ABSTRACT
Trevor Philpott has a File, James Cameron had a Country, Alan Whicker has a World. Obviously alliteration counts in the choice of titles, but of the three television reporters assigned regular, personally surnamed documentary series in recent years, it is Whicker who has gained the sort of prestige which in television terms most appears to justify his acquiring a World. How does this happen? What are the television terms in which it happens? and what constitutes ‘his’ World? This paper offers an examination of such questions by treating The World of Whicker as a case-study, and selecting certain typical features of it for discussion. That is, following the dialectical notion of typicality, the study does not move from-the-particular-to-the-general and search for common denominators, but takes an oscillatory course, selecting elements which, while being at once unique and peculiar to Whicker, may be taken as having ‘representative’ significance. The study then takes for its ‘case’, and the main focus of attention, the programmes ‘written and introduced by Alan Whicker’, and chosen from a television period between 1970 and 1971.1 It seeks to relate them to the ‘world’ of television: for they are both in and of that world, while at the same time belonging specifically to Whicker’s.
