The BBC "Savile" Report.

[Steven M. McCann]

A £6.5m WHITEWASH.
Apparently nobody in any position of power had ever heard anything untoward about his "extra curricular" activities, yeah right.

[JimBentley]

A £6.5m WHITEWASH.
Apparently nobody in any position of power had ever heard anything untoward about his "extra curricular" activities, yeah right.

Well, of course. What did you expect?

I was watching the press conference this morning and the bullshit was simply unbelievable. We're expected to believe that there were 180 reports against Savile to the BBC (junior) management, but somehow none of this ever was related to senior management? Really?

The very suspicious thing about this is that - even on cursory examination - Dame Janet Smith's report seems to contradict itself. One passage says that no BBC senior management could have known about Savile's activities, but on the very next page it details that in 1971 Bill Cotton - at the time, head of light entertainment (i.e. very much the upper echelons of senior management) - commissioned a QC (Brian Neill) to investigate this very thing following the Claire McAlpine suicide case. He delivered his report the following year to the BBC Director General and governors and whilst the only unredacted name that we plebs are allowed to read is 'Savile', it was apparently pretty damning. So how that squares with senior management not being aware of sex abuse allegations on BBC premises, I don't know.

Relatedly, it's going to be interesting to see how the Tony Blackburn thing plays out. There were two inquiries going on at the time, one into the Claire McAlpine suicide and another one - apparently completely unrelated - looking at allegations that certain BBC DJs were involved in payola, either for cash or for favours. Just to make things even more confusing, the two things weren't actually unrelated at all, but nobody seems to know (or is prepared to admit, or can remember) how big the overlap was, but that's a whole other story...

Thing is with Blackburn, surely it's just a case of the BBC producing the transcripts (or recordings, or even contemporaneous accounts from people who were there at the time and aren't dead yet) of the two interviews that they say took place? If they can do that, then it's case closed; Tony Blackburn either lied or misremembered what happened. That they already haven't already done this suggests to me that it's the BBC who are lying, not Tony Blackburn.

[Marc Meakin]

Free the " Pick of the Pops one "
Edmondsit'sonlyamatteroftime#