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When I go into a supermarket I always like to sneak something home with me - I hide it under my sweater. Why shouldn't I? Everyone does it where I come from.
Nonsense, of course, but it's exactly the same argument used to defend the latest piece of BBC manipulation of the truth to emerge:The BBC has admitted that Alan Yentob, the corporation's creative director, has performed "noddy shots" on interviews that he did not personally conduct for his arts series Imagine.
In the first instance of a senior BBC executive being drawn into the TV trust issue, a senior corporation source admitted to MediaGuardian.co.uk that Mr Yentob often does not conduct all the interviews on Imagine - even though he appears nodding or reacting to them.
...[I]t is understood that scenes featuring Mr Yentob reacting to some of the more peripheral figures and experts featured in his programmes were edited in even though he was not actually present. Editing work on the programme later gave the impression that he was present.
...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. Now the BBC itself, one should make clear, hasn't reacted to this story, but one can reasonably assume that it defends the practice and agrees with this defence since the man exposed for faking his interviews is, after all, the BBC's Creative Director.
"Everybody does it" is simply a pathetic excuse.
It's not that it really matters that Mr Yentob was off somewhere else while the interviews he purported to have conducted were being filmed by an underling. It's that it seems all too typical of an organisation for which facts and the truth are sometimes an inconvenient obstacle to progamme makers.
On reflection, Mr Yentob's title of Creative Director is entirely appropriate.