THE six-seater “Dove” aircraft that whisks the World in Action team across Europe is once more standing by, ready to fly off at a moment’s notice.

For World in Action returns to your screens on Tuesday.

The pilot is Capt. Jack Walters — a 34-year-old veteran of some 7,000 flying hours in 50 different types of aircraft. He has been conveying World In Action for the last four years and has taken them as far north as the Faroe Islands, east to Copenhagen, and south to Rome.

But to come down to earth — to London’s Golden Square, to be exact. It is a Tuesday: the World In Action team are in real action—preparing one of their “panic” editions for transmission that night.

Directing operations as smoothly as a master mariner is Alex Valentine — a broad, forceful 41-year-old Scotsman in a black crew-cut sweater. He smokes incessantly, and fortifies himself with endless cups of coffee.

He told me: “There have been, and I’m afraid will be, many ‘panic’ programmes. They’ve become part of our life. Some programmes come out sub-standard, so we scrap them. Or topical programmes fall down overnight — like the time Cassius Clay had a hernia and couldn’t fight.

“So then, we have to think and act quickly. We have to do a week’s work in two days. It’s impossible, of course, but somehow it gets done.”

He pointed to two camp beds in the office. “Those,” he said, “are the most important properties here — and coffee!”

He went on: “Physically, this job is a backbreaker, for all 32 of us. I’ve never seen so many dawns in my life, I don’t mind telling you.”

Basically, World In Action has four producers with four units working on four different programmes, here and abroad. When “panic” time comes, everyone who is available drops whatever he is doing and comes to Golden Square.

World In Action has been in existence for 764 days. They have screened 80 programmes from 24 different countries, and shot over three-quarters of a million foot of film.

“The thing is,” Alex said, “that you’ve got to be prepared to shoot two programmes, to get one on the air. On any ‘panic’ story, you’ve got to get at least 5,000 foot of film out of our library as an insurance, as a stand-by, in case what you get on the spot doesn’t work. You may never use a foot of it. Like the ‘Man In The Trunk’ case — the suspected spy who was about to be flown, doped, to Egypt.

“When this story blew up, I decided it was big enough to justify a ‘panic.’ We scrapped what we were working on, and I took the first night flight to Rome.

“The co-operation I got from the Italian police was fantastic. In less than two days they had built me an exact replica of the trunk and they used all their resources to make up a complete and detailed reconstruction of all aspects of the crime.”

Assistant to Alex Valentine on World In Action is Peter Heinze. He is one of three “fixers” — the back-roomers who do anything from obtaining £500 [£8,100 in today’s money, allowing for inflation – Ed] in Vietnamese money at the flick of an eyebrow to getting 10,000 toy soldiers delivered by the next post.

For “The Great Train Robbery,” for example, they hired the privately-owned Bluebell Line in Sussex for two days.

The biggest “panic” of all?

“John Bloom, I should think,” said Peter. “At the time of his empire’s collapse, we didn’t start on the programme until Sunday, for Tuesday transmission. Somehow, we managed to recall all our four producers and camera crews.

“We shot ‘around it,’ as best we could. We had to think of every possible background angle, in case we didn’t get Bloom himself. Once we had committed ourselves to it, we had no alternative.

“We kept ringing Bloom day and night. He kept saying … ‘Well, I’ll think about it. I’ll think about it …’ We never got him. Well, that’s the way it goes.”

ABOVE is the team which brings you World In Action. Below is a key to the jobs they do.

1 and 6, Assistant cameramen; 2 and 9, Cameramen; 3, Recordist; 4, Driver; 5, Assistant recordist; 7, Co-pilot; 8, Pilot; 10, Assistant editor; 11, Editor; 12, Librarian; 13, 14 and 15, Production office staff; 16, Secretary to executive producer; 17, 18, 22, 26, Four researchers; 19, 20, 27, 28 Four producers; 21, Executive producer; 23, Projectionist; 24, Assistant dubbing editor; 25, Editor; 29, Dubbing editor; 30, Assistant editor; 31, Production assistant; 32. Commentator.

The post Panic stations – for World in Action appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

CLANG! Yes. World in Action certainly rang the bell with Seven Up — that delightful keyhole glimpse of the men and women who’ll be running Britain in the year 2,000.

“Please,” pleaded thousands of viewers. “Please may we see it again?” And Granada is happy to oblige at 9.40 on Wednesday.

This 45-minute programme, which came out of the blue in May this year, had such a stunning impact that TV people have already come to recognise it as a classic.

Seven Up was derived from the fact that today’s seven-year-olds will be running the country at the turn of the century. And a famous quote that goes: “Give me a child of seven and I will give you the man “

The idea was put up by award-winning Canadian drama producer Paul Almond. And those journalistic “hard cases” who cover the world’s trouble spots for World in Action were unable to resist it.

The programme’s present executive producer Alex Valentine, told me: “Standards on World in Action are perpetually high, but now and again, a programme rings the bell. This was one of them.”

Almond interviewed dozens of seven-year-olds from all branches of society. A boy from Liverpool’s middle-class suburbs. A girl from the Surrey stockbroker belt. A boy from a children’s home. Two girls from London’s East End. A farmer’s son from the Yorkshire Dales.

Their views on life are not just sensational — they are of vital importance in taking the pulse of the next generation.

Their outlook is amazingly decisive for seven-year-olds. They speak frankly on love, leisure, marriage, education, money. The Beatles.

Like the young toff who had dabbled in stocks and shares but found the city page “frankly, quite boring ”

Other kids expounded, “I think The Beatles are mad.” “I have a girl friend but I don’t think very much of her.”

One seven-year-old wanted to be a jockey. Another a missionary.

The response from viewers was tremendous and immediate. A number rang the TV centre on the same night of the programme asking if they could adopt the little boy from the children’s home. “These calls were genuine and the people were very sincere,” said Alex Valentine.

A mammoth post arrived. Education authorities wanted to borrow the film to show in teacher-training colleges. A children’s hospital asked if they could show it to their student nurses.

If you missed this programme and your mouth is watering, you can judge for yourself on Wednesday.

The post Young World in Action appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

LIKE a snow-covered volcano that has fumed impatiently for weeks below the surface, World in Action could shake everyone when it erupts for the third time on Tuesday.

The six-week break between the last series and the new was meant to be a holiday for its globe-trotting team of reporters and cameramen.

Instead, World in Action‘s sensitive fingers have been on the pulse of every major international story that has broken since the end of July.

Some holiday! When the Vietnam crisis broke in the evening papers, a World in Action team flew out to Indo-China at midnight the same night.

In the hair-raising fortnight that followed, producer Mike Hodges and cameraman Mike Boultbee were ambushed in the jungle while on a river patrol and almost blown to pieces in their hotel.

I met the two Mikes the day they arrived back in London, sunburned and travel weary from their trip half-way round the world.

Hodges told me of their march through Vietnam to the 17th Parallel with an American jungle patrol.

“We were trudging down a jungle track,” he told me. “when suddenly we were met by a hail of bullets — right from nowhere. All we could see was trees and greenery.”

“Our American friends fired back speedily while Mike Boultbee, risking life and limb — leapt in front of the soldiers to snatch the film we wanted.

“We didn’t give chase. There was no point when you consider it takes three days to cover a quarter-of-a-mile in jungle territory.

“On another trip into the interior with a river patrol boat, we were nearly blown out of the water by a mine.

“Lucky escape number three came when the cinema next door to our hotel was blown up by a home-made bomb. On all the occasions, both soldiers and civilians were lucky to escape death.

“The only time I felt safe was on a helicopter raid on Mekon Delta. At least we were in the air with the guerillas on the ground!

“Apart from that other occasion, I was expecting to be shot or blown to pieces at any moment. It was the most nerve-racking experience I have ever encountered.

“The Americans afforded us every protection, but if you stopped a bullet it was purely at your own risk.”

Next, I spoke to the programme’s executive producer, 40-year-old Alex Valentine, a rugged, good-humoured Scot of Italian extraction.

Alex graduated to the top of this go-anywhere, do-anything outfit after years in top-flight journalism.

“The programme thrives on a get-up-and-go technique,” he told me, “so this has been no holiday for any of us. The team was always on tap — never more than a telephone call away.

“Our lightweight camera gear — carefully weighed and packed — means that we can fly off to any spot on the globe at a moment’s notice.”

What will be in the new series? “It wouldn’t be fair to tell you precisely what our programmes will cover,” said Alex, “in case we disappoint you by throwing them out at the last minute.

“But I can tell you that World in Action cameras have whirled in Indo-China, Malaysia, New York, Chicago and Washington — all during the past four weeks.

“In Vietnam, we played a waiting game in case the situation flared up. We played it the same way in Cyprus and Zanzibar earlier this year and it paid off.

“Our team, which had been in Cyprus for four weeks, snatched some valuable material before they were kicked off the island by the authorities.

“This sort of situation calls for nerve and shrewd handling. Try bull-dozing your way in Cyprus and Vietnam and you’re likely to end up with a bullet in your back.”

I asked Alex for the ingredients of a typical World in Action programme.

He told me: “It should be topical — we did the Beaverbrook story in six hours flat. And it should tell, in an interesting way, a great number of things that are not known to the public.

“In particular, we set out to expose falsehoods and commonly-accepted assumptions that are not true.

“The golden rule on World in Action is to take nothing on trust and always try to find out for yourself.”

The same thing might be said of Alex himself. A favourite yarn spun in the team’s “local” in London’s Soho recalls his dynamic coverage of the Lakonia shipping disaster.

When the story broke, Alex was in Cyprus. He was immediately told to cover the Athens end of the Lakonia story.

Then came a cable urging him to interview the Captain of the rescue ship, the Montcalm, in the Adriatic just off Venice.

There is no recognised flight from Athens to Venice so, like a true newspaperman, he “jumped” a plane from Athens to Zurich; boarded another from Zurich to Rome; sped from Rome to Venice by car; then hired a tug to find the Montcalm.

He boarded the Montcalm, interviewed the Captain and got his report safely away, all within the space of 48 hours.

Spectacular progress, even by World in Action standards!

The post Always in action! appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

“THIS,” said a member of the World in Action team wryly, “is not a show to work for if you like to sleep regularly and are fond of your family.”

“It’s the way newspapers used to be in the old days,” chipped in Alex Valentine (ex-Fleet Street) without a trace of nostalgia.

“It’s a dictatorship,” boomed Tim Hewat, the 35 year old Australian dynamo who heads the team as executive producer. “It has to be to get the right results.”

Youngest of all television’s current affairs programmes (it began only last January), World in Action has brought a new style of television journalism into existence.

There are no link-men or pundits. Stories break down into three categories — profiles, inquiries and exposes. “Tough, tireless noseyness in the best traditions of good journalism,” The Spectator called it.

Behind the scenes, it is the tirelessness that distinguishes the whole operation. On a story about airlines the team travelled thousands of miles in two days, passed through 19 customs posts in 58 hours. Sleep? “We snatched it where we could.” said [Bill] Grundy. “On the plane, on an airport seat, sometimes even in taxis.”

Stephen Peet, after working for several weeks on his sensational film of East Germany, saw it edited and cut and prepared for transmission. Then he drifted into the office the following Monday for what he thought would be “a quiet day to enjoy my triumph. I should have known better — I didn’t get home until 3 a.m.”

Alex Valentine had to get up at dawn every day for a week in order to film petrol tankers filling up with supplies for his story on the cut-price petrol war.

Hewat and another member of the production team (there are six producers including Hewat, aided by three researchers) sat up all night editing and cutting and writing the commentary for the story on gambling.

When the Zermatt typhoid story broke last March, Tim Hewat decided it was too hot to ignore.

Two camera teams flew to Switzerland and by train to Zermatt and Davos. On the advice of the Public Health Laboratory, they made them selves self-supporting. (“They mustn’t eat or drink anything while there,” warned an official. “They mustn’t even brush their teeth.”)

The team disembarked from the mountain railway at Zermatt with 67 pieces of equipment, to be met by hostile officials who refused their co-operation.

So while Hewat argued, his chief cameraman, David Samuelson, crept away with a silent camera and shot 600ft. of film. But by the time he returned, Hewat had talked the officials round. By Friday night, Hewat and his men were back from Switzerland and the job of cutting and editing began.

The post TOUGH and TIRELESS – that’s World in Action appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.

Smugglers are international: the Englishman, the Belgian, the Siamese, and the man from Andorra, high in the Pyrenees. Of course, they never meet. But they are partners in the trade which for every pound invested, pays the biggest profits of them all. They operate with sampans, with mules, with fast cars, and by plane. They smuggle anything from bullion to butter, from diamonds to opium.

To the smuggler it doesn’t matter what he carries; only the profit counts. And the profits are immense. For every year, according to Interpol – the international police organization – the smugglers of the world swindle the customs with such rich loads as: £300 million of gold, £100 million of drugs and narcotics, £30 million of diamonds, and £70 million of such highly taxed goods as cars, radios, and perfume.

Britain, as befits a nation of traders, is an active smuggling centre. The illegal import of watches alone tells the story. In 1963, the Customs seized watches valued at £200,000. But for every watch they confiscated, it is reckoned ten more got through. So, about £2,000,000 of watches were smuggled into Britain in one year. How?

Of the 20,000 people who arrive in Britain every day, most come by air. They are people like the businessman, the housewife, the holiday-tripper. They sit in the arrival lounge of London Airport awaiting their summons to the Customs. To the Customs officer this collection of passengers is fairly typical. The woman says she has nothing to declare, but in fact she has. For she fails to mention the new skirt bought in Paris for herself and the purse brought back as a present. The Customs man decides that this is a case of genuine misunderstanding, needing no more than a warning. The young man, the holiday-tripper, is next. Slung casually over his shoulder is an expensive new camera. He says he bought it last week just before leaving London. But he cannot produce a receipt. So he is taken away to see a senior officer who will find out if the camera was really bought in Britain, or whether it was another amateur attempt at smuggling – an activity many travellers consider fair sport, without realizing it is also a dangerous one. Coming to the businessman, the Customs officer decides to examine his suitcases carefully. He feels for hidden compartments in the lid and sides. Next he searches the contents. A first batch of watches is found between scooped-out hairbrushes. But the bigger haul comes from the tin of talcum. For, packed under a top layer of powder, are two dozen watches – a load which would earn a smuggler around £250.

The main watch smuggling routes from Switzerland into Britain are through Belgium and across France. To make watch smuggling profitable, and at the same time to keep the risks down, the professional smugglers try to bring in very big loads at a time.

One favoured way is to hide them in cars with specially built secret compartments. The holidaymakers’ car route from the Continent – the Cross-Channel ferries arriving at Dover – is used by the professional smugglers, hoping to pass undetected among the tourist cars. World in Action showed a special reconstruction of such an attempt being made:

A Customs man asks what there is to declare. The driver produces the normal 200 duty-free cigarettes. His brief-case yields no contraband. Nor does his luggage, brought out from the car. But the Customs man, having been told by the driver that he had come from Paris, spots yesterday’s date on a Swiss hotel bill. He calls over a colleague and a search of the car begins. First the boot, inch by inch, till a secret compartment containing boxes of watches is discovered. Then on to an inspection pit for a thorough look at the underside. The exhaust silencer and the petrol tank are tapped to make sure they are not dummies, too. Mirror and torch are used to look inside the wings to examine the upper side of the chassis. Then inside the car another secret compartment is uncovered. Here are 100 more watches, making a total haul of 250, worth around £4,000. Finally the driver himself is taken to a private office and searched.

Like all confiscated goods, the watches eventually find their way to a warehouse in London’s dockland. The door is number 007, but it belongs to the Queen’s Warehouse, not to James Bond. Here there are rooms crammed with thousands of pounds worth of contraband: cigars, cigarettes and leaf tobacco, wines and spirits, and, of course, watches. All the goods find their way on to the market in the end, for when the Warehouse is full the Customs auction them off to reputable dealers.

For nearly seven centuries the British have been building traditions in smuggling as eccentric as most of the nation’s other cherished traditions. Smuggling has been with us since 1275 when Edward the First first levied Customs Duty on the export of wool. As the levies increased in number the smuggler came into his own, mainly running brandy and wine from France at a handsome profit, and not hesitating to fight it out with the British Customs man if necessary. And because he supplied black market liquor at cheap prices the smuggler was popularly regarded as a hero not a criminal-an attitude which is still widespread.

In Britain today the Customs men no longer have to learn how to shoot it out with the smugglers. Instead they are scientifically taught such things as the design of ships, and where and how to search them. They are taught how to recognize all the apparatus of opium smoking, the pipe, the lamp, and the hard wooden pillow used by the addict. They are shown how cigarette lighters can be smuggled in body belts, how watches can be hidden away in hollowed-out books and shoes.

Britain, of course, has no monopoly on smuggling. It is a truly international racket. Indeed the smallest state would go bankrupt if it were not for smuggling. Sitting astride the snow-covered Pyrenees between France and Spain is Andorra, only 18 miles long and 12 miles wide. It has no income tax and even the fountains in the streets supply hot water, free. And it is a smuggler’s haven. For on either side are countries with high taxes on luxury goods. The shops of Andorra are stacked with cheap tax-free whisky, tax-free razors, tax-free lighters. But official frontier posts are closely watched and every car is searched.

There are, however, other routes into Spain. Late in January, 1964 World in Action cameras joined a smuggling expedition.

First we watched as goods, bought openly in Andorra’s tax-free shops, were assembled and stowed in packing cases. Cameras, sparking plugs for cars, cosmetics, and long-playing records-all high-tax luxuries in Spain today. From Andorra La Vella, the capital of the pocket republic, the packed crates were driven up the icy roads to a mountain village to be handed over to tough mountain men for the crossing over the 10,000 feet high Pyrenees. This particular load was worth £300 in Andorra. Its price just a few hard miles away over the mountains: £630 – more than double.

No one turned out to see our mule-train set off: for convoys such as this are a regular happening. And to Andorrans smuggling is just another way of earning a living. At the summit, the unposted frontier, there was a moment’s rest before the down-hill slither to our rendezvous on a Spanish mountain road, where the contact man from Barcelona was due to meet us. When he did arrive, he was at first, and not unnaturally, surprised and worried to find a camera team with the Andorrans. But the leader of the smugglers managed to reassure him. So we recorded the loading of the goods into the Spaniard’s van – though he prudently insisted that he cover up his number plates!

Without doubt the most loathsome though certainly the most profitable form of smuggling is the squalid traffic in drugs. In Far Eastern ports, such as Hong Kong, the Customs Officer’s main task is to try to stop this traffic, mainly in opium. A constant check is kept on all junks putting into port. But much of the opium still gets through. Some of it is smoked locally, sending its addicts into stupefied sleep. The remainder filters along the Dope Route to the West. Starting in far-off places like Siam (Thailand) further supplies are fed in from the poppy fields of Turkey. And thus to France where the stuff is processed into heroin and morphine, and then smuggled across the Atlantic to the main customers – the dope addicts of America.

Recent laws in America have made dope-peddling a crime almost as serious as murder. But many still consider the risks worth while. According to Interpol, an ounce of opium which is worth ten shillings in, say, Hong Kong or Turkey is worth £300 by the time it is refined in Europe, and no less than £1,500 an ounce to the drug addicts in New York.

The dope growers and exporters do not want payment in money. They prefer gold. So the other main smuggling route runs West to East. Gold flows out from America to France. Some is filtered to Turkey to pay for opium. But the main stream flows eastward via India to South-East Asia.

Certainly the oddest form of contraband in the world today is smuggled within an hour’s flight of any British airport. On the frontier, between Holland and Belgium is the small town of Kieldrecht, centre of a thriving industry for smuggling, of all things, butter.

One side of Kieldrecht is in Holland; and here butter costs sixty-four francs, fifty centimes a kilo – that’s 4/6 a pound. A few yards away is the Belgian frontier post. Here Customs Guards check all cars to see if they are carrying butter, for on the Belgian side of the border butter is heavily taxed and costs no francs a kilo-that’s 7/- a pound – half-a-crown more. Not that many housewives of Belgian Kieldrecht buy it at that price; they have only to walk around the corner, down a side-street where there is no customs post, and stroll into Dutch Kieldrecht to buy cheap butter.

But most Belgians don’t live near the frontier. So smugglers run van-loads of butter from Holland into the interior of Belgium, reckoning to make anything up to £100 for a two-hour drive. Once the van is loaded, as a World in Action reconstruction showed, the smuggler rigs an improvised but effective self-defence system against Customs patrol cars. Boxes are filled with nails soldered together in pairs in criss-cross fashion so that when they fall to the ground hundreds of sharp points stick upwards to puncture the tyres of the pursuing car. The boxes are set, ready to be tugged open by a piece of twine.

At nightfall, the vanload of butter is driven out of the garage, passing along quiet country lanes to cross the frontier into Belgium at one of the many places where there are no custom posts. The smuggler knows that even when well inside Belgium he cannot count himself safe from Customs cars on patrol. Such patrols in 1963 arrested 85 smugglers, confiscated 221 cars and seized half a million pounds of butter. Sometimes the smuggler wins. But, after all, it’s only butter. The pity is that too often it is the dope smuggler, quite apart from the gold smuggler, or the watch smuggler, who wins in this the most profitable business on earth.

The post Nothing to declare appeared first on THIS IS GRANADA from Transdiffusion.