Probity at the Pole

Vin Ray, the director of the BBC's college of journalism, set up to protect journalistic standards after the Hutton report, admits that it wasn't that easy setting up the Safeguarding Trust workshops for staff this autumn following all those TV scandals earlier this year. Speaking at a press briefing where details of the courses were unveiled, he noted that the programme began two weeks before the BBC announced "massive job cuts". The experience, says Vin with noble understatement, was inevitably "character forming". Still, it's easy to see why there are so many potential headaches out there. One of the programmes used in the Safeguarding Trust workshops is an edition of Top Gear in which the team raced to the North Pole. Some of the linking shots were filmed using a professional driver, and BBC staff are being invited to discuss whether viewers might have thought Jeremy Clarkson and co were driving the monster 4x4 vehicle when they weren't. The issue came to the BBC's attention when a "bystander" phoned in and suggested that maybe the Top Gear team didn't in fact do the drive (as it happens, they did - the shots of the professional driver were filmed later to save time and money). But still, a bystander? At the North Pole? The BBC has enemies everywhere, it seems.