Every season of Whicker's World ever, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best seasons of Whicker's World!

Papa Doc - The Black Sheep

Hatti was the world's first black republic, ruled from 1957 to 1971 by 'President For Life' Dr Francis Duvalier - Papa Doc. Whicker meets Papa Doc in his Presidential Palace at Port au Prince in the company of his Tontons Macoutes - murderous civilian thugs. This show won the Dumont International Journalism Award at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1971.

Papa Doc -The Black Sheep

Whicker In Stroessner's Paraguay - The Last Dictator

Alan Whicker comes face-to-face with the last of South America's old style dictators - Don Alfredo Stroessner who has been absolute ruler of Paraguay for 19 years. One Paraguayan in ten is sold to be a paid informer and the Minister of Information has admitted there are so many informers that they run out of information and have to make it up.

Whicker In Stroessner's Paraguay - The Last Dictator

Harold Robbins - I'm The World's Best Writer

Harold Robbins, 56 and five times married, is the orphan who became the world's best paid writer. In New York he takes Alan Whicker round the Devil's Kitchen district of his youth. This won the Best Interview Programme Award at 1973's Hollywood Festival of World Television.

Harold Robbins - I'm The World's Greatest Writer

I'd Like To Think I'm Nearer To God Than Frankenstein

In California they change faces as casually as we change clothes and cosmetic surgery is no longer only for the rich and famous. Whicker meets plastic surgeon Kurt Wagner and his wife Kathy, a walking example of his surgery skills.

I'd Like To Think I'm Nearer To God Than Frankenstein

I Haven't Taken My Own Shoes Off For 45 Years

Whicker arrives in Penang for the island's spectacular Thalpusam festival, where entranced pilgrims pierce themselves with giant spikes. He also meets a Scottish doctor still living in the style of the British Raj.

I Haven't Taken My Own Shoes Off For 45 Years

He's Been Hunted All His Life - Now He's Going To Rest In Peace

Butch Cassidy's sister Lula is alive and well and living in Utah, aged 94 and with a fund of fascinating stories. In Salt Lake City Whicker drives the hydrogen car, learns from Dinosaur Jim why these monsters face a new extinction, and sees the world's biggest man-made hole

He's Been Hunted All His Life - Now He's Going To Rest In Peace

Part 1 -   Whicker undertakes a risky assignment, hurtling around San Francisco in the back of a police car. The cops are women, fully armed and determined to prove they are worthy of the blue uniform. Please Note, this episode contains some strong language.

I Wear A Uniform And Pack A Gun But I'm Still A Woman

Part 2 -  San Francisco's 150,000 homosexuals are the city's largest unofficial minority. The Police Department has become the first in the US to knowingly recruit gay officers. Whicker gives an exclusive view of the first gay officers training and going on patrol.

If A Cop Wiggled Around With Pink Hair And A Limp Wrist It Would Discredit The Department

Alan Whicker investigates the aristocracy, talking to rich peers and land-owners, including the Baron of Guiseborough, the Baron of Faversham, Viscount Down, and George Howard (Castle Howard).

The Aristocracy Business

It’s the Chinese New Year’s Day and Alan Whicker focuses on a picturesque Chinese race and their strange ‘centuries-old’ pattern of life - the Boat People, whose homes, shops, restaurants and brothels (or ‘flower-boats’) all float.

Tankers/Boat People (Hong Kong)

The most dreaded island in the world has been undisturbed and decaying for a few silent years. Alan Whicker seeks out ex-convicts who survived the Island’s unspeakable cruelties, and parts the curtain on a grisly stage where 75,000 Bagnards lived, fought and died.

Devil’s Island

Alan Whicker discusses the coming of Disneyworld to Florida. The special magic of Disneyworld is explored and Whicker finds himself judged unacceptable by the tribe of ‘apostles’ preparing to spread pixie dust on ten million people a year.

Pixie Dust on the Goodie Goodie Land

This week Whicker discovers vienna and its people

Vienna - Come in Doctor Freud, All is Forgiven

Whicker is in the Great Central Desert of Australia and the mostly underground environs of Coober Pedy, the centre for Opal mining, the real outback that's for sure.

You Stopped Being a Pigeon When You Got Your Throat Cut

In this episode he looks at the way the lives of the black community has changed since the 1920's

Charleston, South Carolina - You Used to Call Me Boy, Now You Got To Call Me Mr Boy

Alan Whicker heads north to the spectacular landscpe of Alaska. It has the most hostile conditions in the world; Winter temperatures average minus 60 degrees, if there’s a wind, it can plummet below minus 100 degrees and the nights last two months.

Anchorage, Alaska - The Ultimate Dream, the Last Chance to Do it Right

Alan Whicker meets some of the 50,000 Britons that have made Los Angeles their home, drinking in English-style pubs and playing cricket. He interviews Christopher Lee and Peter Sellers and also meets that model of Englishness, Patrick Macnee, who admits he would like to die in Dorset.

Nothing is Utopia, This Comes Pretty Close

Alan Whicker joins the Sultan of Brunei (reputedly the richest man in the world) in his kingdom on the island of Borneo. He joins in the silver jubilee celebrations and meets the Sultan’s family and his army.

The Absolute Monarch

Whicker meets Percy Shaw who invented cats’ eye reflectors for roads. We discover how Percy Shaw was inspired on his way home from a pub named Rose Linda’s in Queensbury near Halifax in West Yorkshire, when he found himself guided by his car headlights reflecting off the tram lines.

The Road from Rose Linda's - Alan Whicker Meets the Cats Eyes-Man

Whicker looks at the cult of immortality in America, where people will pay $10,000 for the chance to live twice. They believe that while they are frozen for a century or two, science will find a way of re-animating them as medicine crosses new frontiers. A Michigan professor predicts it will become a trillion dollar industry. Twenty people are frozen already. On Long Island, Whicker talks to a Manhattan policeman, beside them, in a crate of dry ice, is his wife. His hope is that science will find a way to cure the cancer from which she died, and then invent a method of reviving her. On his death he will join her in the ‘freezatorium’. In the San Fernando Valley, Whicker meets the director of a scheme by which 20 bodies can be frozen in large tanks, liquid nitrogen preserves them in this frozen limbo and a salt solution replaces their blood.

Immortality Inc

Alan Whicker attends the 93rd running of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill's Downs track in Louisville, Kentucky. But the event is threatened when activists plan a programme of civil disobedience as a protest against the practice of residential segregation.

Conflict in Kentucky

Episode Segment on James Bond

Tonight we join 007 - Secret Agent and all-time box-office champion. We're on location in Japan with James Bond's latest £3-million epic "You Only Live Twice", which could be seen by 100 million cinemagoers. For Cubby Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, the two multi-millionaire producers, making a picture is an oriental headache, especially with Sean Connery, another millionaire and perhaps the best-known face in the world. You've got to think big for Bond films: to the tune of building a £400,000 volcano and then blowing it up!

The World Of James Bond

Whicker's World is an award-winning British television documentary series that ran from 1958 to 1994, presented by journalist and broadcaster Alan Whicker.

Originally a segment on the BBC's Tonight programme in 1958, Whicker's World became a fully-fledged television series in its own right in the 1960s. The series was first shown by the BBC until 1968, and then by ITV from 1969 to 1983, when it was produced by Yorkshire Television, in which Whicker himself was a shareholder. The series returned to the BBC in 1984, and to ITV again in 1992.

The Best Seasons of Whicker's World

The Best Seasons of Whicker's World

Season 1

Season 2

Season 3

Season 1967