World in Action – Waterwell Drilling Rig – china Top Head Drive Drilling System
Origins
World in Action was the pre-eminent current affairs program produced by Britain’s ITV Network in its first 50 years. Along with This Week, Weekend World, First Tuesday, The Big Story and The Cook Report – and the news-gathering of ITN – World in Action gave ITV a reputation for quality broadcast journalism to rival the BBC’s output.
For the first 35 years of its existence, ITV had a near-monopoly of television advertising revenue. Roy Thomson, who ran Scottish Television famously described ITV as a “licence to print money”. In return for this income, the broadcasting regulator insisted that the ITV companies broadcast a proportion of their programmes as public service TV. Out of this was born the network’s reputation for serious current affairs, eagerly grabbed by program makers under Granada’s founder Lord Sidney Bernstein.
Some of the dominant figures