Five key points from the Pollard Review evidence on Newsnight and Jimmy Savile

There are over 3,000 pages of evidence in the cache of transcripts, emails, statements and texts for the Pollard Review released by the BBC today. Some of the interviews covered familiar old ground, such as Jeremy Paxman telling the inquiry that it was ‘common gossip that Jimmy Savile liked, you know, young – it was always assumed to be girls’. But there are other points which are worth noting from today’s release. There may well be others: some of the evidence, as the pictures below show, was heavily redacted.

1. Newsnight was poorly resourced

This was a problem referred to by many of those who gave evidence to the inquiry. Jeremy Paxman told Pollard that ‘frequently things are now so stretched that they can’t be viewed by editors before transmission because there are simply – there is simply nobody there. No-one has the time to do it’, although he added that this would not have been the case with this particular story.