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Private Notes
Many people enjoy being scared - will pay for the pleasure of being frightened out of their lives. Tellers of ghost stories have profited from this shadowed side of our natures for centuries; today a considerable industry satisfies the needs of the cult followers of Horror magazines and Horror films - even Horror ballet. Alan Whicker braves that Unspeakable Something in cellar and grave-yard in an attempt to find out why we like to be frightened, and talks to those who do the frightening.
In the Barbagia - least-known mountains of Europe where it is said there is a robbery, a kidnapping, or a murder every day - Alan Whicker follows the course of a bloody vendetta that has claimed ten victims so far... He also discovers how and why simple shepherds suddenly turn bandit-men on the run who only leave the peaks to kidnap and kill.
Alan Whicker has not turned highwayman - but this is the choice he finds many of our top money earners must make when faced by the Tax Man. The prospect of the Budget fills the top executive or best-selling author with dread. What does he do? Pay up and look happy? Hire a clever accountant? Slip down the Brain Drain, the Executive Drain, the Talent Drain?
If you look marvellous - who needs a gorgeous character? In this anniversary year of the suffragette, Whicker's World observes three young women, their dreams and attitudes to their lives and good times: a Duke's daughter in her Adam palace; a library assistant who'd rather be a film star; a factory girl at a conveyer belt. They may not know much about Hitler, but they excel on contemporary man, marriage, and morals.
As a nation, we have an enormous appetite for newsprint: we read more, per head, than any country in the world. Of our nine national dailies perhaps the two most influential are at opposite ends of the scale: Cecil King's Daily Mirror, read by more than a quarter of the population, and Lord Thomson's Times, read by everyone who "matters"... Yet in today's television-educated age, popular and quality papers draw closer together. What do they say about their role, their power, their influence - the men on the inside who decide what you read? What are they like, what do they think - the men behind the headlines?
