Whicker's World

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.