It doesn't just happen to the Queen


Following last week's royal documentary fiasco today's Observer reports that - "BBC director-general Mark Thompson, fearing that more skeletons might tumble out of the cupboard, is this weekend undertaking a purge of 'fast practice' by programme makers, offering an amnesty by which producers who offer information about past mistakes are unlikely to face a reprimand.

At 3pm on Friday he sent a memo to staff insisting: 'Nothing matters more for us than honesty, accuracy and fair dealing with the audience. We must now put our house in order. We cannot allow even a small number of lapses, whether intentional or as a result of sloppiness, to undermine our reputation and the confidence of the public.'

This followed an email from BBC executives, in the wake of the phone-in disaster, urging staff to identify programmes 'where you feel there may be a risk that in some way audiences could have been misled'.


This blog would like to identify the BBC Radio 3 choral evensong broadcast of October 25th 2006 as a programme where " in some way audiences could have been misled". During that programme two commercial recordings were quite deliberately passed off as historic BBC broadcasts. On An Overgrown Path broke the story exclusively here.

It doesn't just happen to the Queen.

And then, of course, there was the day when listeners were misled into thinking a Haydn quartet was a Mozart quartet, and vice versa. It's enough to make one storm off in a huff.
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