Honouring the programme in its 50th anniversary awards the Political Studies Association said, "World in Action thrived on unveiling corruption and highlighting underhand dealings.

"[1] A melodramatic post-trial encounter in 1967 between Mick Jagger and senior British establishment figures, in which the rock star and his retinue were flown by helicopter onto the lawn of a stately home, was engineered by then World in Action researcher and future BBC Director-General John Birt.

"[2] Soon after she became Conservative Party leader, Margaret Thatcher was said to have told the BBC Director-General, Sir Ian Trethowan, that she considered World in Action to consist of "just a lot of Trots.

Some of the most prominent figures in 20th-century British broadcasting helped to create World in Action, in particular, Tim Hewat, "the maverick genius of Granada's current affairs in its formative years",[7] and David Plowright, but also Jeremy Isaacs, Michael Parkinson, John Birt, and Gus Macdonald and its most long-serving executive producer, Ray Fitzwalter.

"[9] Although its rivals produced many memorable programmes, World in Action;s "slamming into the subject of each edition without wordy prefaces from a reassuring host-figure"[7] consistently gained a reputation for the kind of original journalism and filmmaking that made headlines and won major awards.

Landmark investigations included the Poulson affair, corruption in the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, the exposure of the shadowy and violent far-right group Combat 18, investigations into L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology, and most notably, a long campaign that resulted in the release from prison of the Birmingham Six, six Irishmen falsely accused of planting Provisional Irish Republican Army bombs in Birmingham pubs.

Sir Denis Forman, one of Granada's founders, wrote that "trench warfare" existed between the programme and the industry regulator, the Independent Television Authority, in the years between 1966 and 1969 as World in Action sought to establish its journalistic freedoms.

Spycatcher, Wright's subsequent account of the period when his colleagues and he had, as he put it, "bugged and burgled our way across London",[15] revealed what had in effect been a planned coup against the then-Labour government of Harold Wilson.

Wright, embittered by a still-unresolved pension dispute, fled to Australia, where the book was written and finally published – to the fury of Margaret Thatcher – with the assistance of the original programme's chief researcher, Paul Greengrass.

The Scientologists tried – and failed – to stop World in Action's broadcasts about them through the courts, and in 1980, members of the programme's staff and senior executives at Granada TV announced that they would be prepared to go to prison rather than submit to a House of Lords ruling[16] that the programme reveal the identity of an informant who had supplied WIA with 250 pages of secret documents from the then-state-owned British Steel Corporation[17] which was at the time locked in an industrial dispute with its workforce.

[22] In a phrase that would come to haunt him, Aitken promised to wield "the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play ... to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism.

In 1971, years before the rise of "reality" programmes on TV schedules, World in Action challenged the Staffordshire village of Longnor to quit smoking,[25][26] a forerunner of many of the popular-challenge documentaries that enjoyed success in the 21st-century reality-television boom.

The same year, World in Action revealed the tricks behind political oratory by coaching a complete beginner, Ann Brennan, to deliver a speech, which won a standing ovation at the annual conference of the Social Democratic Party, using techniques developed by Professor Max Atkinson.

Eminent political commentator Sir Robin Day, covering the conference for BBC television, described Mrs Brennan's performance as "[t]he most refreshing speech we've heard so far."

World in Action helped to pioneer the technique of using covert cameras, not just in investigative work, but also in social documentary, including, from the earliest days, the treatment of gypsies, the old in care ("Ward F13"), and poverty in England.

The arrival of high-quality miniature cameras allowed ambitious projects such as Donal MacIntyre's award-winning programmes in October 1996 on the illegal drug trade, and the future Conservative MP Adam Holloway's disturbing reports on the reality of life among the homeless in 1991.

In 1998, World in Action took advantage of the new technology to equip an entire house with secret cameras hidden in places from coke tins to fish tanks to catch out shoddy builders.

[28] The gameshow device re-emerged in 1989, when an academic study of the uptake of tax-funded benefits by the middle class was transformed into a mock quiz show named Spongers, fronted by a well-known star of game formats, Nicholas Parsons.

In 1983, Stevie Wonder, at the height of his popularity, gave the programme a musical exclusive when he agreed to let a World in Action crew record him performing an unreleased song, written to help Democratic politician Jesse Jackson's electioneering, for The Race Against Reagan.

[32] Perhaps the most bruising encounter between WIA and popular entertainment was the 1995 film Black and Blue, which featured a covert recording of a performance by comedian Bernard Manning as the star of a charity function organised by the Manchester branch of the Police Federation, which represents rank-and-file officers.

Manning's racist and homophobic performance, loudly applauded by those present, caused outrage when WIA broadcast excerpts, sparking an intense debate about the willingness of British police officers to embrace a diverse culture.

World in Action employed many leading journalists, among them John Pilger; Michael Parkinson; Gordon Burns; Nick Davies, Ed Vulliamy and David Leigh of the Guardian; Alasdair Palmer of the Sunday Telegraph; John Ware, BBC Panorama's leading investigative reporter; Tony Wilson, whose second career as a music impresario was immortalised in the feature film 24 Hour Party People; Michael Gillard, creator of the Slicker business pages in the satirical magazine Private Eye; Donal MacIntyre; the writer Mark Hollingsworth; Quentin McDermott, since 1999 a leading investigative reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation; Tony Watson, editor of the Yorkshire Post for 13 years and editor-in-chief of the Press Association from December 2006; and Andrew Jennings, author of Lords of the Rings and The Dirty Game, who has campaigned vigorously for more than a decade against corruption in international sport.

Laurie Flynn, a central figure in the British Steel papers case, and Michael Sean Gillard revealed that large parts of a 1996 Carlton Television documentary, The Connection, about drug trafficking from Colombia, had been fabricated.

[36][37] Flynn and Gillard's exposé in the Guardian in May 1998 led to an inquiry and a record £2 million fine for Carlton from the then-regulator, the Independent Television Commission,[38] as well as provoking a passionate debate about truthfulness in broadcast journalism.

[39][40] Unusually for a current-affairs programme, WIA's standard format was as a voice-over documentary without a regular reporter, although a handful of WIA journalists did appear in front of camera, including Chris Kelly, Gordon Burns, John Pilger, Gus Macdonald, Nick Davies, Adam Holloway, Stuart Prebble (who later became the programme's editor), Mike Walsh, David Taylor, Donal MacIntyre, and Granada Reports journalist and Factory Records supremo Tony Wilson, who became the show's first in-vision anchor in the early 1980s.

Among the more recent generation of filmmakers to emerge from World in Action were Alex Holmes, who became editor of the BBC2 documentary strand Modern Times and went on to write and direct the BAFTA-winning dramatised documentary series Dunkirk for the BBC and House of Saddam for the BBC and HBO; and Katy Jones, a former WIA producer who became a key collaborator with the screenwriter Jimmy McGovern as a producer on the drama-documentaries Hillsborough (1996) and Sunday (2002).

Dianne Nelmes, who worked as a researcher and executive producer of WIA, was the founding editor of Granada TV's hugely successful This Morning with Richard and Judy and went on to head daytime and factual programmes at ITV.

Former British cabinet minister Jack Straw worked on World in Action as a researcher, as did Margaret Beckett, who served as Tony Blair's last Foreign Secretary.

Ray Fitzwalter, WIA's longest-serving editor and the man behind the ground-breaking Poulson investigations, became a visiting fellow at the University of Salford School of Media, Music, and Performance.

The late Gavin MacFadyen, who worked on early series of World in Action as a producer-director, best known for his undercover human-rights films, became a visiting professor at City University in 2005.