Censor’s black pencil hovers over BBC’s Jimmy Savile review transcripts

The BBC has released its (redacted) transcripts and other evidence from the Pollard Review, which examined the decision to drop Newsnight’s Jimmy Savile investigation. There are thousands of pages of evidence, which you can read here, some with large sections which have fallen foul to the censor’s black pencil, even though Jeremy Paxman in particular had made clear that he wanted his interview transcript published in full.

We’ll bring you further details of the key transcripts throughout the afternoon, but one of the interesting observations from Paxman’s transcript is this on the effect of pared-down resources on Newsnight:

‘Newsnight, particularly in view of the – of the huge resource cuts that have gone on, it is a particularly grinding, gruelling job, because it is every day, and every day, you are making judgements which are either for that night’s transmission or for next week’s transmission, if it is the case of a film, for example, or the week after or the week after that.