The fiasco of Operation Yewtree: C4’s The Accused – National Treasures on Trial reviewed

At 4.38 a.m., one morning in October 2013, the radio presenter Paul Gambaccini was understandably asleep when the doorbell rang. He was then arrested for sexually assaulting a minor on what proved to be the word of a drug addict with a history of making false accusations.

The trouble for Gambaccini, though, was that this wasn’t proved for another 11 months. In the meantime, the allegations were all over the news, he was dropped by the BBC, lost around £100,000 in earnings and started having panic attacks.

And Gambaccini, of course, wasn’t alone in being arrested and publicly named like this – not merely without being charged, but before any investigation had taken place. After the 2012 ITV documentary by Mark Thomas-Williams that exposed the late Jimmy Savile, the police had set up Operation Yewtree and it was pretty much open season on British celebrities. As the then editor of the Daily Star told us in The Accused: National Treasures on Trial, tabloid journalists were soon ‘playing a kind of paedo bingo in the newsroom’, as well as printing ever more lurid stories (‘Savile ring made from glass eye of a corpse’).

Meanwhile, rather as the drugs squad in the 1960s gradually worked its way up to the Beatles, the Met moved on from the likes of Dave Lee Travis and Fred Talbot to raid Sir Cliff Richard’s house in the full glare of BBC cameras. As with Gambaccini, the accusation against Sir Cliff was from a source that the police should obviously have dismissed, but apparently didn’t even question. It then took him 22 months and £5 million to clear his name.

In the circumstances, you might expect the cops and journalists who appeared in the programme to have exhibited something between regret and paralysing remorse.