Whicker's World

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.