July

NB: <----- She's going that way

You know, now that we’ve actually seen the programme – perhaps the most boring and deferential five hours of television ever – can you really blame Stephen Lambert for trying to jazz it up a bit? Oh, yes, that’s right, we can. From Eye 1190:

“The BBC is truthful, or it is nothing,” opined the Telegraph, reeling from the catalogue of faked phone-ins and editorial juggling acts ’fessed up to by the corporation’s director-general. “It is staggering that the programme’s makers believed they could get away with inventing a sequence involving the head of the British state. But they did. It gives a disturbing indication of what they are prepared to do when ordinary people are their victims.” Many Telegraph readers were also staggered by the paper’s front-page report on the execution of the former Iraqi head of state on 30 December last year, which got a number of details wrong, largely because, as hack Toby Harnden subsequently admitted, he was “writing about Saddam’s hanging before it happened” – indeed, a full nine hours before the timeline “3am” which the paper printed prominently next to his story. Harnden’s excuse? “It was one of those tricky journalistic challenges when no matter how much you hedge and speculate, the reality will always mischievously diverge from the finely-turned piece one filed.” And the Telegraph’s take on the BBC affair? “Surely it should be obvious to any employee of a nationally subsidised, world-class broadcasting organisation that deceiving the public in the manner of a tawdry, fly-by-night showman is not acceptable.”