The BBC’s creative director may have had his phone hacked tens of thousands of times by journalists at the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and the People, the high court in London has heard.
Alan Yentob’s private voicemails were an Aladdin’s cave of stories about hit shows including EastEnders and Strictly Come Dancing as well as a string of BBC stars between 1999 and 2008, it was claimed on Thursday.
David Sherborne, his barrister, told the court that Yentob was a daily target for journalists because he was in charge of high-profile television shows and had one of the most valuable address books in showbiz.
Sherborne said: “It looks likely that he was a hugely productive source for stories, otherwise why, we say, would there have been vast amounts of calls made to his phone during 1999 to at least 2006 and, we say, up to 2008?
“A volume that would have been thousands of calls and maybe even tens of thousands over the period.”
The former BBC director of television and controller of BBC1 and BBC2 is one of eight phone-hacking victims suing Mirror Group Newspapers for invasion of privacy on an “industrial scale”.
Yentob, who was in court on Thursday, is scheduled to give evidence on Friday about the hacking. In a witness statement he said he felt “violated on a truly massive scale”.
The court heard that call data from landline phones revealed 330 attempted voicemail interceptions from 18 different call extensions within Mirror Group, meaning journalists from the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and the People allegedly attempted to hack Yentob’s phone.
Sherborne said: “Mr Yentob had no legitimate reason to speak to any of these people but call him in their thousands they did.”
He added: “The first reason why he was of such great interest was because he was the creative director at the time. He was the head of the two most popular programmes for those newspapers: EastEnders and Strictly Come Dancing. They were his babies … He was responsible for everything to do with them.”
The second reason why Yentob was routinely targeted, Sherborne said, was because he was one of the biggest figures in the media, and that meant he had a valuable address book of famous contacts.
The court heard that Mirror Group journalists hired private investigators to unlawfully obtain Yentob’s mobile call data in September 2002 in the mistaken belief that he was having an affair.
The court has heard that James Hipwell, a former Daily Mirror journalist, claimed that Yentob’s emails were targeted daily by reporters who would sing an amended version of a Spike Milligan song while eavesdropping on the BBC executive’s private messages.
Dan Evans, a former Sunday Mirror journalist who has pleaded guilty to phone hacking, admitted that he targeted Yentob at least twice a day. He said two senior journalists taught him how to hack using Yentob’s voicemails as an example in April 2003.
In a witness statement, Yentob said he was profoundly shocked when he learned that his voicemails had been snooped on, describing the revelation as extremely disturbing.
