Masterly

75-year-old former station master, Richard Spendlove, still adorning BBC Radio Cambridgeshire's schedules, gets a pretty hard kicking from the BBC Trust's Editorial Standards Committee, in its latest report.

They noted his comments during a phone-in discussion of  marine sergeant Alexander Blackman, jailed for the murder of an Afghan insurgent, which included...

“And this, for what it may be worth, is my view: we shouldn’t be there in the first place. That’s where I stand on it. And if that’d been the case, it wouldn’t have happened, would it?”

At one stage, he urged listeners to write to their MPs about the sentence of eight years in prison; but later added,,,

“…as I’ve said so many times before, you vote one lot of wasters out and another lot of wasters in…” 

In relation to the parts of the complaint upheld, the Committee noted.. .

"...the failings throughout the show of 7 December 2013 and it was concerned that they were of such seriousness as to suggest that there had been inadequate editorial supervision of the output. It noted BBC Cambridgeshire had already acknowledged the issues and required the BBC Executive to confirm that such supervision was now in place.

The Committee considered that some of the breaches in this programme had been unequivocally clear. Trustees regretted it had been necessary for the complainant to go through every stage of the appeals process to establish what should have been conceded by the BBC earlier. "

Tickets, at £9 each, are still available for Richard's performance at the Brook in Soham on October 3rd, entitled "A Nice Night In...".