It's feathers all the way within the guarded, gilded salons of High Fashion, where one dress can cost £3,000. A puff of plumes, a shimmer of sequins, a knock of naked knees as the waist-makers and swishbucklers prepare to change the Shape of Woman... the autumn sleeves drift by the catwalk in the most frenzied weeks of the year: the Winter Collections, when Paris provides "the look a woman must have to seduce."
"What's a pretty girl like you... doing in a place like this?" The hair, massive and lacquered stiff - a solid, unmoving helmet. Make-up, heavy - a deep dusty coating, fanned by great remote-controlled eyelashes. Waistline, unnaturally small and tight. Swimsuit, sculptured to emphasise endless thighs. The exposure, tremendous - it's got to be tremendous, for these are The Beauty Queens. Tonight, to examine nature in the raw, we join these perambulating bathing-beauties, crowned and uncrowned, on and off the catwalk, to share their triumphs and defeats as they sway towards their ultimate trial - the day of Miss World!
with Alan Whicker It's an Unpleasant Business if you're not Friendly with the Chap Next Door... ...especially (as His Excellency explains) if the Chap Next Door is a nation of 31,000,000-and you're a tiny Colony of 25,000. Few places in the world have as turbulent a history as The Rock of Gibraltar Tonight, a journey to the other side of the 'Garlic Curtain' to see just how solid is the Rock; how life goes on within this proud fortress at the very end of Europe, now in the second year of Spain's 'little blockade'.
The Albas, one of the world's great families, have accumulated their treasures during nine centuries; within their palaces and castles they live in a style almost unknown in the world today. Spanish aristocrats are cloistered, secluded, unapproachable, their way of life still feudal. Today Spain approaches the end of an era, but tonight we are just in time to look within this private world and meet the family of los Duques de Alba: their eldest son, Carlos, Duke of Huescar; their second son, Alfonso, Duke of Aliaga; their younger children, Jacobo and Fernando; their baby Cayetano; and the staffs of their various Palaces.
He comes from the Sixth Sphere. A doctor, in fact, who comes from a world other than Whicker's - indeed from "the Other World." He is one of the unorthodox healers to whom thousands of patients are looking today for a cure for their apparently incurable ailments. Many of these patients venture outside the established channels of the medical profession into the labyrinth of Bee Cure, Spirit Operation, Radiesthesia, and even Witchcraft. Who are these people? Are they gullible, stupid, superstitious - or ordinary people who believe medicine has failed them? More significant, perhaps - who are the "healers" who practise these methods, and others less extreme like Acupuncture, Osteopathy, Hypnotism, and Faith Healing? What are their claims? How do they justify them? And of course there's a "price" to pay. You choose your cure, pay your money and - then what?
Alan Whicker looks back to his journeys through the sunshine islands from Trinidad to Jamaica, each with its own improbable blend of cultures, colours, and creeds. Here extravagant resorts and crushing poverty are neighbours, but no one frets.
The Sea Cruise is for those who can afford so much more than a holiday camp. Tonight's film joins the affluent flotsam to find out what the £15-a-day cruisers are seeking. Is it fun and friendship? Moonlight and romance?
Alan Whicker reports on The Pools Winners. Today and every Saturday twelve million people hope for eight draws on their football pool coupon. How does it feel to open your front door and be told you've won the jackpot? Does sudden wealth change your life? Are pools winners as lucky as they seem?
As winter ends, Munich enjoys its Fasching, an uninhibited pre-Lenten spree. With daunting stamina the town dedicates itself to six noisy weeks of dressing-up and celebrating into the small hours. A few million sausages and seas of Bavarian beer sustain the revellers until the frenzied climax. Costumes incredibly elaborate or revealingly simple; flirting loudly exhibitionist or deadly earnest; fun, instant.
Today the desperate and the wretched, the suicidal and the drug addicts, gamblers and neurotics, divorcees and alcoholics are finding salvation in the Anonymous Societies, which reach out to show them the way back. There is tragedy in this lonely world where emotional starvation drives some to self-destruction, others to misery - and it is happening right among us, today: that man in the bus, the woman next door... But fellow-sufferers will help, and just a few of us are ready to listen...
Alan Whicker in Kuwait, scene of the most staggering success story of the century: a tiny, primitive desert state transformed into the world's richest society, where no Kuwaiti need work and no one pays taxes, where the problem is not how to earn money - but how to spend it! How has sudden, astronomic wealth affected Kuwaitis? As a major financial force, today able to alter Britain's standard of living - how are they coping?
When we die do we simply move on to another plane to live again in a sort of astral suburbia, able, through a medium to transmit messages of encouragement and hope to loved ones still earthbound? Thousands believe this. Are they pathetic, gullible, foolish, or is it a reality?
The birth-pangs of one of the most spectacular and expensive cinema epics ever attempted - MGM's £3-million "Grand Prix", a film about the motor-racing world. The backdrop - Monte Carlo; the stars - James Garner, Yves Montand, and a roaring cacophony of cars; and, caught in close-up under the strain of his task, the young and talented director John Frankenheimer.
You look in the mirror and there they are... wrinkles, sagging muscles, grey hairs - or that getting-thin-on-top shine! The unhappy signs of an ageing process which some people seem able to stave off. How do they do it? With persistence, pain, money, and remarkable ingenuity - as can be discovered tonight.
Arguably, the ideal woman is Japanese. She knows how to obey, how to be submissive, to keep silent, to charm with her shy tenderness... a man's woman perhaps. The perpetual bow and the ceremonial smile did help to create a social harmony, a formal serenity. But today, Americanisation has dented a rigid code, is emancipating the feudally subservient Japanese woman. She is in danger of losing most of what makes her different - so old-fashionedly feminine, so captivating to the Western male.
One of the largest English-speaking nations in the world is a distant, little-known Republic which, after 48 years of American occupation and two decades of independence, seems a bridge between East and West. Some 7,000 Pacific islands together make up Asia's freest Democracy. It is at once a familiar and a very strange land indeed... Each year in the Republic of the Philippines there are 16,000 murders, and smugglers rob the Treasury of almost half its National Budget - some £80 million.
Italy, where Tom Ponzi, detective extraordinary, runs the largest Private Detective Agency in Europe. As his men go about their stealthy business watching and trailing be it a bored housewife enjoying an evening with her latest boyfriend or an industrial spy stealing secrets, Alan Whicker turns Private Eye and investigates Ponzi and his men at work.
In the booming world of antiques what used to be junk can now be worth a lot of money. Alan Whicker looks at the fringes of this world and goes into the delicate question of when restoration becomes faking.
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!
Why does the pressure on people in the public eye so often break up their marriages? Five divorces revolve round these two women: Elizabeth Jane Howard, novelist, and Sandra Paul, international cover-girl. Peter Scott, David Wynne-Morgan, and Robin Douglas-Home, three of the eight characters on a matrimonial marry-go-round, reveal the emotions surrounding their marriages and re-marriages, and the effect of divorce upon their lives. Do people have the right to part, to consider only their own happiness? What of those left behind alone?
There is no sure-fire formula that produces laughter. This is what makes the comedian the most mixed-up, most vulnerable person in show business. If you refuse to laugh he "dies the death." His timing goes, and he starts to sweat. He begins to hate you because the previous house rolled in the aisles. With Charlie Chester, Alfred Marks, Ray Martine, Max Miller, Ted Ray, Ted Rogers, Mike and Bernie Winters, and Johnny Speight, Ned Sherrin, Peter Cagney.
The wasteland of London's W11 is the world of the small-time crook. In this society a young man, just out of jail - seven convictions behind him - is trying to go straight. Surrounded by men for whom the only difference between right and wrong is getting nicked - can he succeed?
San Francisco has become the capital of the world for a rapidly growing tribal community of self-styled beautiful people. They are staging a peaceful revolution against the pressures and greed of the western way of life. But the 'straight world' outside shows little enthusiasm for these Flower Children, with their long hair, far-out clothes, and dropped-out ideals. They're often viewed as parasitic and drug-addled. Alan Whicker finds himself surrounded by love, peace and harmony in 1960s San Francisco.
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.
Flame dancers whirl, drums throb, guests feast on thirteen thousand sucking pigs, and in a festive mixture of Polynesia and Ruritania a King is crowned. Once ruled by Queen Salote, Tonga - remote coral island set upon the seas of the South Pacific - is tonight's world for Alan Whicker, observing the joys, pangs, and charms of a unique Victorian pageant - with South Sea island overtones!
How long will you live... Whom will you marry... Will you be rich or poor - or Prime Minister...? Do you believe that everything in life is determined, at birth, by the position of the planets? Most Ceylonese have no doubts. For them astrology is not just a vague three-line prediction in a newspaper, nor palmistry an amusing diversion; it's a way of life, a creed. Ridiculous? You could change your mind if you watch Whicker's World.
Tonight we hit Arab Street. A chicken squawks, a cry of death, a knife flashes, and the spouting blood religiously collected cleanses the sins of a dead woman. The Chinese have many traditions, but in the new city state of Singapore things must change. A multi-racial society is not easy to control, and in this impression of Singapore Alan Whicker observes its police force: patrolling its seas for infiltrators; discussing murder and kidnap; raiding opium dens; dealing with secret societies; steering an ancient society towards a newer way of life.
Many people enjoy being scared - will pay for the pleasure of being frightened out of their lives. Tellers of ghost stories have profited from this shadowed side of our natures for centuries; today a considerable industry satisfies the needs of the cult followers of Horror magazines and Horror films - even Horror ballet. Alan Whicker braves that Unspeakable Something in cellar and grave-yard in an attempt to find out why we like to be frightened, and talks to those who do the frightening.
In the Barbagia - least-known mountains of Europe where it is said there is a robbery, a kidnapping, or a murder every day - Alan Whicker follows the course of a bloody vendetta that has claimed ten victims so far... He also discovers how and why simple shepherds suddenly turn bandit-men on the run who only leave the peaks to kidnap and kill.
Alan Whicker has not turned highwayman - but this is the choice he finds many of our top money earners must make when faced by the Tax Man. The prospect of the Budget fills the top executive or best-selling author with dread. What does he do? Pay up and look happy? Hire a clever accountant? Slip down the Brain Drain, the Executive Drain, the Talent Drain?
If you look marvellous - who needs a gorgeous character? In this anniversary year of the suffragette, Whicker's World observes three young women, their dreams and attitudes to their lives and good times: a Duke's daughter in her Adam palace; a library assistant who'd rather be a film star; a factory girl at a conveyer belt. They may not know much about Hitler, but they excel on contemporary man, marriage, and morals.
As a nation, we have an enormous appetite for newsprint: we read more, per head, than any country in the world. Of our nine national dailies perhaps the two most influential are at opposite ends of the scale: Cecil King's Daily Mirror, read by more than a quarter of the population, and Lord Thomson's Times, read by everyone who "matters"... Yet in today's television-educated age, popular and quality papers draw closer together. What do they say about their role, their power, their influence - the men on the inside who decide what you read? What are they like, what do they think - the men behind the headlines?
As the age of jet travel dawns, Alan Whicker considers the small regional airport at Yeadon and the reluctance of its operators to open up for international routes. Could the regions which fail to embrace the jet plane be left behind, just like the Victorian towns which shunned the railroads?
Alan Whicker calls on some of the leading horse trainers in Middleham in the North Riding of Yorkshire.
Whicker celebrates the "Glorious Twelfth" Yorkshire-style, and takes a closer look at the esoteric pastime of grouse shooting.
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).
Whickers examines one of civilisation's most important assets - water - and the many different ways we rely on it.
The Royal Picardy Hotel in Le Touquet, France, was once renowned among the world's champagne set until the war brought the jackboot treads of the 3,000 German troops who were billeted there. Whicker visits Le Touquet to see for himself the building that was once christened "the most beautiful hotel in the world."
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's investigations of Ecuador, including meetings with the Presidential Guards and some headhunting Indians.
Alan Whicker observes six trends in the American Lifestyle, six cults which have not reached Britain - yet. This week he looks at Americans who are questioning the inevitability of death, and ways to cheat it.
Where have all the American children gone? The pre-teens, the seven-to-elevens you'd think are entitled to be childish, have grown into the first Micro Media generation - mature moppets who make movies instead of playing games and are completely at home with computers and crime, the stockmarket and sex.
There is a new economic force in America today, privileged and envied: the swinging, 24 million unabashed and unwed adults with few inhibitions about their marital status. In the third of his journey into the new transatlantic lifestyles, Alan Whicker found them courted not only by each other, but by big business.
Continuing his series looking at modern American trends, Alan Whicker visits "The Greenhouse" in Texas, where American women pay up to $110 per day for treatments to make them slimmer and younger-looking.
Business executives, America's leading heroes, enjoy the greatest prestige and the greatest rewards. The President of General Motors collects £330,000 a year and others pick up £125,000. In return, Society demands nothing from the top executive - except his entire life!
In the last part of his series examining modern American trends, Alan Whicker looks at the problems faced by retired people who are fit and active.
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. In this vivid report Whicker provides a remarkable close up on an absolute ruler with the power of life and death.
Alan Whicker meets the modern adventurer Carl Gustav von Rosen, the Swedish Count who led a flight of rocket-carrying planes for Biafra against the Nigerians. The Count talks about his life as a champion of the underdog, which goes back to flying for Ethiopia against the Italian invaders.
Alan Whicker meets the French aristocrat-tycoon Count Robert John De Vogüe.
A sort of saint, and a man with the best kind of message for 1970, an Irish priest who founded the Shoeshine Hotel for the juvenile floram of wartime Naples, then set up the famous Boys' Towns of Italy where wayward youngsters govern themselves.
Alan Whicker meets Johannes, 11th Prince of Thurn and Taxis, a German businessman and head of the immensely wealthy Thurn und Taxis family who own more land in Germany than anyone else.
This Lutheran vicar of a sleepy village in Jutland wanted to wangle a free holiday for his parishioners so he organised a coach tour. In Segovia he paid £50 for a meal wrongly ordered so, to recoup, he organised another tour... It was the luckiest mistake of his life, for today Pastor Eilif Karogager has the largest travel agency in Scandinavia - it copes with 300,000 holidaymakers each year, runs 65 coaches and several hotels, and his airline of 28 aircraft (14 of them Caravelle jets) is Europe's largest independent airline.
The son of a lord with a famous name and an unusually passionate life. The passion, shared by his wife, a princess and serene highness, is for... the preservation of Eire's Georgian buildings. Desmond and Mariga Guinness could lead an agreeably tranquil life in their green and faded land, but have instead flung themselves into a breathless campaign to save the stately homes of Ireland, now threatened by decay and developers. Even Castleton, most splendid mansion in Ireland, stands threatened. Most Irish seem unmoved by the decay of their birthright, but as Desmond and Mariga gallop to the rescue, Alan Whicker observes how Guinness is good for Georgiana.
Napoleon called Venice "the best drawing room in Europe," and for nearly 40 years the man in the white jacket carrying in the drinks has been... Harry. His is probably the most famous bar in the world. To international celebrities Harry is the ultimate professional host, attentive, observant, shrewd. His tiny bar still looks like a railway waiting room, for he believes people are the best decor. Most of the world's famous have jazzed-up his sophisticated scene. In Venice, place of fantasy with its endless succession of echoes and reflections, Alan Whicker's sixth European considers the view from the other side of the cocktail shaker.
When the talk is about international show business, the name of Margaret Kelly does not immediately leap to mind... yet few have dazzled more audiences. Miss Kelly, born in Dublin, abandoned by her parents, adopted by a Liverpool family, grew up to be Miss Bluebell, the iron hand behind the velvet gowns of thousands of dancers and statuesque showgirls who have been widening eyes since 1934. The Bluebell Girls dance their way through the Lido lights in Paris, the Stardust Show in Las Vegas, the International Casino in Nairobi; in Buenos Aires and Madrid. So what sort of person is this Miss Kelly, who sets them dancing and who, after 35 years, still commands their routines? And what are the Bluebell Girls like when they are dressed? To find out, Alan Whicker went to Paris - willingly!
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.
Whicker visits Norfolk Island, a tiny piece of paradise drifting through the South Pacific where the descendents of the Bounty Mutineers live, the seamen who set Captain Bligh adrift in an open boat and returned to their Tahitian women. Today most islanders are still called Young, McCoy, Adams, Quintal, making isolated Norfolk an 18th Century storeroom of people - the way we used to be, once upon a time. They speak a unique dialect, a soft and joyful blend of West Country English and Tahitian. Their most indomitable character is Girlie Christian, 76-year-old descendant of Fletcher Christian who tells an extraordinary story. Girlie is a television original.
Norfolk Island has no taxes, and nothing that bites or stings; its pigs are fed on wild peaches, and cattle have right of way. When Whicker first visited the island ten years ago, it seemed so appealing that many viewers emigrated. He now discovers whether they are living happily ever after.
Australians like people to be ordinary, but also look favourably on those who "give it a go." In this programme, Whicker meets more unconventional characters and keeps his cool in the presence of, among others, a bikini-clad charlady, a mine owner who wears jewellery while she drills, and a professional gambler who denies he was shot in the backside.
Whicker meets a new breed of Australians: ranchers, cowboys and stockmen from Montana and Nevada, who are flocking to the remote top end of the Northern Territory. Vast tracts of land are leased to Americans, and Whicker learns more about their way of life.
Whicker finds that Australia is still a man's country. At parties, women are relegated to the other end of the room; bars and male conversations remain off-limits. Meeting some surprising women, Whicker wonders why they seem willing to accept their second-class role.
A mid-season special report. Defiant and hostile, the independent principality of Broken Hill stands hundreds of miles from anywhere in parched saltbush country. Controlled by its trade unions, it is not just a closed shop; it's a closed city, where strangers are suspect and Hillites must do as they are told, and watch what they say - or be ostracised...
Australian life is shaped by isolation. In the words of a migrant: "In Europe I used to feel, but here - nothing. There is no deep feeling anywhere." Whicker considers this observation, and in the process examines the Britishness of Australia.
In early 1970, three Aborigines sold their desert claim in Western Australia for £50. Six weeks later that stake was valued on the world's stock exchanges at £80 million. Whicker observes the effect of nickel fever in Kalgoorlie, a town where old prospectors dream of striking gold, and an elderly cook prepares to become a millionaire.
For the first fime, Alan Whicker leads a television team info the ghost-ridden ruins of France's former penal colony. He 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.
What would you do if you had a Caribbean island all of your own? You probably wouldn't run it like a Scottish laird, giving pensions to all the islanders and a chunk of it to Princess Margaret - nor have Oliver Messel design everything. But the Honourable Colin Tennant did, as Alan Whicker discovers in Mustique - a paradise that may not be as perfect as it seems.
The Hon. Eric Matthew Gairy, Premier of Grenada, is seen by some as a budding Papa Doc; they fear his sudden and sinister deportations, hís extravagance and his power over an impecunious island where unemployment is high. Others admire his flair for publicity. Whicker meets this turbulent figure, and tries to discover what's going on behind the scenes in paradise.
Alan Whicker is one of the few journalists permitted to film in Walt Disney World - a £125 million fantasy in construction, and the biggest, wildest and most improbable boom to hit Florida. The special magic of Disney World is explored, and Whicker finds himself judged unacceptable by the tribe of "apostles" preparing to spread pixie dust on ten million people a year.
Whicker visits Kourou, Guiana, the resting place of Blue Streak - intended to be Britain's first independent nuclear deterrent, but shelved in 1960. Meanwhile, France's desolate multi-million pound space station supports a new town where 6,000 scientists live on double salaries, gentle taxes and the hope of one day having something to launch.
Whicker discovers two vanishing tribes. The first, on Dominica: remnants of the proud Caribs, who long resisted European domination. The second tribe are the Metropolitan police keeping the Queen's Peace on the tiny isle of Anguilla.
Island-hopping the Caribbean, Whicker meets the former emigrants who have returned to their sunny homelands after sampling the UK. He asks why they chose to leave, and what, after living there, they think of the British.
Most of us have dreamed of getting away from it all and escaping to a palm-fringed island in the sun. But how many make the final break and go where the sun keeps shining? On a visit to Tortola in the British Virgin Isles, Whicker encounters a typist from Reading, an aviation pioneer from Bournemouth, a knight from Burnley, an accountant from Norfolk, and an American millionairess...
...so complains Ben Novak, sole owner of one of the world's most famous hotels. Novak's improbable palace, the Miami Beach Fontainebleau, is more like a stupendous movie set. Whicker probes the secrets of this American gold-plated Mecca - to discover that the owner can't wait to get away from the customers he can never please.
To sail the turquoise seas of the Caribbean under billowing white sails and a cloudless sky must be everyone's dream. But, as Alan Whicker discovered, the charter skippers often charging more than £1,000 per week don't always find it so perfect.
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.
Run Run Shaw is a film mogul who makes more than 60 feature films a year. His magic formula is not sin and sex, but blood and guts; sagas whose heroes and heroines perform implausible swordfights and back-somersaults to the tops of buildings. Whicker meets this Chinese wizard at his Hong Kong studios.
Gamesmanship in Thailand is one step beyond; picture Derby Day with elephants. And when it comes to a wicker ball game... it's simply too much, as Alan Whicker discovers.
A look at the dominant role played by women in the Thai business world. Demure Oriental ladies control hotels, fleets of buses, navies of river boats; Whicker finds it's not the executive suite in Thailand, but the sweet executive.
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.
Whicker reports on the many Chinese risking death in their attempts to escape from China to Hong Kong. Many succeed each year, and are received with rueful resignation by the Hong Kong authorities, already struggling to house a population of four million people.
Following in the footsteps of Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour, Whicker takes the Road to Bali - a remote, enchanting island just beyond reality. As he explores the undiscovered paradise that has been called "the morning of the world", Whicker asks whether Bali can escape the fate of other tropical islands and resist the onrush of tourism.
The Sisters of the Order of Poor Clares, having taken perpetual vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, can never leave their convent. In the first episode of his new series, Alan Whicker reveals their hidden world to us - but although St Clare is the patron saint of television, the nuns will never see this programme made about them.
Whicker meets 36 year old Patricia, a merry warm-hearted woman and the mother of nine children by a variety of fathers. She is also a criminal who has been an inmate of Holloway five times. She specialises in housebreaking and shoplifting, but her lifetime of crime has included smash-and-grab, hi-jacking, gaol-breaking and armed robbery. Patricia provides a revealing picture of a criminals' mind, and then speaks of the revelation which transformed her moods and attitude from then onward.
Women on parade - Whicker meets seven new recruits to the Women's Royal Army Corps, and follows them through their initial training.
Alan Whicker speaks with five different women who can more than compete in a man's world. He talks to pilot Yvonne Sintes, who is the only British woman flying scheduled airliners; a woman engineer; a film stunt-girl; a woman cricketer; and Ivy Benson, leader of the famous all-girl band.
Bachelor Alan Whicker explores the spectrum of romance, 1972-style, ranging from detached computer dating to the never-never land of the romantic writer - seeking out the advice of authoress Barbara Cartland in the process.
Alan Whicker meets the Doghouse girls - wives of Grand Prix motor-racing drivers - trackside at the British Grand Prix at Brand's Hatch, in his final report from Inside a Woman's World.
Alan Whicker visits the Republic of Nauru, an island with an area of eight square miles situated in the Pacific Ocean, 26 miles south of the Equator.
Alan Whicker looks at New Zealand's venison industry, which exports three million tons of meat a year to Europe (mainly Germany) and the U.S.A.
Alan Whicker compares lifestyles on the Samoan Islands - American Samoa, a territory receiving 36 million dollars annually from the U.S., and Western Samoa, 65 miles away, which is one of the World's poorest nations.
Alan Whicker interviews various New Zealand women on the role of women in their society. He meets author Dame Ngaio Marsh, Women's Liberation leader Sue Kedgley, and a housewife, an editor and a female lorry driver.
Alan Whicker looks at life on the volcanic island of Tanna in the South Pacific.
Alan Whicker meets a number of British emigrants to New Zealand, some of whom are content with their lives there and others who are longing to return to the U.K.
Gay liberation is one of the fastest growing movements in America. In this episode Alan Whicker attends a homosexual wedding in San Diego, meets a gay bishop, three transexuals and some members of a lesbian tide.
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.
Continuing his series in California, Alan Whicker examines the love of the car by the Californians.
Whicker looks at an extraordinary group of people whose belief is absolute and baffling, they are members of the first and largest of several hundred Jesus Communes - the 'Christian Foundation' of Tony and Susan Alamo. He investigates the position of this enigmatic couple, so lacking in charisma yet commanding such complete and astonishing allegiance. Why are there Jesus freaks content to exist 30 to a room in conditions of squalor, when their unlikely leaders live on the hill above in such style?
Alan Whicker meets Frances Klug who believes she speaks daily with the voice of God, and whose followers are building a £400 million Holy City. Whicker is ordained as a Doctor of Divinity by the President of the Universal Life Church.
Alan Whicker investigates a recent American phenomenon - the introduction of speedway racing for children as young as 3 years old, equipped with mini-bikes.
Alan Whicker examines how Californians spend their leisure time. He watches people hang-gliding, goes to a women's American football match, and watches men and women in a nightly activity where skill lies in undressing and standing still.
Alan Whicker observes a $75,000 wedding in Las Vegas, from the first fitting of the bride's dress to the actual event in a candlelit casino.
Alan Whicker visits Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.
Alan Whicker journey's to Houston, Texas - one of the most notorious cities for shootings in the United States.
Alan Whicker visits Honolulu in Hawaii.
This week Whicker discovers Vienna and its people.
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.
Charmain Biggs, wife of Great Train robber Ronnie Biggs, talks at length for the first time on television about her life with Ronald. They discuss the background to his part in the robbery, his dramatic escape from Wandsworth and their life on the run in Australia where, eventually, a number of people knew who they were.
In his series looking at Australia, Alan Whicker meets Leonard & Shirley Casley who, following an argument with the government, declared their farm in the outback to be an independent nation with its own stamps, currency and air force.
In his series looking at Australia, Alan Whicker meets wealthy mineral prospector Lang Hancock, and discusses his plans for opening up the north-west outback, dealing with bureaucracy, and his daughter Gina taking over from him.
Alan Whicker meets migrants who have found success in Australia, including a golf coach from England, a Jerseyman who teaches Australians to enjoy losing money, and a racing driver whose fleet of double-decker buses have bars and saunas.
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.
Alan Whicker meets people who emigrated to Australia, including an Englishman who runs Australia's oldest stately home and a British bishop, raised in a Welsh slum, whose diocese covers a quarter of Australia.
Alan Whicker discovers the "Ocker," a term describing the new-style aggressive Australian who cocks a snook at his British origins and the rest of the world.
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.
Americans have one Secret Society which everyone longs to join, based on an improbable sandbar down in Florida. For a century Palm Beach has been the Mecca of the Super Rich, living between tall walls and high hedges with only one money problem - how to spend it. Palm Beach, a never-never land, where no-one feels properly dressed without a yacht, is seemingly populated by bathroom billionaires known by their products, like Mr Kleenex, Mrs Listerine, Mrs Q-Tips and Mrs Gillette. In his remarkable study of America's new aristocracy at play, Whicker reflects that the rich should not be resented but enjoyed as a pageant - as they pass before us, a glittering entertainment. He talks to society hostesses, including Juliette de Marcellus, Helene Tuchbreiter, and Ann Hamilton.
Alan Whicker visits the city of Charleston and observes the very varied lifestyles of its residents, including that of America's only Voodoo colony.
Alan Whicker visits Salt Lake City, home of the Mormon religion Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Although polygamy is now officially banned by the Church, he discovers that it continues among Fundamentalists. He also meets the 82 year-old Mormon leader, Spencer Kimball.
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.
Alan Whicker visits Rajasthan to examine Indian royal marriages. He meets the Maharajah of Jodphur and his wife, and rides their royal train. Whicker also meets the Princess of Alwar, a widow who is forbidden to remarry.
Alan Whicker visits Kerala to see the martial art of Kalarippayat, celebrates Passover with an old Jewish community, attends a festival where elephants in gold armour engage in a battle of Umbrellas, and meets some Britons who live there.
Alan Whicker visits the High Ranges of North Travancore in India and looks at the lives of the few remaining British tea planters.
Alan Whicker visits several of the Maharajahs of Rajasthan and watches a polo match played on bicycles.
In the first of a two-part edition, Alan Whicker visits the city of Bombay, meeting some of its wealthiest residents, including film stars and industrialists and inhabitants of the shanty slum areas.
Alan Whicker visits Kerala to see the martial art of Kalarippayat, celebrates Passover with an old Jewish community, attends a festival where elephants in gold armour engage in a battle of Umbrellas, and meets some Britons who live there.
Alan Whicker joins 300 passengers from 16 countries on a two-week cruise from Singapore to Indonesia.
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.
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 visits Los Angeles and meets Britt Ekland and Sherry Lansing, goes to a birthday party for dogs and talks to starstruck teenagers and their pushy mothers anxious to see their offspring make it in show-business.
Whicker revisits one of Los Angeles' more unusual marriages - plastic surgeon Kurt Wagner & his wife Kathy ("I’d Like to Think I’m Nearer to God than Frankenstein", October 1973). He finds that Kathy, now 38, has had two more improving operations since they last met - a full facelift and an acid treatment. Whicker gives viewers that sense of privileged eavesdropping as he peels away the attitudes of this unusual couple and reveals some startling truths about the surgeon whose patients call him Mr God. Why would he turn to psychiatry? What has led the couple to get involved in ESP and marriage counselling? Rarely has there been such a sting in the tail of one of Whicker's films...
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 examines the fear of violence that causes so many ordinary Americans to pack a gun, and goes to a school that teaches people how to shoot to kill.
"I'm very much afraid I have champagne poisoning..." On its first journey in five years, Alan Whicker journeys aboard the newly refurbished Orient Express from London Victoria to Venice. Among the famous and wealthy travelers are Liza Minelli.
This new series considers the buoyant upstairs-downstairs life experienced sailing around the Pacific in 80 days, with Alan Whicker aboard the Queen Elizabeth 2 on her three-month winter voyage around the Pacific - the ultimate cruise. Here Whicker is dazzled by emeralds too enormous not to be real, surprised by the most pampered passenger, disappointed by the ship's wheel, swayed by South Sea islanders - and tempted into totally sinful behaviour...
The second of this series considers the upstairs-downstairs relationship of passengers and crew within their remote floating world. Upstairs, Whicker queues for a summit meeting with the President - and meets a multi-millionaire who only feels secure when on board. Downstairs, he talks to the extravagant man passengers love to hate, becomes involved in fights, happy events and £ 160,000-worth of caviare - and dares to discuss the one unmentionable subject ...
The third in this series goes ashore with the more adventurous cruisers. Whicker flies into the mountains of Papua-New Guinea for an eerie encounter with the Mudmen. On Bali he is stunned by beauty, walks into an ambush and minds his etiquette. After stocking-up in Singapore, the QE2 sails on to the sights and sensations of Thailand. For the passengers at Pattaya - orchids and elephants. For the crew -kisses and kicks. Then it's time for another sailor's farewell....
In the last of this series the QE2 reaches the two Chinas - Capitalist and Communist. At Hong Kong 2,000 workers swarm over the liner - and leave her whiter than white. At Qingdao in Red China the city almost comes to a halt as the cruisers disembark. Made-up children chant their doll-like welcomes to these 'visitors from another planet', while in the stadium before 20,000 Chinese the QE2 football team takes on Qingdao's best. Nigel Broackes , the man who in effect owns the QE2, talks about her future - and his passengers reflect upon their comfortable adventure ...
David Harvey is a cowboy, working high in the Colorado Rockies; until four years ago he was with the Metropolitan Mounted Police and living at Parsons Green in London. Peter Vanson, also once with the London police, is still a policeman - on patrol in Watts, one of the most dangerous areas in the USA. A few hundred miles south in San Diego lives Vikram Khalsa - once Victor Briggs, lead guitarist of the Animals. He is now a Sikh and a plumber, and sings a different song. Ken Crutchlow, an East Ender who was labelled a "smart alec" at school, travelled round the world before settling in the wine country north of San Francisco, where he imports old London taxis and sells them as toys.
Joan Collins is an international phenomenon. She tells Whicker about her life and work in Los Angeles, and about her role as Alexis in Dynasty. Jane Deknatel, a real-life Alexis, produces her own films and talks with passion (and yet with a certain sadness) about the changing role of women in American society. Mike London is a professional poker-player in Las Vegas; he clears $60,000 a year - "Americans love beating the British" he says - "they've never forgiven us for the colonies!" Rachel, Jill and Suzanne are dancers at one of Vegas's vast casino-hotel's shows. They love America - 'but we're not here for the men!' Just along the strip a former GI bride from Coventry, Mavis Okerlund, is Marriage Director at the Little Church of the West, the ultimate in assembly-line weddings. One client has been back 11 times.
Richard Wrigley has some forthright thoughts on America, and in particular on business and sex. At 38, with no financial background, he's creating in Manhattan a million-dollar brewery as well as a vast ice-rink in New York's Central Park. He has no bank account and no credit rating but says thousands of dollars have gone through his mattress. Brendan Fearon, with a BA from Manchester University, is also working in Central Park - driving a horse-drawn carriage - and experiencing some of the romance himself. When most of the muggers are in bed, Richard Lord, who lives with a pet eel, takes the 4.00 am subway to Wall Street - not to a bank but to the Fulton Fish Market to pursue his obsession.
Ralph Murphy had produced 300 records before making the journey from Saffron Walden in Essex to Nashville in Tennessee. Along with Roger Cook, who's written more hits than anyone except Paul McCartney, and Michael Snow from Liverpool, he's part of the British contingent bridging the gap between pop and country and western. In Palm Beach, Whicker meets Guy and Hilary Wyatt who started a landscaping business; Bill Burt who left the Scottish Daily Mail in 1961 and now edits one of America's outrageous tabloids; and Pam Symes, a widow who tells of the other side of life in the millionaires' enclave.
Dr Geoffrey Stanford is an ecologist from Ipswich who sees himself as "saving Texas for the Texans." Whicker looks at Dallas through the eyes of a butler, Stuart Heasman ("I want to merge, to blend - but with my accent it's impossible"), and David Cotterill, Maitre d' at the Mansion Hotel on Turtle Creek where a glass of champagne costs $25. One Brit has both merged and made money: his Union Jack Stores in Dallas and Houston offer the homosexual market the latest and tightest in jeans and T-shirts - "England's like a foreign country to me now..."
The Rev Hugh Hildesley is Rector at the socially desirable Church of Heavenly Rest on New York's Fifth Avenue. For eight years he was an auctioneer at Sotheby's, USA. He is full of praise for the role ordained women play in America: Tthe sooner Britain catches up, the better." Other successful Brits living in New York include Shirley Lord, a Vogue editor: "you learn not to be a shrinking violet"; the actor Jim Dale; Philip Kingsley, a multimillionaire trichologist - for, by happy chance, eight out of ten Americans have dandruff; and David Lloyd-Jacob, who has borrowed to start a business and now pays interest of $10,000 a day. "More than anywhere else in the world, New York tests you... There is a sense of lurking danger, but we love it."
Mick Luckhurst is the envy of every American boy. He's kicker for the Atlanta Falcons and earns over $200,000 a year: "Here you can't play a good game, and lose." Clive Wilson, Trevor Richards and Chris Burke are keeping traditional jazz alive in the very spot where it was born, New Orleans. Around the corner is the Useful Shop - a hardware store run by Joan Norris; she has an Oxford degree and once worked at the Cheltenham "Spy Centre"; her husband left her and their two children penniless: "There is a charity hospital, so I've somewhere to go..." Dr Paul Buisseret passionately defends the American medical system: "In British hospitals intensive care is the bed next to Sister's desk...!"
Diana McLellan is a Washington Times gossip columnist. "The Ear", as she's called, came from Norfolk in the 50s. A prime target for gossip is the White House - President Reagan's advisor on the Middle East is an ex-Brit from Gravesend, Dr Geoffrey Kemp; and the State Department spokesman came from Wales, John Hughes. At George Washington University the Professor of American History is Englishman Marcus Cunliffe. To complete this group of Washington aliens, the former editor of The Times, Harold Evans - "I feel angry and proud about Britain at the same time; here they think it's a quaint, sleepy country torn by incipient civil war between the classes..."
Dawn Langley Simmons emigrated from Kent as a man, became a woman, and made the first mixed marriage in South Carolina. She is one of the programme's five lone women survivors. A divorcee, Elizabeth Daoust, is Head of Protocol for the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington. Hilary Brookes, a GI bride, lives with her son in New Orleans: "It's like living on a volcano - you just get used to it..." Mary Hayes is a black social worker who, after 25 years, wants to go home to work in her native Liverpool; but the former wife of James, Pamela Mason, has no regrets about leaving England - "I'd be shot before I'd go back."
The last of ten films in which Alan Whicker talks to a wide range of Brits who've gone to live and work in the USA. Sir Gordon White has, in ten years, turned $3,000 into a company worth a cool billion: "They only understand excellence in this country, you can't get by with mediocrity." America may be the land of opportunity, but when the axe falls it can be a cruel place - as Colin and Veronica Draper experienced. New York is also the home of a Scot, Albert Watson, one of America's most successful photographers. Vanessa Angel arrived in Manhattan at the age of 17. Three years later, she is a top model with an income of $200,000 a year. But, like many Brits in this series, she still has reservations about life with Uncle Sam: "They don't care about the quality of life - just how many Porsches they have..."
Dorrie Flatman left Liverpool in 1963 with three daughters and £45. Today she is one of Australia's wealthiest women. She is a brothel madam, with three flourishing businesses and the firm conviction that business is best kept in the family. So while she manages one "house," her daughter oversees the house opposite, and her ex-babysitter from Kirkby the branch brothel in Fremantle. The books are meticulously kept by Dorrie's husband, an accountant 21 years her junior. Had Dorrie plied her trade in Britain, she would have ended up in jail. But this is Perth, Western Australia, in some ways astonishingly permissive, where licensed brothels are illegal, but "tolerated."
Jane Makim, born in London, lives a hard life in the remote and rugged outback of New South Wales with her rancher husband and two young children. On 23 July 1986 she was in London on important family business - the wedding of her younger sister. But this was no ordinary wedding. Her sister, Sarah Ferguson, was marrying Prince Andrew. Back at the ranch in the drought plain on the Queensland border, Jane reflects on a life and lifestyle that could hardly be less like those of her more famous sister. Captain John Alliston, RN, also decided to settle in a remote corner of Australia. At the end of the war he brought his new bride, Eleanor, to a deserted island, a mere speck on the map off Tasmania, where they eked out a precarious living and raised a large and happy family. Today the Allistons enjoy a busy retirement. John cultivates his garden; Eleanor writes romantic novels under the nom de plume of Minka Jones.
No one exemplifies the buccaneering, entrepreneurial spirit of Western Australia more than Alan Bond, who left Hammersmith as a 13-year-old and is now a megamillionaire and Australian folk hero, the only man to wrest the America's Cup from the Americans. Alister Norwood, son of a Belfast carpenter, is to jeans what Bond is to beer; Peter Briggs from Streatham believes that someone who's worth five or ten million "hasn't really made it." Briggs owns 150 vintage cars, and offers Alan Whicker a chance to drive in York's annual 'Flying Fifty' endurance trial.
Northern Queensland seems an abode of the blessed. And yet each year the crocodile notches up its terrible toll, despite the signs that warn of the presence of this unlovely amphibian... unloved by all, except Mike Pople, who left Bristol to become a ranger for the Queensland Wildlife Service. Among other examples of Pommie exotica who flourish in this balmy backwater are Bill Moull from Dagenham who sells prawns to the Japanese; Pat Robertson from London who sells koalas to the Japanese; Geoff and Edie Taylor from Coalville in Leicestershire, who are making a brave attempt to convert Australians to the garden gnome; and Eddie Farrell from Manchester, who lives in hope of finding gold - but who, to date, has not found enought to fill a gold tooth.
Beautiful people abound in Sydney, and more than a few exotic blooms are on display at Lady Primrose Potter's fancy dress ball, where Diana "Bubbles" Fisher, society columnist and daughter-in-law of a former Archbishop of Canterbury, chronicles proceedings attired as Brunhilde. Then there is the annual Sleaze Ball where 6,000 gays in this, the gayest of cities, pogo through the night to the laser lighting of Jeff Hardy, who once decked the displays at Fortnum and Mason. But first Alan Whicker meets the man who migrated 12,000 miles from East Ham - to become a dustman - and the orphan abandoned in a Cumbrian workhouse 50 years ago who is now an Australian cabinet minister.
To most travellers the real Australia is the Northern Territory, which attracts the loners, men like Sid Smith from Dudley who runs one of the loneliest pubs in the world. While Sid looks after his one and only regular, his wife Barbara prepares Devonshire cream teas for any passing trade. It is via a cattle-mustering expedition by helicopter and a stopover at the tiny town of Katherine to meet a fun-loving girl from Southall with a strong right hook that Alan Whicker meets some Aboriginals at an alcohol rehabilitation centre. For them the bicentenary is no time for celebration. Their existence in the camps is wretched, and lightened only by two young pommy doctors, Dr Clare and Dr Neil.
"If we have a malaise, I think we can trace most of our industrial attitudes back to the English" - so says David Hill, a Barnardo's boy from Eastbourne, who manages the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. George Campbell holds a senior position in the metalworkers' union. He brings the Belfast waterfront into the living rooms of Australia as he castigates government and bosses. The metalworkers were on strike when Alan Whicker met Tony Packard, a £10 Pom from Reading, whose multi-million pound motor franchise was threatened by the stoppage. Roger Smith left Britain in 1964 with £8, and made £20 million. Beaten by restrictive union practices, he's selling up and leaving.
Is the Aussie male all he's cracked down to be - a pot-bellied, beer-swilling chauvinist? Sally Hurley, ex-bunny croupier, would agree. So would Liverpudlian Clare Jukka, who sees a lot of outback wives in her clinic in a remote Northern Territories township. Sue Becker - the BBC's keep-fit Green Goddess of the early 70s - yearns for the company of European men in her lonely Hobart home. But liberated executive Jane Deknatel from Oxford sees something almost wimpish in the Sydney male; and Hazel Small from Aberdeen shows Alan Whicker that a woman in Australia can pioneer as well as a man.
When Ray Wilmott was a boy he used to follow the Beaufort Hunt on foot. Now that he's made his fortune, he has invented his own hunt. Arrayed in pink, he halloos through the vales of New South Wales - hoping the hounds have picked up the scent of a fox, and not a wallaby. Len Evans has been a keen drinker from his youth; he has become Australia's most respected vigneron, gourmet and wine critic. Because of him consumption has shot up to 24 bottles per person per year. Dennis Gowing was a penniless orphan from London, but he achieved the dream of every Australian male; his horse won the Melbourne Cup and he formed a liaison with Miss Australia. Alan Whicker bumped into him in the boisterous party crowds at the Melbourne Cup meeting.
In the last of ten films Alan Whicker talks to Poms who have joined the world of arts and entertainment down under: Robert Morley's son Wilton, a theatre producer; Phillip Emanuel, who contributes to the Australian film industry; Edmund Capon, late of the V&A, new curator of the NSW Art Gallery; Tony Shaffer, author of Sleuth, writing more fiendish drama in the house in the rainforest of Queensland he shares with wife Diane Cilento. At the lower end of the market - Paul Sharratt, late of the pier at Clacton, now owner of his own showbar in Surfers' Paradise; Peter Barnard, ex-Playboy croupier from Torquay, who presides over Hobart's casino; and honorary Pom Joe Bugner, who draws adoring crowds of Australians chanting "Aussie Joe!"
Thirty years after his first visit there, Alan Whicker returns to Hong Kong and looks at its society and its political and economic structure.
Alan Whicker tours the waterfront on a craft owned by a Chinese man who reads The Times and smokes cigars, meets a businessman who serves caviar with a pearl shovel, and a woman who is a telecommunications tycoon who visits soothsayers.
Alan Whicker looks at the treatment of the widows of the men killed when defending the colony in 1941, to a police chief about how illegal immigrants are treated on both sides of the border, and the immensely wealthy Kadoorie family.
Alan Whicker looks at drugs, crime and capital punishment in Hong Kong, and meets Christian missionary Jackie Pullinger who rescues drug addicts in the Walled City.
Alan Whicker looks into the superstitions and belief in fortune tellers of many Hong Kong citizens.
Alan Whicker examines Hong Kong's organised crime syndicate, The Triads, and meets a lawyer who used to prosecute them, a priest who befriended them, and a Traid "enforcer" who is now on the run from them.
Alan Whicker talks to some of the working, professional women of Hong Kong, both Chinese and European, about their work, roles and the attitudes towards them.
Alan Whicker talks to some of the many expatriates who live and work in Hong Kong.
Tonight Whicker goes on location with Spain's most outrageous film director, meets a priest with a chain of restaurants, and a British diplomat who married by post.
Travelling south to Andalusia, Whicker meets the sherry barons of Jerez and finds them celebrating the annual feria, a show of horses and traditional dress.
This week's programme opens in Marbella at a poolside party for the jet set where, Alan Whicker discovers, "you feel quite under-dressed without a Rolls-Royce." He meets the man once reported to be the richest in the world, a feature film writer, a prince, and Fleet Street's permanent eye on the "Costa del Crime".
Journeying inland, Alan Whicker meets some Britons who have decided to settle permanently for a Spanish way of life. They include the Scott family, who restored an old olive mill, an English teacher in Seville whose Spanish husband expected her to lay out his socks, and the great nephew of GK Chesterton, who opens his home to paying guests.
This week, Alan Whicker talks to a Grandee, once married to the ex-wife of singer Julio Iglesias, and meets the Duke of Arion, who now produces gin and tomatoes.
Alan Whicker meets some remarkable Spanish women - among them a TV sex therapist, a lawyer who helped an embattled Madrid community declare independence, and fashion doyenne Cuca Solana.
Alan Whicker visits Andalucia, in the south west corner of Spain. He meets a king's ambassador, a red duchess, an oil magnate and visits Expo 92 in Seville.
In three weeks' time the Olympic Games begin in bustling Barcelona. In the last programme of the series, Alan Whicker visits the city and talks to those behind its colour and success. He meets Javier Mariscal, designer of the Olympic mascot, and Frederico Correa, creator of the Olympic stadium, and he gets away from it all with jet-setting architect Peter Hodgkinson, who designed Barcelona's controversial new airport.
Alan Whicker joins a 34-day holiday package around the world with 87 other passengers.
Alan Whicker's package tour of the world reaches the Taj Mahal in India and then on to Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the Great Wall of China, Xian, and Hong Kong.
Alan Whicker continues his package tour with 87 other passengers. After a champagne breakfast at Ayers Rock, Australia the jet travels to Sydney and across the Tasman Sea to New Zealand. It then lands at Tahiti and on to Easter Island.
Alan Whicker concludes his 34-day, 14-country tour with 87 other passengers. After the Iguazu Falls near the Brazil-Argentina border, the jet goes to Rio. Finally in New York, a celebration is held on the Waldorf's Starlight Roof.
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.
Alan Whicker visits South Africa's Lost City, one of the luxury hotels at the Sun City resort created by millionaire Sol Kerzner - and the venue for the 1992 Miss World contest, with judges including Ivana Trump, Richard Branson, and Joan Collins.
In the second of his two-part report from South Africa's Lost City resort, Alan Whicker talks to guests Joan Collins, Jerry Hall, Jean-Michel Jarre and Ivana Trump.
Alan Whicker joins the inaugural run of the Eastern and Oriental Express, a 1200 mile train journey from Singapore to Bangkok. Fellow passengers include Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, the Earl of Snowden, Susannah York and Koo Stark.
Globetrotting Alan Wicker sees drama unfold in the tropics as opera superstar Luciano Pavarotti, hired to sing on the island of Pangkor Laut, Malaysia, loses his most valuable asset - his voice.
The very last land, going south, stands silent and splendid at the end of the world, and calls itself "the only white nation south of Canada." It has the largest city south of the Equator, the largest British colony outside the Commonwealth - yet among 23 million people there is much anti-British feeling about football, foot-and-mouth and the Falklands. Accompanied by photographer Frank Pocklington, Alan Whicker observes life in this vast Land of Gaucho.
