World in Action - Television Techniques

Television Techniques

Although the series' lasting reputation is for its investigative work, it also led the way in introducing other techniques to mainstream TV. In 1971, years before reality programming became the staple diet of the TV schedules, World In Action challenged the Staffordshire village of Longnor to quit smoking, a forerunner of many of the popular-challenge documentaries which enjoyed success in the 21st Century reality boom.

In 1984, World In Action caused a sensation by challenging a rising young Conservative Member of Parliament, Matthew Parris, to live for a week on a £26 unemployment benefit payment to test the reality of his own critical views on the unemployed. (Parris subsequently abandoned Parliament for a career as a broadcaster and writer.) The same year, World In Action revealed the tricks behind political oratory by coaching a complete beginner, Ann Brennan, to deliver a speech which won a standing ovation at the annual conference of the Social Democratic Party, using techniques developed by Professor Max Atkinson. The eminent political commentator Sir Robin Day, covering the conference for BBC television, described Mrs Brennan's performance as "The most refreshing speech we've heard so far."

World In Action helped to pioneer the technique of using covert cameras, not just in investigative work but also in social documentary, including, from the earliest days, the treatment of gypsies, the old in care ("Ward F13") and poverty in England. The arrival of high-quality miniature cameras allowed ambitious projects such as Donal MacIntyre's award-winning programmes in October 1996 on the illegal drug trade, and the future Conservative MP Adam Holloway's disturbing reports on the reality of life among the homeless in 1991. In 1998 "World in Action" took advantage of the new technology to equip an entire house with secret cameras hidden in anything from coke tins to fish tanks to catch out shoddy builders. The success of the two-part series called "House of Horrors" produced by Kate Middleton, led not only to the ITV series "House of Horrors" and to the BBC's "Rogue Traders" but to a whole new genre of programming, around the world, based around hidden camera footage of dodgy tradesmen.

World In Action also gave rise to a number of other spin-off series, most famously the Seven Up! documentaries which have followed the lives of a group of British people who turned seven years old in 1963. The most recent, 56 UP, was shown in 2012. Michael Apted directed most episodes; parallel series have also started in the last decade in South Africa, the USA and Russia.

More recent current affairs series on other channels, such as the MacIntyre series on BBC and Five, and Channel 4's Dispatches, commissioned by Dorothy Byrne, a former WIA producer, may be seen as having inherited certain aspects of World in Action's hard-hitting journalistic style.