Whicker's World
Whicker's World is an award-winning British television documentary series that ran from 1959 to 1988, presented by journalist and broadcaster Alan Whicker.
Throughout its 30 year run, the series was first shown by the BBC (from the late 1950s to the late 1960s) and then ITV (from the late 1960s to the 1980s, when it was produced by Yorkshire Television which Whicker himself was a shareholder in). The series returned to the BBC in the 1980s.
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[edit] Series History
The series was notable for being filmed all over the world, with Whicker reporting stories of social interest from each and every continent. Whicker's interviewees would include locals, politicians, celebrities, and even convicted criminals as he reported on stories as far ranging as military dictatorships, British expatriates, the feminist movement of the 1970s, the Tanka people (Boat People) of Hong Kong, the rise of the San Francisco Gay Rights movement in the 1970s, the opening of Disneyworld in Florida, and the growing plastic surgery industry of California. Among his more famous interviewees were actors Peter Sellers, Joan Collins, and Christopher Lee, Haitian President François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, Paraguay dictator Don Alfredo Stroessner, novelist Harold Robbins, Lula Parker Betenson (the 94 year old sister of the infamous outlaw Butch Cassidy), the Sultan of Brunei Hassanal Bolkiah (reportedly the richest man in the world), and various members of the British aristocracy.
In 2009, now in his mid-80s, Whicker made Alan Whicker's Journey Of A Lifetime for the BBC in which he returned to some of the locations and met up with many of the people shown in the series decades earlier to see how their lives had progressed since their original interviews.
[edit] Acclaim
Whicker's World was a huge ratings success in the UK, and one of the longest running series in the history of British television. The series was nominated for a variety of awards throughout its run including nominations for several BAFTA Awards. The 1977 episode "Palm Beach" garnered three BAFTA nominations for Best Documentary, Best Sound, and Best Editing, and Whicker himself won the Richard Dimbleby Award at the 1977 BAFTA ceremony,[1] and had also won a BAFTA in 1964 for his presentation in the Factual category.[2]
In 1971, the series won the Dumont International Journalism Award at the University of California for the episode "Papa Doc - The Black Sheep". The episode "Harold Robbins - I'm The World's Best Writer" won the Best Interview Programme Award at the Hollywood Festival of World Television in 1972.
[edit] DVD release
Network DVD have released two volumes of the series. Each volume contains 8 episodes over 2 discs, and features some of the more prominent episodes of the series from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
[edit] Cultural Impact
In the late 1960s, the series was spoofed by the British comedian Benny Hill who did a sketch on his show called "Knickers World". It was parodied again in 1972 by Monty Python's Flying Circus who did a sketch set on a tropical island called "Whicker Island" where all the inhabitants were Alan Whicker clones.
In the 1980s, Whicker appeared in several television commercials for Barclaycard which were based on Whicker's World and featured Whicker in various foreign locations.
In 1981, Whicker was spoofed yet again, this time by The Evasions, a British funk group whose song, "The Wikka Wrap,"[3] was a send-up of a Whicker documentary on R&B music[4]. It featured songwriter Graham DeWilde[5] impersonating Whicker and its chorus was adapted from that of Tom Browne's "Funkin' for Jamaica." "The Wikka Wrap" became a smash hit in the United States, getting massive airplay on R&B-formatted radio stations.
In 1989, a board game based loosely on Whicker's World was released.
