So Alan Yentob is in the clear. Phew! There’s no evidence that ‘noddies’ were inserted into his broadcast work. Ahem. What it actually looks like, is that although it is more than likely that he filmed fake cutaways, they never ended up being aired. He told an old chum:
“I’m sorry – I hope you understand why I did it. I wanted to be open and undefensive – it turned out that was not the way it was interpreted.”
Ah yes, interpretation. Would open and undefensive be your reading of the senior anonymous source quoted in the original story that started it all?
Cast your mind back to how it all emerged in the Guardian on 7 September:
A senior BBC source admitted that Mr Yentob had engaged in so-called ‘noddy’ shots for interviews he did not conduct but declined to name which instances.
The source robustly defended the practice, insisting that Yentob was unable to attend every interview that appears on his show because of his workload.
“Everybody does it – it is a universal technique,” he said. “The important point is to ask – does this change the meaning of what you are doing and the answer is no it does not.
“If you had everybody who did interviews featured in them you would have have 11 or 12 people nodding at different times which is getting into the realms of the ludicrous. This is standard practice across the industry.”
Who was that senior BBC source trying to be so open and undefensive? Well, on the 9 September, Yentob wrote:
Everyone in TV and much of the press continues to be much preoccupied with the issue of trust. But there is a startling naivety about some of the debate. So, in the middle of the week, the Guardian calls up the BBC: “Has Alan Yentob ever done any ‘noddies’,” the journalist inquires. (By the way, can I say how much I hate the term ‘noddy’. Do you not think that ‘cut-away’ is rather more dignified.)
Well, the answer is on occasion, I have done ‘noddies’ because the constrictions and conventions of TV demand one from time to time. Are we not losing our heads in this debate? Isn’t it important to acknowledge that there can be artifice without deception?
Let’s have more of this openness and undefensiveness!
3 responses to “Alan Yentob: mea maxima exculpa”
So he was
a) not sure whether he had ever faked any sequences in his programme or not, but reckoned on the balance of probability he probably had
b) perfectly prepared to defend the practice if he had
c) backed to the hilt by the director-general on the understanding that he had
The BBC are certainly experts in how to turn a crisis into a long-running, all-encompassing balls-up, aren’t they?
As the consultants would say, it’s a core incompetence.
Consider this my noddy.