which have followed the lives of a group of British people who turned seven years old in 1963. The most recent, 49 UP, was shown in 2005. Michael Apted directed most episodes; parallel series have also started in the last decade in South Africa, the USA and Russia. ITV’s popular consumer series, House of Horrors, in which shoddy builders are invited to carry out minor repairs to a house festooned with covert recording devices, originated on World In Action.
More recent current affairs series on other channels, such as the MacIntyre series on BBC and Five, and Channel 4’s Dispatches, commissioned by Dorothy Byrne, a former WIA producer, may be seen as having inherited certain aspects of World in Action’s hard-hitting journalistic style. World In Action and popular culture
One of the programme’s hallmarks was its willingness to embrace popular culture, at a time when its