From Bognor Regis to Bandos

In recent years I have been fortunate enough to be able to holiday in such glamorous, exotic and far-flung places as Tobago, Hawaii and the Maldives. I have been on cruises to Hawaii, Scandinavia and Mediterranean Europe: my work has taken me to Hong Kong (and, more prosaically, Scotland).  Rewind back as recently as the late 1980’s however, and a day-trip to France apart, I had never been abroad and I wasn’t alone in that. Whereas in 2010, fifty five million Britons went abroad (thirty six million of them travelled abroad on holiday), in 1980 it was just seventeen million and back in 1961/62 a meagre three million. [1]

Bandos in The Maldives

In the days when I was one of the majority who didn’t travel overseas, I would usually holiday on the South Coast with my parents, either at a holiday camp or guest house. The holiday camps had their spartan chalets, fixed meal sittings, their corny entertainment and forced jollity; the guest houses had shared bathrooms and the same fixed meal sittings, but tended to lack entertainment or jollity of any kind. Guest houses required their visitors to vacate the premises shortly after breakfast and not to return until tea-time. The vagaries of the British summer meant that a holiday staying at a guest house would necessitate many a day spent dodging the rain in cafes, cinemas or gaudy amusement arcades. Glamorous and exotic these holidays were not; the fact that they were not far-flung and therefore the travelling was not too onerous was one of the few points in their favour.

Guesthouses in Blackpool

If I didn’t visit anywhere exotic or glamorous in person, I did so by proxy however, and my guide was Alan Whicker, who sadly died aged 87[2] on 12^th July this year. Whicker was immediately identifiable; the thick rimmed glasses, the moustache, the somewhat mannered delivery and his attire (suit and tie, or on less formal occasions, the blazer) that made him an easy target for parody and impersonation. Who can forget the peerless Monty Python sketch, “Whicker Island”, a parody that asked “The whole problem of Whicker Island is here in a nutshell. There are just too many Whickers.”? Whicker spoofed the parody with his retort, that there were too many millionaires to interview and too few Alan Whickers!

Whicker’s genius was his ability to bring the lifestyles of the rich and famous and the colourful locations they inhabited, into our living rooms; the living rooms of the ordinary man, in a way that did not patronise an audience who were, by and large never likely to visit these locations or meet these mega-rich and famous interviewees. By doing so he educated us, entertained us and ultimately, enriched us.  In an era when the BBC’s remit was to “inform, educate and entertain,” Whicker achieved all three with an effortless grace that is beyond the powers of many presenters today.

Today we may watch any number of documentaries in which T-shirt and shorts clad presenters, presumably with the “edgy” approach so beloved of documentary makers these days, visit faraway settings; they scuba dive, abseil or climb mountains, interact with the locals but ultimately fail to engage us in the same way that Alan Whicker did. Admittedly Whicker worked in a different time; a time when Bali or Hawaii or Hong Kong were beyond the reach or budget of most of us, but whereas now we may watch a travel documentary and know that the destination is within our reach, his programmes were so much more aspirational.

The instantly recognisable Alan Whicker in his natural habitat, the equally recognisable Hong Kong.

Whicker’s programmes went beyond the travelogue however. He interviewed the great and the good (and the not so good), among them Joan Collins, Peter Sellers, the Sultan of Brunei and the Haitian president Papa Doc Duvalier. There was a hard, journalistic edge to his programmes that made them more than merely entertainment and which many of today’s travel documentaries lack. Whicker noted that, when interviewing Papa Doc, he asked the dictator questions that no Haitian would dare do. The dictator, far from taking offense (or worse), apparently joked with him.

While we now may still not necessarily have the opportunity to meet the famous or rich, we are much more likely to have the chance to visit the sort of places that Whicker presented from. The world has shrunk, thanks to affordable air travel and package holidays, but we owe a lasting debt of gratitude to a man who brought these places into our homes, who made us curious about these places and gave us the urge to travel to them and to savour them.

There have been times, for instance when sitting on the terrace of a Maldivian hotel sipping a cold drink, I have thought of Alan Whicker. The next time I have the opportunity to do so in such a location, I will raise a glass of something cold, bubbly and expensive in toast to the man who beyond all others, was king of the travel documentary, the man who made us aspire to holidays beyond the dubious delights of a guest-house on the South Coast!

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[1] Source: Office for National Statistics.

[2] Some sources are of the opinion that Whicker “lost” a few years from his age and was in fact 91 when he died.