Fincham’s head on a royal plate

Fancy that - Peter Fincham, controller of BBC1, has quit. As predicted here, it was never likely that he would escape unscathed from the so-called “Crowngate” scandal.

As the Times reports:

Mr Fincham wrongly told a July 11 press launch that a forthcoming documentary would show the Queen storming out of a sitting with the celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz.

Mr Fincham discovered by 5pm that day that this was untrue, but the BBC did not correct it until the following morning after prominent stories had already been made public in a number of newspapers and television stations - and only issued an apology at noon that day.

The fallout comes following former BBC executive Will Wyatt’s report into the affair. An interesting snippet, reported in the Guardian, says:

Mr Fincham and his head of press, Jane Fletcher, saw the promotional tape three times, but Mr Wyatt said they failed to “grasp the potential of the news value”.

Fincham’s background is in comedy and entertainment programmes like Alan Partridge, The Day Today and Jamie’s Kitchen, so perhaps his lack of news nous is unsurprising.

Another unsurprising thing is that Fletcher has also quit, as has Stephen Lambert of RDF Media, which made the fateful documentary for the Beeb. Lambert’s earlier suggestion that the tape portrayed nothing more than a “slightly ruffled encounter” was plainly laughable, as has been previously observed.

This whole thing has been perceived as central to the “trust in TV” debate, which has sucked in everything from GMTV to the Blue Peter cat in recent weeks. It’s arguably the most giant cock-up of them all. But the important lesson for the future, clearly, is nothing to do with deceiving your audience and gobbing off about it, because that’s obviously still happening. No, it is, quite simply, don’t diss the Queen.

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