World in Action

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World in Action
Format Current affairs
Run time 30 minutes
Creator(s) Tim Hewat
Channel ITV
Production company Granada Television
Air dates 1963 – 1998
No. of series 35

World in Action was an investigative current affairs series produced by Granada Television in the United Kingdom from 1963 to 1998. It frequently took risks that other similar series would not have taken, and gained a reputation for unorthodox thought and campaigning journalism in the finest Mancunian tradition.

The first of the ground-breaking Seven Up! programmes was shown as part of World in Action in 1964, and World in Action also broadcast the famous meeting between Mick Jagger and several senior British establishment figures in 1967, arranged by the future BBC Director-General John Birt.

The Political Studies Association, honouring the programme in its 50th Anniversary Awards, said: "World in Action thrived on unveiling corruption and highlighting underhand dealings. World in Action came to be seen as hard-hitting investigative journalism at its best."[1]

World in Action's demise in favour of the more populist Tonight with Trevor McDonald was criticised by some as part of a "dumbing-down" of ITV, although the decision was praised by others as a necessary response to the increasing commercial pressures on British TV.[2]

Contents

[edit] Origins

World in Action was the pre-eminent programme among a number of significant current affairs series produced by the ITV Network in its first 50 years. Along with other notable shows, including This Week, First Tuesday, Weekend World, The Big Story and The Cook Report - and the news-gathering of ITN - World in Action gave ITV a reputation for quality broadcast journalism to rival that of the BBC.

For the first 35 years of its existence, ITV had a near-monopoly of television advertising revenue. Roy Thomson, who ran Scottish Television famously described ITV as a "licence to print money".[3] In return for this income, the broadcasting regulator insisted that the ITV companies broadcast a proportion of their programmes as public service TV. Out of this was born the network's reputation for serious current affairs.

Some of the dominant figures in 20th century British broadcasting helped to create World In Action, among them John Birt, Jeremy Isaacs, Gus Macdonald, David Plowright and Michael Parkinson; it also trained generations of journalists and film-makers. The award-winning film director Paul Greengrass, who spent ten years on WIA, told the BBC: "My first dream was to work on World In Action to be honest. It was that wonderful eclectic mixture of filmmaking and reportage. That was my training ground. It showed me the world and made me see many things."[4]

Although its rivals produced many memorable films, it was World in Action which consistently gained a reputation for the kind of original journalism which made headlines and won major awards. In its time, the series was honoured by all of the major broadcasting awards, including Bafta, the Royal Television Society and the Emmy Awards.

World in Action's style was the opposite of the urbane BBC programmes which were its rivals. Gus Macdonald, an executive on the programme, said it had been "born brash".[5] Steve Boulton, one of its last editors, wrote in The Independent that the programme's ethos was to "comfort the afflicted - and afflict the comfortable."

World in Action out-lasted all of its contemporaries in ITV current affairs; they were killed off as the commercial pressures on the network grew with the arrival of multi-channel TV in the UK. Eventually WIA, too, was removed from the schedules by its own creator, Granada TV, following pressure from the ITV Network Centre, and replaced with Tonight.

[edit] Investigative legacy

From the beginning, and especially from the 1970s, the programme broke new ground in investigative techniques. Landmark investigations included the Poulson Affair, corruption in the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, the exposure of the shadowy and violent far-right group Combat 18 and, most notably, a long campaign which resulted in the release from prison of the Birmingham Six, six Irishmen falsely accused of planting Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombs in Birmingham pubs.

World in Action's appetite for controversy created tension with the official regulators, especially in the early decades, when the regulator had the power to intervene before broadcast. Sir Denis Forman, one of Granada's founders, wrote that there was "trench warfare" between the programme and the industry regulator, the Independent Television Authority (ITA), in the years between 1966 and 1969 as WIA sought to establish its journalistic freedoms.[1]

The most celebrated dispute was in 1973, over the banning of The Friends and Influence of John L Poulson, the definitive film about the Poulson Affair, itself one of the defining scandals of British political life in the 1960s. Poulson was an architect, who was jailed a year later for corrupting politicians and civil servants to advance his construction business. The regulator, which was by then the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), banned the film without seeing it and without giving official reasons other than "broadcasting policy". In retaliation, Granada broadcast a blank screen in protest (which bizarrely recorded the third highest TV audience of that week). After a public furore which saw newspapers as different as the Sunday Times and the Socialist Worker unite in condemnation of "censorship", the IBA held a second vote, having by then seen the film. By a single vote, the ban was lifted and the programme, retitled The Rise And Fall of John Poulson, was transmitted on April 30, 1973, three months after it was first scheduled.[6]

WIA was prepared to take on even the highly-secretive British intelligence services. It broke the stories of whistleblowers from GCHQ[7] and the Joint Intelligence Committee[8]. Perhaps its most explosive coverage of the secret state was The Spy Who Never Was, about the former MI5 officer Peter Wright, an extended edition aired in July 1984; Wright's subsequent, controversial book Spycatcher, banned in the UK by the government of Margaret Thatcher, was co-authored by one of the programme's producers, Paul Greengrass.

The series was rarely away from the courts and the threat of legal action. In 1980, members of the programme's staff and senior executives at Granada TV announced that they would be prepared to go to prison rather than submit to a House of Lords ruling[9] that the programme reveal the identity of an informant who had supplied WIA with 250 pages of secret documents from the then state-owned steel company British Steel[10]. British Steel was at the time locked in a controversial industrial dispute with its workforce.

In 1995, Susan O'Keeffe, a World in Action journalist, was threatened with prison in Ireland for refusing to reveal her sources. She had investigated scandals within the Irish meat industry in two films in 1991, setting in motion a three-year Tribunal of Inquiry in Dublin, which found that much of her criticism of the industry was substantiated. The Tribunal, though, demanded that she name her informants, and when she refused to do so, she was charged by the Irish Director of Public Prosecutions.[11] The case became a cause célèbre in the Irish Republic, and in January 1995 she faced trial for contempt of court but was cleared of the charge.[12] She was honoured in the 1994 Freedom of Information Awards for her stand.[13]

In its last few years, the programme was involved in two high-profile libel cases. It won the first (along with The Guardian) against the former Conservative Cabinet Minister Jonathan Aitken, and lost the second, against the high street chain Marks & Spencer.[14]

On April 10, 1995, Jonathan Aitken called a televised press conference three hours before the transmission of a World in Action film, Jonathan of Arabia, demanding that allegations about his dealings with leading Saudis be withdrawn.[15] In a phrase that would come to haunt him, Aitken promised to wield "the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play... to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism."[16] Aitken was subsequently sentenced to 18 months in prison for perjuring himself in the libel case.[17]. World in Action followed the collapse of Aitken's libel case with a special edition whose title reflected the MP's claim to wield the "sword of truth". It was called The Dagger of Deceit.

[edit] Television techniques

Although the series' lasting reputation is for its investigative work, it also led the way in introducing other techniques to mainstream TV. In 1984, years before reality programming became the staple diet of the TV schedules, World In Action caused a sensation by challenging a rising young Conservative Member of Parliament, Matthew Parris, to live for a week on a £26 unemployment benefit payment to test the reality of his own critical views on the unemployed.[18] (Parris subsequently abandoned Parliament for a distinguished career as a broadcaster and writer.) The same year, WIA revealed the tricks behind political oratory by coaching a complete beginner, Ann Brennan, to deliver a speech which won a standing ovation at the annual conference of the Social Democratic Party, using techniques developed by Professor Max Atkinson. The eminent political commentator Sir Robin Day, covering the conference for BBC television, described Mrs Brennan's performance as "The most refreshing speech we’ve heard so far."

WIA helped to pioneer the current fashion for using miniature covert cameras, not just in investigative work, such as Donal MacIntyre's award-winning programmes in October 1996 on the illegal drug trade, but also in social documentary, including the future Conservative MP Adam Holloway's disturbing reports on the reality of life among the homeless in 1991.

World In Action gave rise to a number of spin-off series, most famously the Seven Up! documentaries which have followed the lives of a group of British people who turned seven years old in 1963. The most recent, 49 UP, was shown in 2005. Michael Apted directed most episodes; parallel series have also started in the last decade in South Africa, the USA and Russia. ITV's popular consumer series, House of Horrors, in which shoddy builders are invited to carry out minor repairs to a house festooned with covert recording devices, originated on World In Action.

World in Action's hard-hitting style and undercover techniques are sometimes cited as a template for 21st century British current affairs series, especially the MacIntyre series on BBC TV and five tv; and Channel 4's Dispatches strand, which is commissioned by Dorothy Byrne, a former WIA producer.

[edit] WIA and popular culture

One of the programme's hallmarks was its willingness to embrace popular culture, at a time when its competitors preferred a more highbrow approach. One of the very earliest editions reported on overspending at the Ministry of Defence in the style of a contemporary gameshow, Beat The Clock. The programme was so controversial it was banned from being shown on ITV by the then regulatory body, the Independent Television Authority (ITA); instead, ten minutes of it were shown on the BBC as an act of journalistic solidarity.[2] The gameshow device re-emerged in 1989, when an academic study of the uptake of tax-funded benefits by the middle-class was transformed into a mock quiz show named Spongers, fronted by a well-known star of game formats, Nicholas Parsons.

Popular music played a significant role in WIA's history. An early edition, in 1966, carried a fly-on-the-wall account of daily life aboard one of the then pirate radio ships, Radio Caroline, at a time when the British Government was determined to preserve the radio monopoly of the BBC by driving the "pirates" off the air.

In 1967, a young researcher named John Birt established his early reputation by persuading the rock star Mick Jagger to appear on World in Action[19] to debate youth culture and his recent drug conviction, with Establishment figures, including William Rees-Mogg of The Times, who had written a famous editorial defending the singer. Jagger so enjoyed the experience that he invited the Granada team to film The Rolling Stones at the band's famous 1969 free concert in Hyde Park, London. The resulting film, The Stones In The Park,[20] was one of the iconic concert films of the Sixties. John Birt rapidly moved on to edit World in Action and eventually run the BBC as its Director-General.

The rise of Thatcherism and the misery of mass unemployment saw WIA examining the phenomenon through the eyes of another emerging band, UB40, in A Statistic, A Reminder (1981), a line taken from one of the band's songs. Six years later, a special edition of the programme was devoted to the Irish rock band U2 and their charismatic front man Bono. Like The Rolling Stones before them, U2 allowed World in Action to film one of their classic concerts in 1987 in Ireland. This footage, shot by the future Hollywood director Paul Greengrass, was shown only once and has never been repeated because of copyright restrictions, although it does circulate among fans of the band as a bootleg.

In 1983, Stevie Wonder, at the height of his popularity, gave the programme a musical exclusive when he agreed to let a World in Action crew record him performing an unreleased song, written to help the Democratic politician Jesse Jackson's electioneering, for The Race Against Reagan.[21] Another popular singer, Sting, appeared in a more critical World in Action episode, which questioned the effectiveness of his Rainforest Foundation.[22]

Perhaps the most bruising encounter between WIA and popular entertainment was the 1995 film Black and Blue which featured a covert recording of a performance by the veteran comedian Bernard Manning as the star of a charity function organised by the Manchester branch of the Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers. Manning's racist and homophobic performance, loudly applauded by those present, caused outrage when WIA broadcast excerpts, sparking an intense debate about the willingness of British police officers to embrace a diverse culture.[23]

[edit] Leading contributors

[edit] Journalists

World in Action employed many leading journalists, among them John Pilger; Michael Parkinson; Gordon Burns; Nick Davies, Ed Vulliamy and David Leigh of The Guardian; Alasdair Palmer of the Sunday Telegraph; John Ware, BBC Panorama's leading investigative reporter; Anthony Wilson, whose second career as a music impresario was immortalised in the feature film 24 Hour Party People; Michael Gillard, creator of the Slicker business pages in the satirical magazine Private Eye; Donal MacIntyre; the writer Mark Hollingsworth; Quentin McDermott, since 1999 a leading investigative reporter for Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Australia; and Andrew Jennings, author of Lords of the Rings, who has campaigned vigorously for more than a decade against corruption in international sport.

Gavin MacFadyen, Director of Investigative Reporting at the UK Centre for Investigative Journalism[24], was a producer on the early series of World In Action. He is also a tutor in investigative journalism at the National Film and Television School.

Two former World in Action journalists uncovered one of the biggest broadcasting scandals of the 1990s.[25] Laurie Flynn, a central figure in the British Steel papers case, and Michael Sean Gillard revealed that large parts of a 1996 Carlton TV documentary, The Connection, about drug trafficking from Colombia, had been fabricated. Flynn and Gillard's exposé in The Guardian in May 1998 led to an inquiry and a record £2 million fine for Carlton from the then regulator, the Independent Television Commission (ITC),[26] as well as provoking a passionate debate about truthfulness in broadcast journalism.[27] [28]

[edit] Presenters

Unusually for a current affairs programme, WIA's standard format was as a voice-over documentary without a regular reporter, although a handful of WIA journalists did appear in front of camera, including Gordon Burns, John Pilger, Gus Macdonald, Anthony Wilson, Nick Davies, Adam Holloway and Donal MacIntyre. Guest presenters were used on rare occasions, among them Jonathan Dimbleby, Sandy Gall, Martyn Gregory, Sue Lawley and Lynn Faulds Wood. Perhaps its most celebrated guest presenter was the distinguished American anchorman Walter Cronkite, who came out of retirement to cover the 1983 British General Election for the series.[29]

[edit] Directors

The series was known for its gritty visual style, and a number of its directors went on to work on major projects. Paul Greengrass, director of the feature films United 93 and The Bourne Supremacy and of the drama-documentaries Bloody Sunday and The Murder of Stephen Lawrence, cut his directing teeth on the series, as did Michael Apted, director of Coal Miner's Daughter, Gorillas in the Mist and the James Bond film The World is not Enough, as well as the Seven Up! documentaries. John Smithson[30] and David Darlow, who set up the production company responsible for the feature films Touching The Void and Deep Water[31], worked together at World in Action. Leslie Woodhead[32], director of The Stones In The Park and regarded by many as a founder of the drama-documentary movement,[33] worked on the series as a producer and executive.

Among the most recent generation of film-makers to emerge from World in Action were Alex Holmes[34], who became editor of the BBC2 documentary strand Modern Times and went on to write and direct the Bafta-winning dramatised documentary series Dunkirk for the BBC; and Katy Jones, a former WIA producer, who became a key collaborator with the celebrated screen writer Jimmy McGovern as a producer on his award-winning drama-documentaries Hillsborough and Sunday.

[edit] Broadcasters

WIA was a starting point for several key programme-makers who went on to major roles in British broadcasting. The most famous, John Birt, became Director-General of the BBC, having also been Programme Controller of the former London ITV franchise LWT, where he created another iconic current affairs series, Weekend World.[35]

Several WIA staffers were promoted to significant roles in Granada Television, among them David Plowright[36], who became its chairman and later went on to become deputy chairman of Channel 4. Steve Morrison became chief executive at Granada. Gus Macdonald held the same role at another ITV franchise, Scottish Television.

Stuart Prebble, a former editor, became chief executive of ITV, and Steve Anderson became Head of News and Current Affairs for that channel. Both have since moved on to the independent production industry. Ian McBride, who led the team which made the Birmingham Six programmes, became Managing Editor of Granada TV and is now Director of Compliance for ITV.

Dorothy Byrne, a former WIA producer, is Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel 4. Julian Bellamy, who worked as a young researcher on one of WIA's last big foreign investigations - about arms deals between Britain and Indonesia[37] - later headed up Channel 4's entertainment channel E4 before becoming programme controller of the BBC digital channel BBC3.

[edit] TV production companies

A number of WIA veterans went on to set up and run their own independent television production companies. Claudia Milne founded twentytwenty tv, which made a successful current affairs strand for ITV, The Big Story, as well as popular factual series such as Bad Boys' Army' on ITV and That'll Teach 'Em on Channel 4. David Darlow and John Smithson founded the Darlow Smithson company, responsible for Black Box, The Falling Man and Touching The Void, among many factual programmes. Brian Lapping set up the much-garlanded Brook Lapping company, which made The Death of Yugoslavia and many other landmark contemporary history programmes. Stuart Prebble, a former editor of World In Action, runs Liberty Bell, best known for the popular Grumpy Old Men series on the BBC. Another former editor, Steve Boulton, started an eponymous company, which made Young, Nazi & Proud, a Bafta-winning profile of the young British National Party activist Mark Collett.

One of the biggest new independent production companies is All 3 Media, which controls several other leading companies, including Mersey Television, makers of Hollyoaks. It is run by Steve Morrison, a former WIA producer.

[edit] Political connections

A number of British Parliamentarians have World In Action on their curriculum vitae. The most recent is the Conservative MP Adam Holloway, elected to the House of Commons in 2005. The British Cabinet Ministers Jack Straw and Margaret Beckett worked on World in Action as researchers. Chris Mullin, Labour MP for Sunderland South, played a major role in the programme's campaign on behalf of the Birmingham Six. Gus Macdonald, now Baron Macdonald of Tradeston, and from 1998 to 2003 a Government Minister, was formerly an executive on the programme. John Birt (by then ennobled as Baron Birt), was appointed personal advisor to the British Prime Minister Tony Blair in 2001.

[edit] Editors

Editors of the programme (sometimes with the title of Executive Producer) were, successively, Tim Hewat, Derek Granger, Alex Valentine, David Plowright, Jeremy Wallington, Leslie Woodhead, John Birt, Gus Macdonald, David Boulton, Brian Lapping, Ray Fitzwalter, Allan Segal, Stuart Prebble, Nick Hayes, Dianne Nelmes, Charles Tremayne, Steve Boulton and Jeff Anderson. Anderson also became editor of World in Action's replacement Tonight, before becoming Head of Current Affairs at ITV in 2006. Mike Lewis, a former WIA producer, was appointed editor of Tonight in October 2006.

[edit] Academic connections

Professor Brian Winston, Pro-Vice Chancellor (External Relations) at the University of Lincoln, who has also held leading posts at the Universities of Westminster, Cardiff, Pennsylvania State and New York, was a researcher and producer in the early series of World in Action.

Ray Fitzwalter, WIA's longest-serving editor and the man behind the ground-breaking Poulson investigations, became a Visiting Fellow at the University of Salford School of Media, Music and Performance. David Leigh, who made Jonathan of Arabia, the film which provoked Jonathan Aitken's self-destructive libel action, [38] was made Britain's first Professor of Reporting at City University, London, in September 2006.

[edit] Camera work

Although a great many producers, journalists and editors passed through the programme, one cameraman played an overwhelming role in shaping the appeal of the series. George Jesse Turner, born on the Lancashire coast, close to Granada's roots, served on the programme from 1966 until its end. By his own count, he shot the principal footage for some 600 of its 1,400 editions, as well as filming all of Michael Apted's documentaries in the Seven Up! series.[3] Turner was shot himself - in the backside - by an Israeli bullet whilst filming a clash between Fatah guerrillas and the Israeli Army in 1969.[4] Shortly before he retired from Granada, Turner was honoured by Bafta in 1999 for his work as a documentary cameraman.

[edit] Title sequence

The programme's distinctive identity owed much to its striking title sequence. The music, based on a descending series of organ chords, was called Jam for World in Action and was written by Jonathon Weston. The programme's logo, and the centrepiece of its titles, was the famous Leonardo da Vinci drawing, the Vitruvian Man.

[edit] External links

[edit] Books and articles

  • Peter Goddard (2004), 'World in Action', in Glen Creeber (ed.), Fifty Key Television Programmes, London: Arnold.
  • Jonathan Aitken (2003), Pride and Perjury, London: Continuum International Publishing Group - Academi.
  • George Jesse Turner, Jeff Anderson (2000), Trouble Shooter: Life Through The Lens of World in Action's Top Cameraman, London: Granada Media.
  • Luke Harding, David Leigh and David Pallister (1997), The Liar: The Fall of Jonathan Aitken, London: Penguin Books Ltd.
  • Denis Forman (1997), Persona Granada, London: Andre Deutsch
  • Jonathan Margolis (1996), Bernard Manning, London: Orion Books
  • Chris Mullin (1990), Error of Judgement: Birmingham Bombings, Dublin: Poolbeg Press.
  • Ray Fitzwalter, David Taylor (1981), Web of Corruption: The Story of J. G. L. Poulson and T. Dan Smith, London: Granada.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Denis Forman, Persona Granada, p. 222
  2. ^ Denis Forman, Persona Granada pp. 216-7
  3. ^ George Jesse Turner & Jeff Anderson, Trouble Shooter, p. viii
  4. ^ George Jesse Turner & Jeff Anderson, Trouble Shooter, pp. 7-13
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