The 70s

The BBC has re-issued paperwork from the Brian Neil report, in response to a Freedom of Information enquiry. The QC was asked by the BBC to investigate allegations of payola and sexual misconduct, and produced what he called his interim report in 1972.  One element was a front page story in the News of the World, April 1971. Samantha McAlpine, a regular teenage visitor to Top of The Pops, had committed suicide, and her mother gave quotes from her diary about DJs on the show to the newspaper.

Here's the conclusion from Neil about that element - which, most people believe refers to Tony Blackburn; it clears him. Yet Lord Hall felt that a reading of this document required Blackburn to lose his BBC employment, because he said he didn't remember being interviewed by Neil, and stuck by that position in front of Dame Janet Smith's enquiry. Blackburn returns to the BBC in the New Year.