AT the smart London office of law firm Lewis Silkin, a team of solicitors this week set about grilling staff from the TV show MasterChef.
Acting for the show’s producer, Banijay, they wanted to know if they had heard any off-colour “jokes” from the now jettisoned host Gregg Wallace.
Did they see him act inappropriately, and if they did, what did they do about it?
This evidence will be used to compile an “independent” report into the culture of the show.
BBC top brass await its contents with trepidation.
But it won’t be delivered for a while, which is a blessing for the BBC as it had no time for it last week.
Because just as these stressed-out MasterChef staff were facing the heat, executives were bogged down with another major scandal.
And at 7.14pm on Thursday night, just as the news agenda was dominated by Keir Starmer’s tete-a-tete with Donald Trump, they decided to tell the rest of us about it.
Following yet another review, the Beeb had “identified serious flaws” in the making of the BBC2 documentary Gaza: How To Survive A Warzone.
The corporation confessed: “Some of these were made by the production company, and some by the BBC; all of them are unacceptable.”
It went on: “Nothing is more important than the trust that our audiences have in our journalism.
“This incident has damaged that trust.”
Independent report
Ouch! As mea culpas go, this one was a doozy.
For weeks the BBC had faced a firestorm as it emerged that the young boy who narrated the documentary was the son of a member of terrorist organisation Hamas.
Not only that, he had been paid from licence-fee cash, via his mother, wife of Hamas’ deputy agriculture minister.
BBC News, which commissioned the hour-long show from producer Hoyo Films, had finally put its hands up.
Newspapers, like this one, scrambled to get the confession into print. Fortunately we found space.
The BBC’s bid to bury bad news had failed.
Careless doesn’t even cut it. The arrogant BBC has become its very own wrecking ball.
Colin Robertson
Anyway, it is starting to look like we newspapers should keep a slot open for a BBC apology every day, such is the frequency of its public contrition.
The sainted BBC is staggering from one scandal to the next.
This week’s Gaza debacle came just days after it put out another apology following the release of another damaging independent report, this time into what the executives knew about DJ Tim Westwood’s alleged “bullying and misogynistic” behaviour.
Released while the world’s gaze was on Ukraine as it entered its third year of war, the BBC board admitted it had not taken complainants’ views seriously enough because it was “too deferential to high-profile individuals”.
Sound familiar? Then you’d be right.
It was but a month ago that the BBC also apologised to staff for “management failings” over how they handled complaints about Russell Brand’s “unacceptable behaviour” when he was a DJ on Radio 2 and 6 Music.
It admitted that staff felt the star, who has denied the allegations, was “perceived to be too influential” to bother complaining about.
So that’s THREE significant apologies already this year — and March had not even begun.
As the year unfurls, we will probably hear more — not least about Gregg Wallace.
In “spring” the BBC will publish an independent report into “workplace culture”, a deep dive, which, if it is doing its job properly, will shed light on the BBC’s propensity to let bad people do bad things.
We will hopefully hear more about why the paedophile Huw Edwards has still not paid back the £200,000 of our money he ran off with when he was sacked.
And there will be other apologies, mark my words.
Careless doesn’t even cut it. The arrogant BBC has become its very own wrecking ball.
Of course, Auntie’s defenders — usually the people paid handsomely by its annual £5billion income — were out in force this week.
More than 500 luvvies and lefties — including, naturally, £1.35million-a-year Match Of The Day host Gary Lineker — were furious the BBC was under fire for its Gaza documentary.
They loftily declared: “Beneath this political football are children who are in the most dire circumstances of their young lives. This is what must remain at the heart of this discussion.”
Needless to say, in common with most celebrity interventions, it spectacularly missed the point.
This is a row about processes, not programmes.
As the BBC itself even admitted: “While the intent of the documentary was aligned with our purpose . . . the processes and execution of this programme fell short of our expectations.”
Offer up scalps
The BBC is, by act of Parliament, allowed to demand we pay it £169.50 a year because of its unique role in public life as a non-partisan cultural entity designed to “inform, educate and entertain”.
As such, it is rightly held to a much higher standard than any other media organisation.
It must be impartial, its coverage must be balanced, its behaviour must be beyond reproach.
But time and time again it has been found to be none of the above.
If this was a commercial business failing to such a prolific degree, there would be calls for it to be closed, or at the very least offer up scalps.
So what the hell is going on? Well, there is a common thread, and one that will not surprise you.
The BBC’s most recent apologies all point to a central flaw that it seems incapable of doing anything about, despite its endless apologies.
And it is this: If you are useful to the BBC then you will be protected.
Important questions will not be asked about your behaviour or, in the case of the Gaza doc, exactly how you made your programme. We’ll get you on the air, buddy!
The content of the now- deleted Gaza doc spoke to the concerns of a left-leaning BBC that refuses to call Hamas a terrorist organisation and seemingly views the Palestinian cause as the most important element of Hamas’s war with Israel.
Indeed, last year more than 200 TV and film people — including a former BBC director of TV — signed a letter accusing the BBC of “systemic problems of anti-Semitism and bias”.
Their worries were batted away by sanctimonious BBC top brass, who claimed they had “well-established and robust processes in place to handle any concerns or complaints”.
If only that were true.
