...the problem with Whickers Island is ...

Every UK male of a certain age will be able to finish off the sentence in the title. It is of course from the Monty Pythons Flying Circus tribute to one of British TV's most enduring images, Alan Whicker - "...the problem with Whickers Island is...that there are just too many Whickers" - you had to be there, it was funny I promise you.

Alan Whicker was the must-watch travel icon on British TV for most of the 60's, 70's and 80's, not that any of us could ever dream of going to most of the places he went to in the 60's and 70's - only now in the grown up world of cheap jet travel can some of us (not me, but some anyway) actually go and visit the sorts of places that Alan Whicker did, but even now we still can't get access to the stuff that Wicker saw, touched and smelled once a week on our black and white TV's.

I'm currently watching a 1978 episode of Whickers World on one of the Discovery Travel channels and even from the starting titles you can tell that this is going to be no ordinary travelogue, the first few seconds of the intro show Concorde flying high above the clouds, flashing past the aircraft that was filming it and the jazzy, fast paced intro music takes you to a world that none of us ever inhabited but the very rich and very titled - Alan Whicker was the Judith Chalmers of the jetset, his clipped nasal vowels with its classic English accent brought an air of civility to some of the very uncivil places that he visited and no matter which country he visited he was never seen outside of a smart blue blazer and tie, or in the case of the programme that I am currently watched, a well pressed beige safari suit as a small concession to the heat of central India.

The fascinating thing about Whickers World (1959-1994) is that it is still fresh and still interesting and in fifty years time it will be a valuable archive into how the British viewed those bloody foreigners but also a valuable archive into those bloody foreigners themselves who are even now losing their own identity as McDonalds and Sony take over the world.

For instance in "Whickers World in India", Alan Whicker chose the central state of Rajastan to visit and started the programme by explaining how this huge state (three times bigger than the UK) used to be owned by independant Raj's who were told to rennounce their titles (they were viewed almost as gods by their people) and give up their lands to form the new state under Indian government rule rather than each individual Raj enforcing his own version of the lawbook.

And they did, in theory. In theory the Indian Government thought that they ruled the region, but in practice life went on as it always had - and this is where Wicker went in 1978 to interview the beautiful widow of one of the last and greatest of the Raj's, she was still young when Wicker interviewed her even though her husband had committed suicide twenty years earlier, still young because she had been married to him at the age of twelve.

She told a frank tale of a crazy ruler of tens of thousands of people in a time when the ultimate act for any widow was to throw yourself onto your dead husbands funeral pyre and die with him - fortunately for her the practice had become illegal when the old Raj died although it was still being practiced with the authorities turning a blind eye to it - the old Raj had so many wives that she'd have been at the back of a long queue and the pyre would have kept burning for weeks if they'd all jumped.

The old Raj had in theory committed suicide because of the stripping of power by central government, he thought it was disgraceful and that he had brought great shame on the family name by allowing it to happen, so one day he sat in his study, took out a finely carved, gold embossed rifle, summoned one of his servants to the room and ordered him to shoot him and make it look like suicide - the Raj beleived that a Raj should not stoop so low as to actually commit suicide himself, one should always get ones servants to commit suicide on ones person.

Whicker was not afraind of asking awkward or personal questions - sitting in a swinging chair in the widows palace garden he asked her to explain what was meant by the rumours of the Raj's sexual prowess, without batting an eyelid the young widow explained that the Raj was indeed a very sexually active man although not necessarily with his wives - Whickers eyelids raised every so slightly at this revelation and then exploded into mirth as she added "he preferred the young village boys".

She also told of how he was ostracised by the English, not after tales of his cruelty to his villagers with his unique intertpretation of Indian law and punishment were heard at Westminster, but after he had become bored of the royal game of polo and had set fire to all of his polo ponies to get rid of them - the stories of him using live human babies as bait when he went tiger hunting wouldn't have impressed Her Majesty the Queen either.

All in all a fascinating glimpse into a way of life that had disappeared except from memory in 1978 and has probably disappeared permenantly now, except in the old films of Whickers World, a place where an Englishmen never shows sweat marks on his safari jacket, and always wears a blazer and cravat at your hosts evening dinner, even when your host is a naked Bornean chief who eats his rival tribesmen.