Despite his relatively young age—he was 37 when Whicker's World first started—Whicker quickly became known for his distinctive appearance and broadcasting style: an old-fashioned, stiff-upper-lip Englishman with "the neat moustache, the blazer or, in tropical climes, a Doug Hayward gabardine suit"[5] who was always "politely interested and innocently perplexed.

"[4] As much as this was also Whicker's off-camera fashion sense and manner of speaking, he soon realised that it was also an effective way of encouraging interviewees who might otherwise be hostile or suspicious to let their guard down—an approach which even extended to a policy of only ever asking questions in English.

"[6]Though Tonight was a magazine-style current affairs show with multiple presenters, Whicker's reports proved popular with viewers and were given extra prominence within only a few years.

Whicker's World began airing as a standalone show on BBC One on 16 October 1965 with "Plumes For My Rich Aunt", a half-hour report looking at the excesses of that year's Paris Fashion Week.

[26][2] Several of the episodes in Whicker's first ITV series looked at people and places in Yorkshire itself as a result—including interviewing Halifax native Percy Shaw (the inventor of cat's eyes), visiting elite horse trainers in Middleham, and attending a grouse shoot on the Glorious Twelfth.

While he often spoke with people from a wide range of social backgrounds and classes, some of his more wealthy or famous interviewees included actors Peter Sellers, Joan Collins, Britt Ekland, Liza Minnelli, and Christopher Lee, several former Maharajas of India, and various members of the British aristocracy.

Another two-part special, broadcast in 1993, was filmed at the 1992 Miss World competition at Sun City, South Africa, which Whicker participated in as one of the judges.

Perhaps his most famous episode (which "would make his name" according to Simon Calder[6]) was broadcast in 1969, when he became the first Western journalist to secure an extended face-to-face interview with Haitian dictator François "Papa Doc" Duvalier.

Included in this was a third visit to American plastic surgeon Dr. Kurt Wagner and his wife Kathy, whom Whicker had already made two programmes about in 1973 and 1980, and had considered among his favourite interviewees.

[citation needed] When the series returned to the BBC in 1984, "Newsweek", a piece composed by Graham de Wilde for KPM Musichouse, was used as the theme.

[28] Whicker's World was a huge ratings success in the UK, and one of the longest running series in the history of British television.

and "Conflict in Kentucky: My People Are More Important Than a Few Horses Running..."—on iPlayer, as well as Whicker's special edition of Tonight from 1963 where he interviewed Jean Paul Getty.

[38][39][40] Another full episode from 1968 ("A Handful of Horrors: I Don't Like My Monsters to Have Oedipus Complexes") is available as a bonus feature on the 2020 Blu-ray release of the Doctor Who serial "The Power of the Daleks".

[1] From May 2016 onwards Network also began releasing DVD sets of each successive ITV series with their episodes in chronological broadcast order, which also include one-off specials; for example, Whicker's interview with Papa Doc is included on the Whicker's New World DVD as it first aired midway through that series' original broadcast.

[54] In particular, his talent for ingratiating himself with "edgy" or "eccentric" subjects by adopting a seemingly-naive persona on location—contrasted with his deadpan narration recorded later during editing—has been cited as an influence on documentarians like Louis Theroux.