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 which resulted in the release from prison of the Birmingham Six, six Irishmen falsely accused of planting Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombs in Birmingham pubs.
World in Action’s appetite for controversy created tension with the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA), the official regulator during most of the series run, which had the power to intervene before broadcast. Sir Denis Forman, one of Granada’s founders, wrote that there was “trench warfare” between the programme and the industry regulator, the Independent Television Authority (ITA), in the years between 1966 and 1969 as World In Action sought to establish its journalistic freedoms.
The most celebrated dispute was in 1973, over the banning