's sister Lula is alive and well and living in Utah, aged 94 and with a fund of fascinating stories. In Salt Lake City Whicker drives the hydrogen car, learns from Dinosaur Jim why these monsters face a new extinction, and sees the world's biggest man-made hole
Part 1 - Whicker undertakes a risky assignment, hurtling around San Francisco in the back of a police car. The cops are women, fully armed and determined to prove they are worthy of the blue uniform. Please Note, this episode contains some strong language.
Part 2 - San Francisco's 150,000 homosexuals are the city's largest unofficial minority. The Police Department has become the first in the US to knowingly recruit gay officers. Whicker gives an exclusive view of the first gay officers training and going on patrol.
Alan Whicker investigates the aristocracy, talking to rich peers and land-owners, including the Baron of Guiseborough, the Baron of Faversham, Viscount Down, and George Howard (Castle Howard).
It’s the Chinese New Year’s Day and Alan Whicker focuses on a picturesque Chinese race and their strange ‘centuries-old’ pattern of life - the Boat People, whose homes, shops, restaurants and brothels (or ‘flower-boats’) all float.
The most dreaded island in the world has been undisturbed and decaying for a few silent years. Alan Whicker seeks out ex-convicts who survived the Island’s unspeakable cruelties, and parts the curtain on a grisly stage where 75,000 Bagnards lived, fought and died.
Alan Whicker discusses the coming of Disneyworld to Florida. The special magic of Disneyworld is explored and Whicker finds himself judged unacceptable by the tribe of ‘apostles’ preparing to spread pixie dust on ten million people a year.
This week Whicker discovers vienna and its people
Whicker is in the Great Central Desert of Australia and the mostly underground environs of Coober Pedy, the centre for Opal mining, the real outback that's for sure.
In this episode he looks at the way the lives of the black community has changed since the 1920's
Alan Whicker heads north to the spectacular landscpe of Alaska. It has the most hostile conditions in the world; Winter temperatures average minus 60 degrees, if there’s a wind, it can plummet below minus 100 degrees and the nights last two months.
Alan Whicker meets some of the 50,000 Britons that have made Los Angeles their home, drinking in English-style pubs and playing cricket. He interviews Christopher Lee and Peter Sellers and also meets that model of Englishness, Patrick Macnee, who admits he would like to die in Dorset.
Alan Whicker joins the Sultan of Brunei (reputedly the richest man in the world) in his kingdom on the island of Borneo. He joins in the silver jubilee celebrations and meets the Sultan’s family and his army.
Whicker meets Percy Shaw who invented cats’ eye reflectors for roads. We discover how Percy Shaw was inspired on his way home from a pub named Rose Linda’s in Queensbury near Halifax in West Yorkshire, when he found himself guided by his car headlights reflecting off the tram lines.
Whicker looks at the cult of immortality in America, where people will pay $10,000 for the chance to live twice. They believe that while they are frozen for a century or two, science will find a way of re-animating them as medicine crosses new frontiers. A Michigan professor predicts it will become a trillion dollar industry. Twenty people are frozen already. On Long Island, Whicker talks to a Manhattan policeman, beside them, in a crate of dry ice, is his wife. His hope is that science will find a way to cure the cancer from which she died, and then invent a method of reviving her. On his death he will join her in the ‘freezatorium’. In the San Fernando Valley, Whicker meets the director of a scheme by which 20 bodies can be frozen in large tanks, liquid nitrogen preserves them in this frozen limbo and a salt solution replaces their blood.
Alan Whicker attends the 93rd running of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill's Downs track in Louisville, Kentucky. But the event is threatened when activists plan a programme of civil disobedience as a protest against the practice of residential segregation.
Episode Segment on James Bond Tonight we join 007 - Secret Agent and all-time box-office champion. We're on location in Japan with James Bond's latest £3-million epic "You Only Live Twice", which could be seen by 100 million cinemagoers. For Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, the two multi-millionaire producers, making a picture is an oriental headache, especially with Sean Connery, another millionaire and perhaps the best-known face in the world. You've got to think big for Bond films: to the tune of building a £400,000 volcano and then blowing it up!
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