World in Action
World in Action is a British investigative current affairs programme made by Granada Television for ITV and it remain for 35 years from 7 January 1963 until 7 December 1998. Its campaigning journalism frequently had a major impact on events of the day. Its production teams often took audacious risks, and the programme gained a solid reputation for its often-unorthodox approach. The series was sold around the world and won numerous awards. In its heyday, World in Action drew audiences of up to 23 million in Britain alone, equivalent to almost half the population.
Cabinet ministers fell to its probings. Numerous innocent victims of the British criminal justice system, including the Birmingham Six, were released from jail. Honouring the programme in its 50th anniversary awards the Political Studies Association 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." A melodramatic post-trial encounter in 1967 between Mick Jagger and senior British establishment figures, in which the rock star and his retinue were flown by helicopter onto the lawn of a stately home, was engineered by then World in Action researcher and future BBC Director-General John Birt. Decades later, Birt himself described it as "one of the iconic moments of the Sixties." Soon after she became Conservative Party leader, Margaret Thatcher was said to have told the BBC Director-General, Sir Ian Trethowan, that she considered World in Action to consist of "just a lot of Trots. Panorama, however, are bastards."
Its removal after 35 years was seen by some as part of a general dumbing down of British television and of ITV in particular. One commercial TV regulatory official privately characterised the Tonight programme, which replaced it, as merely "fluffy". Others saw World in Action's eventual disappearance as the inevitable consequence of rising commercial pressures. Announcing a £250,000 fund for an investigative journalism training scheme, Channel 4 said in November 2011 that a decline in the pool of investigative journalism had occurred since "the demise of training grounds such as World in Action".
Origins
World in Action was the pre-eminent current-affairs programme produced by Britain's ITV Network in its first 50 years. Along with This Week, Weekend World, TV Eye, First Tuesday, 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 the BBC's output.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". 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, eagerly grabbed by programme makers under Granada's founder, Lord Sidney Bernstein.
Some of the most prominent figures in 20th-century British broadcasting helped to create World in Action, in particular, Tim Hewat, "the maverick genius of Granada's current affairs in its formative years", and David Plowright, but also Jeremy Isaacs, Michael Parkinson, John Birt, and Gus Macdonald and its most long-serving executive producer, Ray Fitzwalter. The series developed the skills of generations of journalists, and in particular, filmmakers. Michael Apted worked on the original Seven Up!. Paul Greengrass, who spent 10 years on World in Action, 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." He later told The Guardian: "If there's a thread running through my career it's World in Action – the phrase as well as the programme."
Although its rivals produced many memorable programmes, World in Actions "slamming into the subject of each edition without wordy prefaces from a reassuring host-figure" consistently gained a reputation for the kind of original journalism and filmmaking that made headlines and won major awards. In its time, the series was honoured by all of the major broadcasting awards, including many BAFTA, the Royal Television Society, and Emmy awards.
World in Actions style was the opposite to its urbane BBC rivals, especially to the London BBC. By repute, especially in its early days, World in Action would never employ anybody who was on first-name terms with any politician. Gus Macdonald, an executive producer of the programme, said it had been "born brash". 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." Paul Greengrass told The Guardian in June 2008 that the chairman of Granada TV once told him: "Don't forget, your job's to make trouble."
The series outlasted all of its contemporaries in ITV current affairs, killed off as the commercial pressures on the network grew with the arrival of multichannel TV in the UK. Eventually, World In Action, too, was removed from the schedules by its own creator, Granada TV. On 7 December 1998, World in Action ceased operations for good after 35 years on air. It was replaced in the schedules by Tonight.
Investigative legacy
From the beginning, and especially from the late 1960s, World in Action 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, investigations into L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, and most notably, a long campaign that resulted in the release from prison of the Birmingham Six, six Irishmen falsely accused of planting Provisional Irish Republican Army bombs in Birmingham pubs.World in Actions appetite for controversy created tension with the Independent Broadcasting Authority, the official regulator during most of the series's run, which had the power to intervene before broadcast. Sir Denis Forman, one of Granada's founders, wrote that "trench warfare" existed between the programme and the industry regulator, the Independent Television Authority, in the years between 1966 and 1969 as World in Action sought to establish its journalistic freedoms.
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 then the IBA, banned the film without seeing it and without giving official reasons other than "broadcasting policy". As a protest, Granada broadcast a blank screen – which, bizarrely, recorded the third-highest TV audience of that week. After a public furor, which saw newspapers from the Sunday Times to 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, by then retitled The Rise and Fall of John Poulson, was transmitted on 30 April 1973, three months after it was first scheduled.
In January 1980, the programme examined the business practices of the then chairman of Manchester United football club, Louis Edwards. Edwards ran a wholesale butchery business that supplied schools in Manchester; WIA exposed practices of bribery of council officials and the supply of meat that was unfit for human consumption to such institutions; Edwards' businesses were subsequently prosecuted and lost their contracts. Louis Edwards himself died of a heart attack a month after the show was broadcast.
World in Action tackled the British intelligence services, as well as the Royal Navy, over their recruitment practices; senior navy personnel famously door-stepped the director of World in Actions film in question. The programme broadcast revelations by whistleblowers from both GCHQ, the government's electronic eavesdropping and surveillance headquarters, and from the Joint Intelligence Committee.
Its most audacious investigation of the intelligence community was, perhaps, an extended edition in July 1984 titled "The Spy Who Never Was", the confessions of a former MI5 officer, Peter Wright. Spycatcher, Wright's subsequent account of the period when his colleagues and he had, as he put it, "bugged and burgled our way across London", revealed what had in effect been a planned coup against the then-Labour government of Harold Wilson. Wright appeared to have been in charge of the technical side of things. "The Wilson plot", as it became known, was corroborated to varying degrees both before and after the film's transmission in various other books by journalists and in volumes of memoirs by others involved in the conspiracy. Wright's book was the most explosive of them all. Wright, embittered by a still-unresolved pension dispute, fled to Australia, where the book was written and finally published – to the fury of Margaret Thatcher – with the assistance of the original programme's chief researcher, Paul Greengrass. Publication in Britain was initially banned outright by the government of Margaret Thatcher.
The series was rarely away from the courts and the threat of legal action. The Scientologists tried – and failed – to stop World in Action's broadcasts about them through the courts, and 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 that the programme reveal the identity of an informant who had supplied WIA with 250 pages of secret documents from the then-state-owned British Steel Corporation which was at the time locked in an 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. The case became a cause célèbre in the Republic of Ireland, and in January 1995 she faced trial for contempt of court but was cleared of the charge. O'Keeffe was honoured in the 1994 Freedom of Information Awards for her stand.
In its last few years, the programme was involved in two high-profile libel cases. It won the first against the former Conservative cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken, and lost the second, against the high street chain Marks & Spencer.
On 10 April 1995, Aitken, himself a former journalist for Yorkshire Television, 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. 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." Aitken was subsequently sentenced to 18 months in prison for perjuring himself in the resulting libel case. 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.