The Salvador Dali of broadcasting.

There was something of the civic organisation Roundtable chap about the veteran TV interviewer Alan Whicker (1921-2013) who has just died. He had a rather fruity voice and as a consequence was not taken very seriously by many viewers. Always dressed in his immaculate blazer, crisp shirt and tie, he was often very inappropriately attired for the occasion - sometimes in the middle of the desert. His programme Whicker's World epitomised this and took him to the most unlikely places. He represented a past life - the middle of the 1950's. As he aged the verisimilitude to the Surrealist artist Salvador Dali became even more pronounced. He once entered a Alan Whitcker - look alike competition, and came third. How surreal is that?