eyelash growth

Interview by Simon Calder

Saturday, 4 September 2010

As it happens, everything I knew about travel as a boy, I learnt from Alan Whicker – starting with the extraordinary black-and-white footage of an Englishman with the moustache and the manner of an Army officer lost in the wintry wastes of America’s biggest state. “After stopping a train in Alaska, the rest of your life is an anti-climax,” says Whicker, raising his right arm. the powerful locomotive hauling a train that seems to be the length of the Yukon River, harrumphs to a halt to allow him to climb aboard – and deliver another brilliant piece-to-camera, as precise and clipped as his trademark moustache.

For five decades, Alan Whicker – who is still handsome, urbane and charming at just 85 – travelled the globe so that we didn’t have to. or, more precisely, because we couldn’t afford to. He revealed what was out there, since there seemed no imminent prospect of the rest of us venturing beyond the Channel, let alone the Continent. Instead, we watched transfixed as images of the world, its wonders and its heroes and villains, flickered across 405 monochrome lines of rented televisions in millions of homes. Whicker was so pivotal to our understanding of the planet that he had a world named after him – and Heathrow airport allowed the title of his programme to be painted on one of the runways.

"All proper journeys start at Victoria station," Whicker insists in his latest book, Journey of a Lifetime. Taking his advice, I travelled to see him on a train from the appropriate London terminus, followed by a plane from Gatwick – destination Jersey, where Alan and his partner, Valerie Kleeman, have lived for many years.

Before the unalloyed pleasure of lunch on a sunny late-summer afternoon, I enjoyed an extra and possibly juvenile thrill of striding up to a taxi driver and asking, "Please take me to Alan Whicker". To his credit, the driver asked one or two questions to satisfy himself that I was a bona fide guest rather than a celebrity chaser. Then, without needing to ask the address, he drove me straight to the door of Britain’s favourite foreign correspondent.

The gardens of Whicker’s home tumble down to a rocky shore. the coast of Normandy is visible on a good day – which, evidently, most of them are. Whicker’s world in 2010 is a pretty corner of a Channel Island that measures eight miles by five, the ultimate destination for a man who has travelled more than most of us can conceive.

"what appeals about Jersey is tranquillity, peace, not having to see people you don’t want to see. It’s about as good as it gets, isn’t it?"

To properly appreciate the journey that brought him here, I ask you to please set your watches back 53 years to when the most impressive career in TV history began.

"just good luck," is how, in 2010, Whicker accounts for his success. "I suppose I was in the right place at the right time. I was working on the Exchange Telegraph [a news agency] and I took a leap from there."

He jumped into the unknown, in the form of the BBC’s embryonic television current affairs operation. In 1957, the Tonight programme was an ideal nursery for TV talent. Whicker found himself working with a bunch of talented people who, like him, were largely making it up as they went along.

Initially, the world Whicker explored and portrayed was limited; his first assignment was to Ramsgate, to talk to a landlady. soon, though, he embarked on extraordinary journeys where British television reporters, let alone holidaymakers, simply did not venture: Argentina ("brilliant"), Ecuador ("enchanting") and Peru ("druggy"). Then, in 1969, he stepped aboard a Pan am flight to a destination that would make his name: Haiti, or, as he describes it, "the kidnap capital of the world".

Under the despotic regime of "Papa Doc" Duvalier, the value of human life in Haiti reached an all-time low. Whicker recounts how the self-styled President for Life exiled his own daughter and son-in-law in the belief that the latter was plotting a coup. Duvalier and his wife came to the airport to wave them off to Spain.

"as the door was closing upon the happy couple, there came a nod from Papa Doc. Their chauffeur and two bodyguards were shot in front of them." Three more victims for the dictator who is thought to have sent 30,000 of his countrymen to their deaths.

Into this "sharpshooters’ convention" stepped a young journalist who had honed what would now be called his people skills during the second World War. Whicker had served with the Army Film and Photo Unit on the advance through Italy. In 1943, as the conflict neared its messy conclusion, he "liberated" a Fiat Coup