Whicker's World

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?

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.