World in Action - Investigative Legacy

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 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 Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), the official regulator during most of the series run, which 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 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 furore 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, retitled The Rise and Fall of John Poulson, was transmitted on April 30, 1973, three months after it was first scheduled.

In January 1980 the programme examined the business practices of the then chairman of Manchester United F.C., 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 Navy over its recruitment practices: senior Navy personnel famously 'door-stepped' the director of the World In Action's 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 he and colleagues 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 Mrs 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 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 steel company British Steel. British Steel 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. She 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 (along with The Guardian) against the former Conservative Cabinet Minister Jonathan Aitken, and lost the second, against the high street chain Marks & Spencer.

On April 10, 1995, Jonathan 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 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.