World in Action

Ian Hunton talks about working on ‘World in Action’

World in Action was a regular visitor, once a week. They would come in on Sunday morning. Once it had left film? Once it had left film. It would be on various tapes. They had their own offline editors. We’d get a box of tapes and a little edit decision list for the computer. The…

Brian Blake talks about the different mix of staff that worked on ‘World In Action’

The team was always incredibly small, maybe sixteen, seventeen, eighteen of which eleven or twelve were producers, so about six researchers. We tended to get all the bread and butter stuff, the hard graft of hitting the phone and knocking on doors. Very rarely did you get abroad, all that began to happen much later…

Janice Finch recalls how she got to work on ‘World In Action’

I’d done this programme I was telling you about on airmen and desertion in World War Two, then I’d worked for eighteen months on a series about how the world was mapped called ‘The Shape of the World’. That sent me all over the world, amazing to think now, and was sponsored by IBM, so…

Janice Finch talks about the shift from film to tape and how it impacted on ‘World In Action’

This was a massive transformation as I said, where before they used to have eight people working on things with film this was now a three-man crew. I should say three person crew but I don’t think there were any camerawomen or sound recordists at the time I worked at Granada. It did mean I was…

Brian Blake talks about working on the ‘World In Action’ programme that covered the first British Gay Pride rally in London in 1972

It was the first gay rights civil march in London, to Hyde Park on a Saturday. We had two crews out, one followed a group of gay rights people from Liverpool and I went down to London and filmed the equivalent London group of people who were marching to Hyde Park. So it was filmed…

World In Action first aired in January 1963 and continued until December 7th 1998. During that time it raised a multitude of major issues and became known as one of the finest investigative documentary programmes ever produced. One of it strengths was that it rarely used a presenter with all questions being asked off camera.…