Origins
World in Action was the pre-eminent current affairs program 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 program makers under Granada's founder Lord Sidney Bernstein.
Some of the dominant 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 his World In Action successor David Plowright: but also Jeremy Isaacs, Michael Parkinson, John Birt and Gus Macdonald and, its most long-serving executive-producer, Ray Fitzwalter. World In Action trained generations of journalists and, in particular, film-makers. Michael Apted worked on the original Seven Up. Paul Greengrass, who spent ten 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 programs, it was World in Action "slamming into the subject of each edition without wordy prefaces from a reassuring host-figure" which consistently gained a reputation for the kind of original journalism and film making which 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 Action's style was the opposite to its urbane BBC rival's, 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."
World in Action out-lasted all of its contemporaries in ITV current affairs, killed off as the commercial pressures on the network grew with the arrival of multi-channel TV in the UK. Eventually World In Action, too, was removed from the schedules by its own creator, Granada TV, following pressure from the ITV Network Centre. World In Action, with its worldwide view and coverage, was replaced in the schedules by Tonight.
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Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)
“Grown onto every inch of plate, except
Where the hinges let it move, were living things,
Barnacles, mussels, water weeds—and one
Blue bit of polished glass, glued there by time:
The origins of art.”
—Howard Moss (b. 1922)