Hong Kong and Beyond (2009) Alan Whicker's Journey of a Lifetime

for bbc television in 1958 coming all right what would you have done sunshine's all the time is absolutely marvelous place to come it was on this tour that i discovered my lasting enthusiasm for islands don't you take your own shoes off of course i don't take my shoes off i haven't taken lunches off for 45 years [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] my travels for television started back in the 50s we set out from what was then known as london airport with nothing much planned merely to explore whatever looked interesting that wasn't hard because it was all new and exciting i don't go along with the flying pill poppers who want to sleep all the way there and back if you're writing the grammar of travel television you can't afford to miss a minute let alone a second glass of champagne good morning sir where abouts you're flying to hong kong when i started a flight to the far east was a major adventure there's your boarding card sir you have a safe flight for most of my traveling life as a man already set in his airways this heathrow was where we had takeoff it was normally about four bumpy days to tokyo and korea we traveled in one of boac's noisy canadian arkenhearts at 15 000 feet and a respectable 250 miles an hour it was like a long sea voyage romances and enmities flourished and by the time we reached japan we were all jolly members of an intrepid flying the club please hold on this stop for b gates and some of us i might add were engaged [Music] hello this is the busiest street of the largest city in the world the ginza in tokyo well i've had eight courses tonight and each one of them was fish i got the chopsticks to prove it somewhere waiting for me when wicker's world began turning on television 50 years ago such travel was still an unattainable dream for most people but by then cameras had already become the best way to show viewers what was going on around the world travel and television seemed meant for each other this week i'm returning to hong kong now a mere 13 hours from london [Music] [Music] [Music] it's hard to see this floating manhattan as an island yet hong kong remains one of the one of the sites of the world i first came here in 1951 when i was on my way to korea as a war correspondent and planes then stopped 10 times from london to tokyo and so it could be refueled we all came into town into the peninsula and had dinner and i got my first glimpse of this place and i thought this is somewhere that i must get to know it was so wonderful to start with and it's remained wonderful ever since i've always felt at home in the former colony it's a cosmopolitan island that's always welcomed travellers adventurers and generations of foreign correspondents arriving to cover asia's triumphs and disasters i returned many times to this oriental crossroads on the way to everywhere first went still in fleet street working for the extel news agency and covering most of the wars then going like career as a bachelor willing to work unpopular hours like christmas day i was usually selected for the more dramatic assignments not because of any particular talent i suspected but because a bachelor's insurance premiums were far less costly i then carried my fascination with travel from fleet street over to lime grove to the tonight show as it spread its wings and then on to wicker's world in july 58 i set off with a crew of two on my first television world tour returning at the end of october after thirty thousand miles and some fifty reports from six different countries i instantly became tonight's men around the world why i even worked on christmas day without noticing hello one of the more frightening things that can happen to a man in the far east is to land at hong kong airport the runways of the present hong kong airport are crouched up against the side of the mountains and to come in the plane flies down a ravine with its wing tips almost touching the mountain tops turns right at the bottom and left and altogether it's a very alarming experience there's one just landing down there perhaps you can see it it's not the kind of thing that a a traveler enjoys at any rate and coming in from bangkok the other day the captain of the aircraft came back into the passenger cabin and i confessed that the last few miles of the flight to hong kong i always shut my eyes and the captain said was a matter of fact i'll trap so do i oh mama these reports were the first to appear under the series title of wicca's world but the majority of hong kong's newcomers don't arrive by air they come streaming across the border from communist china at the rate of a thousand a week and they settle here in hong kong's shanty towns i'm on board a hong kong police launch a 20 knot launch one of those that set out every night looking for junks chinese junks that are bringing to the colony some of the 1 000 illegal immigrants who it's estimated arrive each week this is the time night when 100 upon 100 of junks set out and this one stops they don't always stop this is what's happening in the waters around hong kong all night and every night this one it is quite clean and yet despite this nightly vigilance despite these swift motorboats with their searchlights and their radar refugees are getting through all the time every morning the population of the shanty towns is larger than the day before [Music] upon our arrival in hong kong we've been offered the splendid penthouse of the hong kong and shanghai bank atop its skyscraper and that's it that little bungalow down there in light stone it was then all of 10 stories high later it was rebuilt this time a more adequate 41 stories returning sweaty and weary after filming in squalid squatters camps impeccable chinese servants the bank's servants would greet us with an unaccustomed sherry wine sir the bank was the third arm of the trident which ruled the colony alongside the governor general and jardine matheson-hong its managing director michael turner was a leading member of the legislative council and a very grand taipan indeed in the colony he was a sort of democratic emperor years later i stopped your petrol in surrey and the attendant noting my colony bought humber told me some chap called turner lived around the corner used to be a bank clerk in hong kong he said we are all demoted by retirement [Music] one of my reports seemed about to start world war three i've been an international incident on many occasions but uh it's never much fun thank you to get aerial shots of the colony i'd arranged with the ever helpful raf a flight in an oster of the auxiliary air force the pilot of our small spotter plane was perhaps over enthused by my eager cameraman who flew low along the border then for the very first time chinese anti-aircraft guns opened fire upon the west it was the moment citizens had been dreading and and we were not overjoyed either observing we were unwelcome my startled pilot hastily zigzagged back to hong kong airport at zero feet feeling as though biggles had just escaped the red baron we faced a panic-stricken colony which was living in fear of just such a chinese avalanche the government happily impounded our film we had rocked the boat and were extremely unpopular peking was officially assured that our flattery little oster was not the spearhead of a mighty invasion to free the mainland breathing deeply we flew off to tokyo before mines could be changed or we were hit by second thoughts having come a little too close to chinese anti-aircraft fire in hong kong we moved on to look at the more peaceful chinese way of death in singapore this is the street of death in singapore's chinatown this is where the chinese who make up about 80 percent of singapore's one and a half million population come to prepare for death to die to be mourned and finally to be driven away for burial in gaily painted lorries now just as cobblers gather in one street and tailors in another so do the traders in death gather here in sego lane most of these old people they come from very crowded homes and you know chinese are very superstitious about death and they don't like people dying in their homes so they put them out into a place like this which is in the streets of mortuaries yes and they wait to die and then they're carried downstairs and put in a coffin yeah is this right now there's a lot of music and noise in the street here what is this it's a funeral so these old people lie here listening down today to funerals yes some of them have been here for years [Music] waiting for death yes everyone is invited to every chinese funeral for the more mourners who follow the coughing and the noisier their traipse around the cemetery the greater the honor to the departed sego lane lost its character and its mortuaries in the 80s and closed the dying must go elsewhere [Music] when wicker's world returned to the far east for a 1972 series we visited hong kong again to look at the many chinese who were still trying to escape to the colony some of them were even attempting to swim for freedom the story took me to the only place in hong kong then under the control of the chinese communist government there's one place right in the heart of this colony that not only the freedom swimmers but the police avoid and this is it the walled city of kowloon six acres of festering slum with 20 000 people who so far have refused resettlement because they regard it as a piece of china a piece of the mainland this is a sort of far eastern casbah where children are tied to stone ledges to prevent them falling into the open sewers it's a place of excretia and rats of violence of brothels of heroin demands as they're called of every sort of viciousness and villainy and if it's a place that the police have refused to come into i'm not quite sure what i'm doing here shortly after filming this piece of camera the triads made it plain that we were no longer welcome in their walled city seemed pointless to argue [Music] [Music] [Applause] by 1990 hong kong had become rich but the handover to china grew ever closer the walled city was little changed still a dreadful and sworded slum though one english woman was attempting to make a difference something's happening to the most vicious most helpless of the lost people of the world city the drug addict [Music] they're seeking salvation under the determined guidance of a woman from sutton who arrived in hong kong 23 years ago to hand out tracts and survived by teaching the piano today jackie pollinger is to them a sort of savior when i first went to wall city in those days they were actually piling bodies up by the single loo and those are people who'd od'd in the night so i started by by trying it was almost like attacking actually the um the people who guarded the gambling dens we did a swinging around about 2 a.m and i i went up to one you know and said jesus loves you and i really thought it would change his life of course it you know he wasn't at all impressed he just said run along go find another victim i mean in the beginning obviously when i was beginning in the streets i used to go and find people but now they come running after us it usually happens when somebody's met someone down the street an old friend and they see who's fat and they're very impressed by fat people because um when you're on drugs you don't eat you don't have money you don't have appetite so they usually say something like why are you so fat and the um the fat one says it's jesus they say okay okay i'll have him um and where where can i find him and the fat one will say he's in the walled city on wednesdays and saturdays i mean this is really how it happens great so so they come in no knowing nothing love it but jesus changed their friend they say okay now where is he jesus makes you fat yeah perfect and they were free the walled city was finally knocked down without much civil ceremony in 1991 this frenetic and sentimental place offered some of hong kong's more expensive real estate yet surprisingly the walled city was not developed and instead was transformed into a botanical garden this was uncharacteristic but welcome i'm here to meet jackie pullinger again she's continued to work among the city's drug addicts and her dedication and work over 40 years has seen her name set in stone well they tore the wall city down they made this beautiful garden and then i discovered they'd named a rock after me which is signifying some of the things that happened in the world city with the old gangsters and how they they changed and that you were as tough as they were and what it says earlier yes [Music] they pulled down the wall city and the frightful inhabitants dispersed where did they go what did they do what happened to them well everybody who rented something was given the opportunity to rent um like a council house then you were given money compensation but i knew a lot of drug addicts who got their money and then spent it all on drugs so they ended up with no home and no money what about the triads well many of the triads just came in to do gang activities or or sell drugs or take drugs or run gambling things or waffles and they continue to do that everywhere else in hong kong but more out of sight and i've got two people here who were old triad members and they say oh it's not like it was you know we don't have the old big uh gang bosses and the initiation ceremonies but like the mafia families you know it's not the same as it was nobody plays by the same rules as they used to now and the the communists have never been very kind about christians have there no they don't give you an easy time how have you been affected honestly with the communists or the or the british government it makes no difference everybody's thrilled if they see somebody changed um they i mean we've many times across the border helped people get off drugs in the same way we do here and they love it they just don't know what to do because we're not supposed to be there so they say move because you're not supposed to exist but individuals say well we see what you're doing and we see people are changing so i think the individual is always touched but the official them doesn't know what to do with us now does does jesus still make you fat you can see [Music] hong kong's transformation is reflected in its skyline from the shanty towns and bazaars of my first visit to the modern peaks of today [Music] fast moving and overpopulated it's a place where taxi drivers keep a beady eye on the stock market and worry about the price of gold this resilient materialistic society changes little but a decade ago no one knew what the handover might bring [Music] on my last visit to hong kong i stood on this roof as fireworks lit up the harbour rain poured down and we prepared to say goodbye after handover ceremonies with prince charles the governor chris patton wept as he boarded britannia it was the end of an era and the last significant speck of empire disappeared beneath those dark waters [Music] hong kong has always been a favorite stopover but it wasn't until my first trip down under in 1960 that i caught an incurable case of islanditis this is norfolk island where the descendants of fletcher christian and the mutineers of the bounty those defiant british seamen and their tahitian wires came to live in peace road tax is six pounds a year but if you can't afford it you can do a week's work on the roads instead electricity has just arrived and there are even one or two telephones you came out here to norfolk island to retire what a couple of years ago why norfolk well norfolk is a peaceful nice place where you can live a quiet life and we live under the benevolence of the australian government who give us thirty two thousand pounds a year uh as a grant to the island and uh the chancellor of the exchequering great britain doesn't charge us any income tax on our incomes over there and so we live pretty well tax-free and the only rates on the island are 10 pounds a year the sun shines all the time it's absolutely marvelous place to come a marvelous place to come if you don't ask more from life than peace and sunshine yes perhaps you ought to join the thousand or so islanders who bask in both all year round on these fortunate 15 square miles the mutineer's leader had been captain bly's mate fletcher christian almost the whole population of norfolk island shared eight surnames on my first visit there there were still 24 families of christians 12 of adams 27 of quintils in an island of a couple of thousand inhabitants my favorite was girly christian your great grandfather came here from pitcairn was it your great-grandfather no my grandfather or your grandfather yes well now his grandfather was fletcher christian fletcher christian the real fletcher christian what sort of a man do you think he was well of course i would say it was a good man although he was perhaps a violent man i don't know that i wasn't there the first invasion of remote norfolk had been caused by the need for a secure penal settlement for 19th century hard cases the second came when the bounty descendants outgrew pitcairn and needed a new home the third invasion was caused they said by me my tonight reports had been transmitted in britain on some miserable november nights and on the strength of my enthusiasm for this subtropical speck some 50 viewers sold their homes and traveled across the world to start a new life on an island they'd never heard of deep in the south pacific as i flew into norfolk on my second visit a few years later it occurred to me that if those 50 british families were miserable in their new home and much preferred salford then i was in trouble now had i exaggerated or overstated or understated oh understated if anything really because we thought it was a paradise when we first arrived here and we still think so [Music] i need not have worried television normally blamed for everything bad from violence to dandruff had done something right they were happy as mutineers in their lovely tax-free oasis [Music] i caught up with gurley again she had 86 acres so it was an island catch but had never married she just lost a leg in a riding accident when her horse fell and rolled over i said doc before i go under show my leg on again so i can go to the ballrooms i said i'm well than ugly but still i like the ballroom they suit me good they're beautiful you've never been married of course nobody would have me they're shy clear of me boy perhaps i don't know how much land you've got to see those land doesn't count in this scene described everything as beautiful and only herself was ugly this was not sir she was wonderful girlie let's talk about norfolk a little bit you've seen a lot of changes do you think they're good changes now are you pleased with the way the island's going or are you so beautiful nothing spoiled good everything's more marvelous everyday years later in 1979 i called her from new zealand only to find that this indomitable lady had gone to join her defiant ancestors much of my life has been divided between unspoiled paradise isles and white men's graves i was always landing with my cameras on virgin beaches unprotected by background music and pushing on through primeval jungles and whatever television says the far-flung can be horrid given the chance i must prefer my paradise is ever so slightly spoiled there's a strong argument for the well-beaten travel agents trail unspoiled like some hypnotic blandishment in one mighty bound you can get not only ahead of the joneses but so far away from them they won't even be able to find you so you can write your own blurb and tell your own stories uncontradicted so what do they mean by that magic word no roads or beds yak milk do-it-yourself dentistry one stream for drinking washing and lavatory his unspoilt is your nightmare is my forget it for most undiscovered paradises on the wicker's world flight path have upon close examination offered dysentery dingy fever rancid meat filaria sharks intestinal bacteria and water that wriggles what a world what a life i'm one of those south pacific paradises you dream that i sing i can make the rain go anytime i move my finger but wicker's world allowed me to explore places most people had never heard of the volcanic outer island of tana beautiful you don't get weary with a brief like that as long as i hold a string i'd be a silly so and so if i should ever let it go [Music] i got the world on a stream it's a free and easy life here you don't have to get dressed up so to speak you often traveled incognito i wondered how you managed to do that [Music] we're all searching for a better life somewhere unfortunately along the way some very odd people have tried to follow in my footsteps noru was a tiny island with more money than it knew what to do with its vast fortune was based exclusively on fossilized bird droppings the smallest loneliest richest republic in the world a sweltering speck just south of the equator lost in the immensity of the pacific 2500 miles from tokyo and sydney and hawaii as isolated as it's possible to be noro is no paradise aisle no fruit no fresh water few fish its people live in dusty isolation upon their 5 thousand acres amid this lunar landscape stark and unreal yet theirs is the most unusual concentration of wealth in the world for every coral pinnacle down there commemorates the rise to riches of a handful of polynesians and this is their gold this is high grade phosphate which has fertilized the fields of the world from the outback of australia to japan to england and just as it has enriched our farms and our farmers so it's enriched the citizens of this tiny republic to such a degree that they are now richer than the kuwaitis or the americans they're certainly pacific plutocrats schools and hospitals are free and so are telephones houses cost a token two pounds a month and a free pension awaits there are no proof take your average nuru and lori drive lorenzo paul earns 15 pounds a week behind the wheel but the phosphate company is starting to work his land so he's preparing to be a dollar millionaire with the population of an english village the neurons also have their own airline and they don't fly some tired old bc3 theirs is a spanking new 2 million pound fellowship jet keeping open the lifeline with australia each quarter day landowners pick up their four or five figure royalty checks it's all many no ruins have to do on this improbable aisle every man woman and child said to be worth 35 000 pounds for the island's annual phosphate incomes about 12 million pounds they've grown almost scornful of such regular dividends only 2 639 you only get one of these do you just one what are you going to spend it on uh get some uh speedboat get a speedboat even though the new ruins knew their resource would only last another generation they were having far too much fun today to worry about tomorrow you might not expect such a western craze to rumble into the peaceful south pacific and suddenly these hundred mile an hour monster seem a bit pointless here since the only road brings them right back where they started within a few minutes but money and time must be spent somehow now do you ever have any rambles here trouble with the other gangs sometimes they want to have a fight with us to see which gang is stronger so we give them the request a fight yeah you've got some very big fellas i can see that but i didn't think that norwegians were very violent i thought you didn't find depends on how many bees they drink but listen oh let's talk you're a policeman yeah brother i'm half policeman and half los angeles as we might say 908 that's 450 pounds 908 dollars twice that's 900 pounds what's she going to spend the summer the lady says she's going to buy something new to her in her life she haven't had a motorcycle before and she haven't had a car and also she have another washing machine and that's how she's going to spend all this money on she doesn't [Music] sure enough by the early 90s the phosphates were running out causing the economy to collapse in one mighty gamble the neurons invested their last two million pounds in leonardo a west end musical it closed soon after the first night reviews came out [Music] for several years nauru was paid to house australia's illegal immigrants but now that arrangement has ended and the islanders are broke that says that's an island though or at least it's a rock but this doesn't show as many islands the cruisers arrive at the morning of the world indonesia has well over thirteen thousand islands most are delightful particularly nias little known to the rest of the world until the last devastating tsunami exotic cruises have opened up a hidden world to tourists who want their adventure to be comfortable we joined a shipload gingerly dipping their toe into the third world nias had been cut off from the rest of the world with its own language culture and mythology until in the late 70s it became part of the itinerary of a luxury cruise line the shipping company had to make this road six miles uphill to provide an expedition out of the order and to think the neha built villages high as a defense against invasion the fourth flight of a great stone staircase leading up from the sea the last 82 of 700 steps and in this stunning heat quite a climb some woman's just had a heart attack on these steps yeah she was one of the one of the belgians oh my god apparently she had a dicky heart anyway and her husband brought around there oh no now look at this sight isn't it the hilltop home of a megalithic culture two rows of pile houses each are stately black terrace the more important the owner the higher the roof the house of the chief believed to be divine took many years to build this was one of the most stunning man-made settings i'd ever seen the niha are tiny but ferocious once they were headhunters fiercely resisting outsiders they weren't brought under dutch law until the beginning of this century and even today it's whispered some practice head hunting and human sacrifice for the barefoot warriors stone jumping was a symbol of virility once this was how they scaled enemy walls how much forty thousand forty thousand fourteen fourteen one fourteen fourteen okay here we go again fourteen thirty four dollars and fourteen cents i'll tell you what take it or leave it but then you to deal with two thousand ten thousand ten thousand yeah but then you got a deal no more okay i thought you got a deal warriors wear stiff black jackets and helmets of crocodile or carabao skin decorated with black hair some make themselves even more fearsome by wearing metal mustaches well let's face it a moustache can be pretty frightening asking your husband what he makes of it what he thinks of it yes [Applause] [Applause] the next leg of my journey brings me back to another indonesian island which i first visited in the early 70s bali at that time was on the brink of a tourist revolution and i thought it was possibly the last paradise since then two terrorist bombs have made it a place that we are officially warned not to visit i just don't believe what happened here tonight everything has gone the whole street ground zero the explosion created an unstoppable fireball that left from street to street hundreds of people mainly tourists had crammed into the sari nightclub and neighboring bars this was a saturday night massacre no one here will ever forget some places in the world call you back time after time lake atitlan in guatemala venice of course norfolk island that nobody's heard of and now poor battered barley yet on route from anywhere i still always hope to find an excuse to divert to denpasar airport to absorb some more tranquility to breathe in its peace to listen to the gunner again everything you ever heard about bali is true for a start it's perfect [Music] unique among the dream away places of the world bali is a lilting pageant of temples and festivals a soft shimmer of sound the island's one huge botanical garden pervaded by a sort of enchantment where copper-skinned balinese drift through their improbable never neverland not just a magic aisle but a feeling an experience [Music] in an area notorious for disaster famine and revolution bali is the ornament of tropical asia despite some natural ferocity smaller than lincolnshire a third the size of yorkshire it's only 80 miles by 50 the kind of place that could disappear before your very eyes before air travel bali was a symbol of unattainable and distant romance a few rich travelers arrived on cargo ships somerset mourn and no cards slipped in to be amusing or caustic in the sixties hippies on their way to australia tapped into the spiritualism of the place later tourists and surfers began to descend though the balinese sensibly corralled them into one small peninsula where they didn't contaminate the island's beating hearts those terraced paddy fields the temples and villages where traditions remain intact [Music] the westerners who came to look but then couldn't tear themselves away bali was an extraordinary experience a fairy tale a magic door onto a secret life i was off to meet walter foley an artist from dusseldorf who on his way to australia met and married mardi a 13 year old thought to be the most beautiful girl on the island all right what would you have done by the time i reached the village compound where he lives with his wife and her family it was almost nightfall [Applause] maddy was pregnant will your wife have her baby here yes or will you try and get her to a clinic well you uh you walked up this way you know how difficult it is and especially to where in the day and then the monsoon time the big rain arrived and we're expecting the baby anytime so we probably won't make it the baby probably will be born in this valley it's his balance it's the little baloney walter 33 and a lutheran now lives like any low caste balinese the magic was too much for me you know i just could you say i freaked out but it was a nice freak and it was beautiful i never experienced in my life before i met my wife and she was running a little wahrong it's a little bamboo head with her mother selling kachong peanuts yeah so we kept on talking about what's pure friendship kept going maybe on her side a bit of a business too a white man comes and sits every morning having his his coffee and orange juice there and it was nice at the time very simple and never dreamed of slowly developing something else i have this idea said god yes in balinese culture such a marriage was not then considered unusual though this union ended in divorce seven years later but i thought it was a bit of a shock to me that he could that he would marry a girl of 13 i thought that might be a risk yeah or maybe that i'm married maybe a bit young with him and then then i'm becoming a bit older maybe my thing is already different i don't know also you know we are human being i don't know now what about your children you had children would you be happy if they got married at that age yeah both my children already married mardis daughter ratner was born the day after my sudden interview with walter 35 years later she runs a successful buttock business in bali and idolizes her father who died in 2004 i do feel i'm a bit lost because i lost my dad i don't have that family now with me i do feel lost part of my blood is german blood and then harvest balinese blood to be in the middle it's just really hard for me i do have two different culture in my blood but i grew up here so how difficult is it now to to live and work in bali uh it's pretty difficult because we have bali bombing the first one and then the second one it's it's been we've been suffering a lot we've been suffering are you are you frightened now are you fearful that more could happen well in one way i'm i do afraid if that happen again afraid for everyone here for everybody that's here but how come somebody do that [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] bali is good for the soul yet now it's been bombed into paradise lost [Applause] [Music] among the 202 dead and 209 injured were 88 australians and 24 brits they died outside paddy's pub how could this happen in such a place where a baby's feet must never touch the ground where there is communal commitment to caring and sharing the outrage tore the spirit out of this particular paradise and destroyed a heart of goodness wonder and joy when i first visited bali there was one tourist hotel built with japanese war reparations now it has some of the most luxurious accommodation in the world john o'sullivan poet and artist runs two of the islands beautiful resorts what was the main effect of the bombs on berlin i think um initially it was quite immense both from a business point of view but more importantly for the people of bali to just try and figure out how someone bombed heaven and the most important part was also the healing process which people had to go through why was the island of the gods the place chosen for this hell it never seems the healing is hard to reach i would have thought a terrible crime like that it's interesting is that the first thing that the balinese did after the bombings was not to look for blame but to look for healing and to look for reason so the first thing that they did was that the hindu elders contacted the islamic elders and said we have to meet why and what have we done wrong for this to have happened on our island as opposed to you did this you did that and that's the joy and that's the beauty of bali of where the fact is that there is no blame there's only a desire to actually elevate they don't really understand the the idea of an eye for it for a night thankfully so it would appear but also time dot hilo evils and you have a situation 30 months on of where bali has very much come back into favor why because people do not want to be kept out of heaven on earth and so therefore if they have access and they're allowed to come back they want to come back so the level of sole solidarity that there is for bali is absolutely immense and that has been from the from immediately after the last event is that we had people coming back one week later saying is that we just want you to know that we love bali we support bali and we are here to give that level of solidarity so you know you can you can delay paradise you can't deny it that old fantasy about living on a desert island is of course a wild dream to be stranded in the middle of nowhere without communications medicine electricity everything we take for granted is no paradise but one couple from hampshire chose to live that rowanson crusoe life on three hammock island a tiny dot in the ocean between australia and tasmania having survived the cruelties and deprivation of wartime europe their plan was to insulate themselves from the bleak uncertainties of the cold war and to be self-sufficient from here john and eleanor alliston launched into the world four children and fourteen grandchildren isolation meant the most basic of living conditions sporadic contact with the rest of the world and a struggle to survive in many ways their philosophy was ahead of their time they recycled they wasted nothing they deplored additives and they left nothing behind save a few footprints in the island sand and a memory of their happiness had you any idea when you left england what you were getting yourself into no no idea whatsoever i when i walked into this house of course it's all with women it's always the house isn't it john saw the beautiful land and the trees and the paddocks and the stock and thought that was absolute bliss and i thought the house was hell complete hell and you've been here 36 years and you haven't changed the thing well i beg your pardon but our beautiful pain encrusted sitting room and lovely little kitchen i don't think you've ventured in there yet what we didn't realize was that if we didn't do it ourselves nobody is going to ever come and do it for us i used to be a fearful i wanted things exactly the way i wanted them i made them happen well um now it's absolutely too easy it's like falling off a log it's just wonderful is there anything in the world that you want something frightfully extravagant one great big square cut emerald ring to add to my rather small collection but surely arriving to farming island at the bottom of the world must have been one mighty bound for an english naval officer from regent's park nw1 there does come a time in your life when you have to take a sharp knife and chop everything away and start again and that's exactly what we did so you dreamed of an island john but had you planned how you were going to cope when you got here no we hadn't and we got some nasty surprises like what well for instance i found that i had in order to live i had to be able to slaughter a sheep and dress it and and somehow keep it and feed the kids with it you don't do that very often in the navy i get how right you are after all these years and all this work uh what impact have you had on the island very little very little the islands much bigger than than we are and the little bit of plying and clearing and fencing we've done can disappear in in 10 years you'd know no one had been here i'm delighted with that yes it really shows me that the this island is bigger than all us chaps who come along and fiddle around with tractors and spades and things it's far stronger far from being door and lonely they were charming and upbeat healthy and active they shared a youthful optimism that belied their years they had chosen to live a life which had more in common with the 19th century than the 20th but their contentment was such that they were probably the happiest couple i have filmed have you not now having lived together in the solitary way for 36 years yes have you not said everything there is to say to each other no that's the biggest fallacy in the world that's a lovely question um i think that um we're always covering new ground it's absolutely amazing it's you it's the most amazing experience to know some other person well eleanor was 75 but still a determined dreamer with a practical outlook each day she moved barefooted around the island dictating into a recorder her romantic novels which told of girls called tiffany in passionate conflict with men known as rhett in some dashing city of the mind to me such everyday fiction seems far less romantic than the true love story of eleanor and john on their deserted island suddenly she heard the familiar thundering footsteps on the stairs and a look of terror across her the face and the florists and the bands she heard them all again and realized that this was her wedding day [Applause] can you can you foresee the day when you'll leave 300 only when i'm dead but even then i won't leave it because john absolutely guarantees he'll put me on the compost heap so that he can grow some lovely tomatoes out of me i thought you were gonna say you'd be buried in a lovely little grave under that beautiful tree no because it's too much nuisance for people to look after i'd rather be absolutely vanish into the atmosphere i think i've got no thought of it if i die fine if i don't find and sometimes when we're in an aircraft and the engine splutters and things like that i think isn't it glorious that john and i he won't have to find out how to turn on the toaster because here we go both together what fun i've got a lovely little speech ready of thank yous to him when i know the inevitable could be happening and i said please we it'd be so neat age crept up on the alistars sturdy little eleanor slowly succumbed to dementia john cared for her until she died writing books on naval history in his spare time we never dared ask him if he had laid her to rest on the compost heap as she told me that he'd promised thank you very much thank you well it's been a wonderful time for me after a lifetime living together on three hammock island a solitary john passed away having spent his final years in a retirement home on the mainland oh well that was lovely really was beautiful those far away places with strange soundings [Applause] columns holland [Music] [Music] i've just arrived home to find my study and the storerooms where i keep my archive under six inches of gurgling water a burst pipe so now i'm struggling to rescue and dry out 50 years of sudden history the photographic files and tapes of every wicker's world since 1957. the moist remnants of a life's work that was splashing around and sinking looking at this shambles i can see and remember the implacable chill of the great wall of china the impatience while waiting for the sultana brunei the unexpected arrival of that blonde who carried her harp around paraguay memories have been floating about and reminding me that even the happiest of lives has it surprises it's like watching your past life flashing before you without actually needing to drown [Music] [Music] you

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Length: 58min 26sec (3506 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 12 2021