Whicker's World

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.