BBC bosses deny hearing Savile rumours

The details were included in thousands of pages of evidence gathered during an inquiry by former Sky executive Nick Pollard

It was set up last year to investigate if management failings were behind Newsnight’s decision to drop its Savile investigation in December 2011, weeks before a Christmas tribute was broadcast.

The revelations about Savile, later broadcast by ITV, sparked a major criminal investigation and focused attention on what police described as decades of predatory sexual crimes committed by the star.

Mr Paxman said the BBC’s handling of the decision to drop its investigation was “almost as contemptible” as its behaviour during the years the DJ was one of its biggest names.

He said: “It was, I would say common gossip, that Jimmy Savile liked, you know, young – it was always assumed to be girls.”

He added: “I had no evidence. But it was common gossip, I think.”

Mr Thompson, who spent 30 years at the corporation in two separate stints, said he had never worked with Savile.

He said: “I had never heard any rumours at all, if you like of a dark side of any kind, sexual or otherwise about Jimmy Savile”.

Ms Boaden said she “had never heard any dark rumours about Jimmy Savile” but did meet him at a lunch for veteran radio presenters.

She said: “He came to the lunch, he kissed my hand at the beginning, he kissed my hand at the end, he said not a word to me between those events”.

Mr Paxman told the inquiry “the important question” was how Savile had been allowed to rise to prominence within the BBC.

He said: “What was the BBC doing promoting this absurd figure, this absurd and malign figure? And I think that has to do with the fact of the BBC having been aloof from popular culture for so long.

“Suddenly pirate radio comes along and all these people in metaphorical cardigans suddenly have to deal with an influx – once pirate radio, once pop radio is legalised, they suddenly have to deal with an influx of people from a very, very different culture and they never got control of them and I’m not sure even now they have.”

Mr Thompson told the inquiry he had been approached about the Newsnight investigation by BBC journalist Caroline Hawley during a Christmas drinks party in 2011.

He said: “I remember seeing Caroline at the party because I had seen her in Tripoli, in Libya some period shortly before. But the phrase that stuck in my mind is, ’You must be worried about the Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile’.”

Mr Thompson said the “casual remark” had not worried him because “at this point the name Jimmy Savile doesn’t ring alarm bells”.

He said he did not regard Savile, who hosted Top of the Pops and Jim’ll Fix It for decades, as “a kind of BBC person particularly” and said he would have been more worried if the investigation had been into a current member of staff.

He said: “I mean he was someone who, you know, had not broadcast regularly for many. many years. So there was no kind of corporate alarm bell going about, you know, this”.

The emails released today show that at one stage a date – December 7 2011 – had been pencilled in for the screening of the Newsnight investigation, until programme editor Peter Rippon decided the report needed to focus on whether the Crown Prosecution Service had dropped a probe into Savile’s activities.

Journalist Meirion Jones, who initially proposed the investigation, flagged up the idea just hours after the presenter’s death was announced in an email headed “Jimmy Savile – paedophile”.

He wrote: “Some of the girls are now prepared to talk about this which might make a core to a film about what Jimmy Savile really got up to – and of course he’s dead so he can’t sue.”

His emails also contain vivid transcripts of the sexual activities in which girls at Duncroft approved school – where Savile was a regular visitor – took part.

In another email, which had already been made public, BBC executive Nick Vaughan-Barratt said he felt uncomfortable preparing a BBC obituary for Savile.

He wrote: “I’d feel v queasy about obit. I saw the real truth.”

Mr Jones later warned the planned broadcast should go ahead because otherwise the BBC would be accused of a “cover-up”.

He wrote: “I think if we go ahead with TX next week there will be minor embarrassment to the BBC. If we cancel or delay till after Christmas there is a risk of another BBC scandal on the scale of the Queen or Jonathan Ross and similar damage to our core value of trust.”

On the proposed day of transmission, editor Peter Rippon was still unsatisfied with progress on the report saying he was unsure it “will ever be strong enough for us even to run it”.

By December 9, the decision was taken to drop the story when the CPS said its investigation had been curtailed due to a lack of evidence.

A now discredited blog posted by Mr Rippon to clarify the decision prompted an exchange of emails with Mr Paxman, who pointed out it failed to address many of the issues.

But Mr Paxman went on to express his sympathies for the way Mr Rippon seemed to be carrying the can.

He wrote: “Just for the record I think it is very unfair (and sadly not at all untypical) that the BBC has dumped all this on one individual. It will pass. But I think the BBC’s behaviour now is almost as contemptible as it was then.”

The evidence also shows detailed accusations about Savile’s crimes were censored after viewers tried to post them on a BBC tribute web page.

The comments, which included one person who wrote “One of my best friends in 1972 was molested by this creep Savile. He was never the same again. Killed himself in 1985. How’s About That Then?”, were stopped from being published by a team of moderators employed by the corporation.

A transcript of an interview between Mr Pollard and former director general George Entwistle refers to examples of the comments, including one person who wrote: “He was a paedophile. You may not like the truth but he was. It will all tumble out now.”

Another wrote: “Sorry to rain on the parade of all the well-wishers, but he was infamous in Scarborough. I would not have been letting my son sit on his knee.”

Some 3,000 pages of emails, interviews and submissions from BBC executives and journalists, were made available today online in what the BBC said was a bid to be “open and transparent”.

Acting director-general Tim Davie said: “The BBC has been open and transparent in its handling of this unhappy chapter in our history. It has not been an entirely comfortable process for us to go through but it is right that we did it this way.

“It is important that the BBC now moves forward with the lessons learned and continues to regain the public’s trust.”

Legal teams are said to have been sorting through the evidence for several weeks, deciding what should be made public and the BBC said roughly 3% had been redacted.

The scandal last year claimed the scalp of Mr Entwistle little over 50 days into the job.

BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten said: “These documents paint a very unhappy picture, but the BBC needs to be open – more open than others would be – in confronting the facts that lie behind Nick Pollard’s report.

“A limited amount of text has been blacked out for legal reasons, but no-one could say that the effect has been to sanitise this material, which again puts a spotlight on some of our failings.

“We need to acknowledge these shortcomings and learn from them.”