Murnaghan 28.10.12 Interview with Ben Bradshaw and Esther Rantzen on Jimmy Savile and the BBC

ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well now, the BBC’s former Director General, Mark Thompson, has become the latest figure accused of failing to act on claims made about Jimmy Savile. It has emerged that his office was contacted twice but Mr Thompson maintains he was not told about the allegations on either occasion. The Head of the BBC Trust, Lord Patten, has been warning today that the organisation’s reputation is on the line and that the BBC risks squandering public trust. He has questioned whether it could really have been the case that no one knew what Savile was doing. Well with me now is the founder of Childline and the former BBC TV presenter, Esther Ranzten and the former Culture Secretary, Ben Bradshaw, a very good morning to you both. Well that issue that Lord Patten himself has raised in the papers this morning, Esther, you have been saying it for a couple of weeks now, people were talking about it, there were rumours about it but it was never crystallised about what Savile was actually doing.

ESTHER RANTZEN: I think the problem is that what you need is evidence and when they did put the rumours to Savile himself, the boss of Radio 1 at one stage did that in a formal interview we’re told, he simply rebuffed it and denied it and of course what didn’t happen was that people didn’t pull together, the individual complaints from individual young people which the police now say did happen, and see there was a pattern emerging. The trouble is when you have got a child’s voice against a very skilled broadcaster, then the police and the CPS think that will never stand up in court so they need corroboration and what the ITV documentary was able to do was bring five voices together to corroborate each other, plus one witness and to me that witness is very significant because that was someone working in a junior capacity on a production team who walked in to Savile’s dressing room, saw what was going on and reported it to her boss. What happened to that report? What happened to the other junior members of teams who may have seen other things like that?

DM: There are so many strands to all this which are the subjects of investigations that the BBC itself has set up and Ben Bradshaw, do you think given the way that the current BBC high command, if I can term them that, have handled the course of investigations, the trail that has been followed over the last four or five weeks about the Newsnight investigation, are they the ones qualified to sort out the mess and come up with the solutions?

BEN BRADSHAW: No, but that is why they have appointed independent people to chair their inquiries and I have huge respect for Dame Janet Smith who is doing the inquiry into the historic culture of abuse but what worries me more really than that, these are things that happened decades ago and it is important that we get to the bottom of them and learn the lessons, is how the BBC has mishandled the immediate crisis of the last few weeks and the confusion over why the Newsnight programme was dropped, failing to correct an untruthful account for three weeks. I think that says something about the still sclerotic management structure at the BBC that stops them getting to the bottom of something like this and also stops them managing a crisis properly.

DM: Esther, you seem to want to come in on that.

ER: I find it really, really sad. The BBC is so much bigger than all this, you know, we’ve got Children in Need coming towards us, there are so many fantastic creations by this wonderful universally praised broadcasting organisation and they have absolutely dropped to their knees on this terrible crisis. If only Newsnight had transmitted, if only that fatal misjudgement had not been made, the BBC would still be facing the appalling fact that a paedophile was able to have access to children via their studios and so on, via the iconic stature they had created for him but at least there wouldn’t be this awful cover up feel.

DM: That is a good point that Esther’s making there, that you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

BB: No, absolutely and the BBC is still a fantastic organisation, it’s respected around the world as Esther says and even if you look at the polling that’s been done in the last few days, it still commands a huge amount of public respect but the tragedy of this is that the mishandling by the BBC of the immediate crisis is preventing the victims that we all care about, getting their stories heard, preventing them getting justice …

DM: Only preventing it because we keep obsessing about it in the media.

BB: Yes, but we wouldn’t be talking about this, you wouldn’t be discussing it, Dermot, on Sky if the BBC had handled it correctly. If the BBC had just said four weeks ago, we made a terrible mistake by dropping the Newsnight piece, we are very, very sorry, we wouldn’t be where we are now. The fact that they didn’t do that, the fact that they allowed an untruthful account of that decision to be repeated by the Chairman of the Trust, Lord Patten, no less – I think that is a real problem for them and we still haven’t had an explanation as to why they took so long to straighten the record.

DM: Okay, let me broaden it out to the victims, as we’ve all identified and Esther, and in terms of institutions because of course it’s not just the BBC, there are questions that social services, the NHS, the police have to answer about all this, looking back into the past. Is that something of a defence for the BBC that they can say, look, it’s not just us that needs to be examined here?

ER: What we have to be aware is that paedophiles don’t carry a label on their forehead. If they did they’d never get access to children so they have to wear a mask, they have to wear a disguise which gives them access to children and puts them above suspicion. Whether it’s a priest in any number of religious organisations, not just the Catholic church, or whether it’s the head teacher of a school, we are … actually the owner of a school we investigated back in the dawn of time and actually broadcast what we investigated on the BBC who stood by us in that, or whether it’s a children’s home and what about those poor kids in Haute de la Garenne and the other children’s home where Savile sort of browsed hideously and that’s what paedophiles do.

DM: It’s interesting what you’re saying there, Esther, because I can’t have imagined that if you had an investigation such as Newsnight had, that if there’s been even nods or winks or hints that you were to drop it, that you would have dropped it but the culture somehow did change at the BBC and it’s back to you, Ben Bradshaw, because you and I were around when the Kelly affair and the Hutton affair were happening and it has been said by commentators that since then that the BBC for ten years now has been licking its wounds and has lost its get up and go.

BB: Well I don't think the BBC has yet committed quite as grave an error as it did over the Hutton Gilligan scandal where it kind of stuck to a line long after it had been discredited and ended up losing its Chairman and Chief Executive, but there are still serious questions to answer.

DM: But this sense of fearlessness, this sense of we’ve got a story and we will go for it?

BB: Absolutely, that’s a slightly separate point. I think you’re right, I think the BBC may have learnt some of the wrong lessons of the Gilligan affair which is that it needs to be journalistically courageous and brave and not fearful and it hasn’t learnt the lessons of its management structure. We still seem to have this very bureaucratic, hierarchical management structure where decisions are taken, passed up level by level and back down rather than someone just sitting down and saying we’ve got a problem here, let’s get everybody in a room, discuss it and sort it out.

DM: That can work but then again you say a different kind of mistake can be made and people then say it wasn’t referred to the proper organisation, the proper people weren’t told. Bureaucracies are not necessarily bad things is what I’m saying.

ER: I think if the head of the dinosaur is so far away from the feet that the feet can never get the message through to the nerve centre, I am still – I’m afraid I am still shocked and I think George Entwhistle has had the worst luck in the world to have the job of his dreams and then all this to hit him but I still go back to that moment at that Women in Film and Television lunch where he didn’t ask an extra question which might have made him bring everybody in the room together to discuss just how serious this was.

DM: Then there is the issue of Chinese walls, saying I will leave the news division, the current affairs division, to do what it has to do and if I know any more about it, it might compromise that.

BB: I actually accept that argument, I think he was right to say if he had asked more questions of Helen Boaden, the Head of News, back then, then it could have been seen as the Head of TV interfering in the independence of BBC news but what’s much more serious for me is his failure to get a grip on the last three or four weeks. His failure since it has been quite clear to everybody else and actually he was told very early on by the reporter and the producer of the Newsnight piece that the official BBC explanation for its dropping was wrong, that somehow nobody then said we have a problem here, we have differing accounts, let’s get people together in a room, let’s get to the truth, get the facts, get them out there and act accordingly.

DM: So what do you see the upshot being? Clearly you are close to saying there has to be a change in management at some point when this has been sorted out?

BB: I think there has to be a change in management culture at the BBC and I’m sure, I agree with Esther here, I feel sorry for George, he has only been in the job four weeks and this ‘tsunami of filth’ as Lord Patten described it, has landed on him but I don't know if they can wait for the outcome of this independent review by a former Sky executive because he’s not going to report until December and at the moment we are getting daily drip by drip revelations and claims and counter-claims which is damaging the BBC, it’s preventing us talking about the real scandal which is Savile, the child abuse and how this was allowed to go on for so long. I think he needs to get a grip sooner, get the facts together in a form that he is confident with and act on them before the report comes out.

DM: But shouldn’t the BBC Trust be saying that?

BB: Well here you come on to another problem and I don't know whether you want to explore this. I have long thought that the regulatory structure governing the BBC is not fit for purpose, I thought so at the time after the Hutton Inquiry when I thought the Labour government should have separated the BBC management from the regulation, the regulation should have passed to OFCOM and I still think that one of the problems that Lord Patten has is that the Trust has a dual role, the Trust is there both as a regulator for the BBC but actually also as its ultimate defender and cheerleader and you’ve seen him sort of struggling with these two roles over the last few days …

DM: There was that exchange with the Culture Secretary wasn’t there? What do you think about that Esther, because he’s written very frankly in the Mail on Sunday today, Lord Patten, about just how damaging it is and how he will effectively, to paraphrase, leave no stone unturned to get to the bottom of what happened and sort it out?

ER: He is absolutely right, there are so many questions that need to be answered. What happened when people witnessed bad things happening when Jimmy Savile was at his height? How is it that this careful painstaking piece of journalism was not transmitted on one of the flagship programmes? For me, to be honest with you, what’s happened in the last four weeks is too late. I want the right judgments to have been made far earlier and I also want, I really want a very well put together whistle blowing process so that members of a production team, no matter how junior, if they see things going wrong on whatever level, can report it because if Savile had been stopped in his tracks, so much suffering could have been saved.

DM: People say, and I’ve worked in the BBC and you’ve been back to the BBC a lot, it is so entirely unrecognisably different. You were there in the 70s, I wasn’t, I mean the culture has changed totally at the BBC, it is already an entirely different animal.

ER: Child abuse was never legal, child abuse was never right and what Jimmy Savile was doing all those years, was always something that should and could have been stopped. What we needed was a means for people to disclose what was happening. Maybe they are coming forward now at long last and maybe Patten and others can unpick that terrible stain that was weaved, that disguised him and see how he could have been stopped way earlier in his career.

DM: Which is something worth finding out but do you think there need to be changes within the structure still, Ben Bradshaw, at the BBC?

BB: Well I still think there is a question mark over the BBCs regulatory governance, as I said a moment or two ago but I do think that Lord Patten and George Entwhistle need to learn some very important questions about how BBC management works in a crisis because whether it was the Gilligan scandal or this one, they just appear to be flat footed, not on top of events, very slow moving and you cannot run, you cannot manage a crisis that an organisation is engulfed with, which is fast moving, a media storm, you cannot run it by committee. You have to have somebody there who gets a grip on the situation and that just doesn’t seem to have happened.

DM: Okay, thank you both very much indeed, Esther Rantzen, Ben Bradshaw, very good to see you.