The BBC Monster Nobody Talks About

During the peak of Operation Yewtree between 2012 and 2014, it sometimes felt as if we couldn’t get through a full week without yet another TV celebrity getting accused of historical sexual offences involving children. Not all of them led to convictions or even charges, but the ones that did trampled all over the collective childhood memories of everyone who grew up watching and admiring these one-time heroes turned shameful villains.

Gary Glitter was hardly a big surprise as he’d already been convicted of child sex offences in the 1990s. Rolf Harris came as a big shock, as did the excitable presenter and weatherman Fred Talbot who used to bounce around a floating weather map in Liverpool’s Albert Dock for ITV’s ‘This Morning.’

Of course, the man who sparked off the whole investigation was Jimmy Savile who abused hundreds of young victims during his career and is now known to be one of the UK’s most prolific sex offenders in history. No other celebrity figure came remotely close to matching the scale and notoriety of Savile’s colossal catalogue of contemptible crimes. But the one who came closest now barely gets mentioned at all.

It’s not like this man was a complete unknown. He had a television and radio career spanning over fifty years, much of which was spent working for the BBC. He was one of the most unusual and distinctive sporting commentators on the airwaves. For over a decade, he hosted one of the most bizarre gameshows ever shown on TV, one particular episode of which was seen by a staggering 400 million people around the globe.

He was even awarded an OBE by the Queen in 2012 for his services to broadcasting and charity. But before that same year was out, he would be charged with the first wave of historic sex offences involving children.

The scale of his alleged crimes was so severe that a major three-year independent inquiry into the BBC’s failures during the period of Jimmy Savile’s campaigns of abuse later had to be expanded to scrutinise the misconduct of this freshly-revealed offender. So there you have this man’s name slapped right alongside Jimmy Savile in a 370,000-word report which examined how the biggest two monsters working at the BBC managed to get away with abusing their positions of power and influence for such a long time.

Yet whilst the shadow of Jimmy Savile is likely to hang over the BBC until the dying days of the corporation, barely anybody mentions the name ‘Stuart Hall’ anymore. So how did we forget the famous face and voice and chuckle and lyrical language of the man who was convicted of sixteen indecent assaults on victims as young as nine years old? Did he ever face real justice or was he gifted an easy ride by the bewildering quirks of British law? And just what is the true story behind the supposed national treasure whom much of the nation has never even heard of?

The Beautiful Game

Let’s kick off with a sports quiz. Or to be more specific, let’s kick off with a quiz about a sport quiz: Who was the original presenter of the BBC’s long-running ‘A Question of Sport’?

If you’re not quite old enough to remember shell suits, Mr Blobby, or ‘Tetris’ on the Gameboy, you might have assumed that Sue Barker must have presented it for at least 700 years. Viewers with longer memories might recall that David Coleman enjoyed an epic 18-year run as the host of the show from 1979. We’re tempted to give you half a point if your answer was the legendary snooker and skiing dude David Vine, as he was certainly the host of the first national series broadcast in 1970.

But maximum points and an out-of-date Puffin book token go to anyone who came up with the name of Stuart Hall who presented the original black-and-white pilot episode back in 1968. This was only broadcast regionally in the North of England, and it appears that Hall got the chop when the decision was made to commission a full national series. But it’s an interesting little nugget of TV history that often gets forgotten, or to be accurate, often gets purposefully brushed under the carpet.

Just before the beginning of 2020, the BBC marked the 50th anniversary of ‘A Question of Sport’ with the broadcast of a special documentary which looked back at the long history of the show. But not quite all of it. Viewers of the documentary would have been left with the impression that the show was kicked off by David Vine, as there was no mention of the pilot episode at all.

Even the actual timing of the 50th anniversary celebrations implied that the show had no history pre-1970. Now it could be argued that it would have been tricky to cover the regional pilot episode in any great detail as the recording no longer exists in the BBC archives, and it’s difficult to even find any images from it. But even so, you might have expected a comprehensive documentary on the history of ‘A Question of Sport’ to have at least given a cursory mention to the real origins of the format.

And we suspect that had the anniversary fallen before 2013, this would definitely have been the case.

Just a little earlier in 2009, BBC Radio 5 Live had been happy to dedicate a whole evening to a celebration of the genuine original host’s life and career which went under the banner of ‘Stuart Hall Night’. But you wouldn’t have seen or heard anything like that again after 2013. Because after this point, Stuart Hall had become the man they’d much rather you forget. And the strange thing is that we all kind of did.

Back in 1968, Stuart Hall would have been an obvious choice for the host of a new regional sports quiz broadcast in the North, as he had both regional television and sport flowing through his veins. In fact, he could have been a professional footballer, but the ambitious young man turned down the opportunity because he didn’t think the money was good enough for him.

Born on Christmas Day 1929 in Manchester, he was raised in Cheshire and later Derbyshire where he attended grammar school. It would appear that he was imbued with boundless confidence in his own voice from a relatively early age, as he would soon become the chairman of the school’s debating society. After a stint in national service, the son of a baker moved back to the city of his birth where he studied Confectionary and Bakery at what was then called The Manchester Municipal School of Technology.

It was during this time that the talented 16-year-old footballer was offered a playing contract with Crystal Palace F.C, but he quite astoundingly turned his nose up at the chance. His reasoning was that he wasn’t too impressed with the wages dished out to 16-year-olds — £10 a week in the summer and £20 a week in the winter. As he put it himself rather crudely: “That wouldn’t have kept me in tarts, cigarettes, and spirituous liquor. I just thought, there’s better money to be made than for kicking a football about.

Football couldn’t afford me.”

We imagine he wasn’t talking about the kind of tarts that are pastry-based. Funnily enough though, pastry-based tarts are exactly the kind of thing that he briefly chose over a career as a professional footballer, as he ended up working for a while in the family bakery business where his dad presumably paid him better wages than Crystal Palace F.C.

However, he was lured back into the sporting sphere at the age of 30 in 1959 when he secured his first jobs working as a radio commentator and sports journalist for the BBC on such programmes as ‘Radio Newsreel’ and ‘Sports Report.’ It might seem odd that a man who once dismissed the idea of getting paid to kick a football about would go on to spend much of his life getting paid to talk about other people kicking a football about. But this would be a big part of Hall’s career over the course of the next five decades, keeping him in Cherry Bakewells, cigarettes, and spirituous liquor.

His very first job for ‘Sports Report’ could have been a bit of a disaster. He was reporting on a thrilling football match between Sheffield Wednesday and Leicester City in which no less than eight goals were shared. This could have been a budding commentator’s dream, were it not for the fact that the whole pitch was shrouded in thick fog, and Hall couldn’t see a damn thing. He later proudly admitted: “I didn’t see a goal but I described them all in the greatest detail.

I just lied my way through it and I have been inventing stories ever since.”

Despite this hazy start, Hall went on to become a pretty influential and popular football journalist with good friends in high places, including George Best, and Liverpool managers Bill Shankly and Bob Paisley. The latter helped Hall pull off a bit of a sneaky masterstroke much later in 1977 when Liverpool won their first European Cup final in Rome. Hall had persuaded the BBC to pay for his trip to Rome to cover the historic match even though the BBC had not been given any authorisation by the Italian broadcasters to have any kind of presence at the stadium.

Hall was refused entry and had his generic press pass ripped up in front of him. However, Bob Paisley helped out by smuggling Hall into the grounds on the pretence that he was an employee of Liverpool F.C. Hall was then put into a Number 14 t-shirt and plonked on the substitutes bench so that he could absorb the whole match and provide later exclusive insight on behalf of the BBC.

We’re not quite sure what might have happened if Hall had actually been summoned from the substitutes bench to play in the match, but we guess that there may have been a heated discussion about wages and pastries before Hall would even have bothered to lace up his boots.

He also claims to be the man responsible for first coining the phrase ‘The Beautiful Game’ as a description of football. Hall reckons that this first caught on when he regularly used the term to specifically describe the style of legendary footballer Peter Doherty who played for Manchester City between 1936 and 1945, although this peak period of his career was somewhat disrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War. Hall was a lifelong supporter of Manchester City although he wasn’t averse to poking fun at his home team.

Whereas Manchester United supporters refer to their home ground at Old Trafford as ‘The Theatre of Dreams’, Hall insisted on referring to Manchester City’s home turf as ‘The Theatre of Base Comedy’. He felt that the team’s fans were an unusual breed too, as he explained: “They possess the most loyal fans in the world. They laugh and sing and joke and carry inflatable bananas when things are going badly, and they do exactly the same when things are going well.”

But can he really take the credit for coining the phrase ‘The Beautiful Game’? He’d like to think so but nobody else does. The term has been connected with football since the 19th century. Some might argue that Stuart Hall helped to popularise it, but we think that Pelé might have had something to say about that.

The phrase had been knocking around in Brazilian football culture since the 1950s, and it was Pelé who really brought it kicking into the global mainstream with the release of his 1977 autobiography ‘My Life and The Beautiful Game.’ As he’s widely regarded as one of the greatest footballers in history, we suspect that Pelé carries just a little more clout and influence than Stuart Hall.

But one thing that can’t be denied is that Hall’s style of football commentary was certainly unique. Many commentators might be accused of slipping into tired old cliches from time to time. You know the kind of thing. “It’s a game of two halves.” “He almost hit that one too well.” “They gave it 110%.” “You just couldn’t write a script like this!”

But you’d never catch Hall trotting out lines like that. His flowery and passionate commentary often included quotes from Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Shelley, infused with evocative poetry of his own and obscure words that don’t usually get heard outside an audiobook version of a dictionary. Just to pick one example from thousands, here’s how he once excitedly described an impressive performance from his home team’s Georgi Kinkladze: “Tippy-toed! Tumultuous! Only one word will suffice — Terpsichorean!”

Admittedly this particular flavour of commentary may not have been everyone’s half-time glass of orange juice, and probably wasn’t too popular with the type of football fan who needed a translator to understand what Hall was waffling on about. But it can’t be denied that Stuart Hall was a distinctive, intelligent, and strangely prosaic football commentator who was certainly in a league of his own. Hang on, that last bit sounded like a bit of a cliché. Let’s say instead that he reigned supreme in a Colosseum of his own construction, wrought from sharp wit and verbal ballet, in which his fumbling peers could only look up in bewildered awe and wonderment.

Hall didn’t just have a face for radio, though. From 1965 onwards, he became a long-running presenter of the BBC’s regional news programme for the north west, originally entitled ‘Look North’ before later evolving into ‘North West Tonight’. Hall co-hosted the show for 25 years, showcasing his strengths as both a serious straight-laced reader of grim Northern news bulletins, and a cheerful participant in more fun and whimsical elements of the show. One minute he could be sombrely reading a news item on how a fire had broken out at an orphanage in Birkenhead, the next minute he could be chuckling along as he interviewed the owner of a cat from Morecambe who had just broken the world record for performing the most tricks and stunts in under sixty seconds.

His role wasn’t always confined to the north west. The BBC show ‘Nationwide’ often featured link-ups and chats with the regional news anchors, and Hall was always on board to represent the north west, ensuring that his face was now getting noticed on a national level. But his biggest national breakthrough was to come in an entirely different kind of television role in 1972.

Hall might not have felt too gutted after presenting the pilot regional episode of ‘A Question of Sport’ and then discovering that he had been sidelined in favour of David Vine. The consolation prize was David Vine’s old job. Vine had been presenting another sporting-themed quiz on the BBC called ‘Quiz Ball’ in the 1960s.

This involved football players and their celebrity supporters taking part in a general knowledge quiz stylised in the format of a game of football in which the outcome of tackles, runs, and goals were all determined by answering questions correctly. When David Vine jumped ship to ‘A Question of Sport’, Stuart Hall hopped into the vacant seat and became the presenter of ‘Quiz Ball’ – but only for a brief time. He hosted the final few seasons before full-time was called on ‘Quiz Ball’, whereas ‘A Question of Sport’ rumbled on for another 53 years.

However, Hall jumped straight into another strikingly different presenting role in 1972, and this one would stay with him for quite some time.

“It’s a Knockout” had been running since 1966 on the BBC, but the show reached its peak of popularity only after Stuart Hall took over as presenter from 1972. If you’ve never seen it before, it’s a difficult format to describe to a modern audience. “It’s a Knockout” was often a difficult thing to comprehend for the contemporary audience but they still lapped it up.

It was essentially an ultra-wacky outdoor gameshow in which teams of contestants competed in absurd sporting events – often involving water cannons and custard pies – whilst dressed up in giant foam costumes resembling penguins or chefs. Hall himself described it as “The Olympic games with custard pies” whilst others felt it was more “School sports day for adults.” The House of Commons would later go on to describe it as a “surreal, quasi xenophobic art form” when they signed a motion to officially congratulate Stuart Hall on 40 years of broadcasting in 1999.

The host was clearly having a whale of a time, manically laughing and wheezing and cackling throughout every episode as contestants in silly costumes repeatedly fell over again and again. Some might suggest that all it became faintly tedious, particularly when it reached the point where Hall appeared to be incapable of even finishing a sentence without collapsing into a fit of giggles. But it was a different time and it was massively popular, often reaching 15 million viewers in its heyday.

And these were undoubtedly Hall’s most high-profile years in the public spotlight. If you had both a television and a pulse in the 1970s, then chances are you would be familiar with “It’s a Knockout” and the hysterical laughter of Stuart Hall.

But it could be said that we still never really knew a great deal about the man himself and what made him tick, as despite his propensity for embracing effusive language and waxing lyrical on sporting events, he rarely gave anything away about himself. With regard to his personal life, we know that he married his wife Hazel in 1958 and together they had three children, although tragically their first son Nicholas died shortly after birth from a heart defect.

In his younger years, he was a keen amateur racing driver. He later revealed: “I was a dilettante, a rake, a louche. I thought the world belonged to me. I raced cars. I had an Austin Healey. I had the silk scarf. I fancied myself, there’s no doubt about it. Mind, I never won a race.”

But aside from this, the closest we got to learning what made him tick is learning that his family home – a mansion in Cheshire – was full of clocks and watches. He owned a huge collection of expensive antique clocks and watches, including a silver bronze clock depicting his hero Napoleon which he acquired from an aristocrat and took pride of place on his office desk. Still not a lot to go on though, is it?

Whilst he seemed keen to maintain a private life, he occasionally popped up in the newspapers in stories that he would probably rather have kept to himself. In 1978, he was called as a witness for the prosecution in a bizarre case which involved an allegedly drugged policeman. Details are unfortunately quite sparse, but the police constable was on trial after being accused of driving while unfit through drink and drugs.

The constable claimed in his defence that just before he was arrested, he had stopped Stuart Hall on suspicion of speeding, but had then graciously accepted Hall’s invitation to go back to his house for a nice glass of gin. The constable reckoned that Hall must have slipped some tranquilisers in his glass of gin which explained why he was so intoxicated when he was later arrested and found to have drink and drugs in his bloodstream.

Hall vehemently denied the allegation and was never charged in connection with the incident. We’re not sure what he would have gained in the long-term by drugging a policeman on his property, but it’s unclear whether there was any truth in the idea that Hall may have invited the constable into his home for a cheeky drink after being caught speeding.

He found himself in the dock later on in 1990 when he was charged with shoplifting a packet of sausages and a jar of coffee from his local branch of Safeway. He was cleared of the charges in Knutsford Crown Court after explaining that the incident had been entirely accidental, and could be put down to the current state of absent-mindedness that he was enduring following the recent theft of his watch collection.

The press was also quick to reveal that Stuart Hall may not be overly-shrewd in matters relating to business and finance. He came close to bankruptcy in 1989 after heavily investing in Lloyds of London just as the insurance and investment company was about to slide into one of the biggest catastrophes in its history. And his earlier attempt at launching his own travel agency in Manchester City Centre in the early 80s was doomed to fast failure, possibly not helped by the fact that ‘Stuart Hall International Travel’ had a deeply unfortunate acronym which should have been flagged up in the brainstorming stage.

But Hall seemed happy to just laugh off all these failures – in public, at least – in a similar manner to the way he usually chortled his way through another episode of “It’s a Knockout.” He later admitted: “I’ve never been brilliant in business. If you have an artistic bent, you’re never going to be good at the logistics of business. I’ve no time for all that.

I’m the man who ran SHIT Travel - what a great venture that was. I’ve lost a fortune at Lloyd’s, so what? I laughed at it. I was taken for a sucker by folk cleverer than me.

But I laugh. Life isn’t a career, it’s a stumble from crisis to crisis.”

The Royal Knockout and Declining Fortunes

Stuart Hall’s TV career appeared to take a bit of a stumble after regular production of “It’s a Knockout” finally drew to a close in 1982. A few specials were sporadically produced throughout the decade, including most memorably of all ‘The Grand Knockout Tournament’ in 1987, more commonly referred to nowadays as “It’s a Royal Knockout”. Conceived by Prince Edward, this infamous edition featured four competing teams headed up by none other than the man formerly known as Prince Andrew, his wife Sarah - Duchess of York, Princess Anne, and Prince Edward himself. The teams consisted of some other pretty interstellar names at the time including John Cleese, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Kevin Kline, John Travolta, Sir John Mills, and Meat Loaf to name just a few.

But it’s interesting to ponder over the members of the Royal who are conspicuous by their absence. There was no sign of Charles, Diana, or the Duke of Edinburgh who all rejected Prince Edward’s invitation to participate. And there was certainly no sign of Queen Elizabeth II who was reported to have strongly disapproved of the whole venture. Maybe she had a point.

“It’s a Royal Knockout” is generally regarded today as a cringeworthy and humiliating embarrassment which did no favours to the Royal family at all. Even so, it managed to attract 400 million viewers all over the world and raised over £1.5 million for charity. But Stuart Hall would never generate quite as big an audience ever again.

Following the final special episode of “It’s a Knockout” in 1988, Hall bought the rights to the format and occasionally hosted staged events around the world. It seems the Belgians never fell out of love with it. He sold the rights to Channel 5 in 1999 when they produced a short-lived revival of the show, but although there was originally talk of Hall presenting the new show, he was ultimately pushed out of the picture in favour of Keith Chegwin and Lucy Alexander.

Meanwhile, Stuart Hall’s 25-year stint on the BBC’s ‘Look North’ came to an end in 1990, following a reported dispute over a proposed new contract. Hall defected to the regional rivals at ITV where he worked on ‘Granada Reports’ for most of the 1990s. But he hadn’t entirely severed his relationship with the BBC. During the same year that he departed BBC Manchester, he began contributing to sporting segments for the newly-launched BBC Radio 5 which would evolve into Radio 5 Live by 1994.

Hall would continue to provide his exuberant brand of football commentary for Radio 5 Live right up until 2012.

But his face was becoming a far less frequent sight on the television screen as the years rolled by, and you would be more likely to just hear him providing voice-overs for the likes of ‘Ninja Warrior’ on Challenge TV. One of his last TV jobs in 2008 was providing a “laughometer” for “Les Dennis’s Home Video Heroes” on Challenge, in which the comical quality of a home video clip was measured by how hard Stuart Hall laughed at it when it was shown to him. This was obviously a bit of a cringy homage to the glory days when he used to laugh and snort his way through every episode of “It’s a Knockout.” But those glory days of the 1970s now appeared to be a distant memory for many, whilst most younger viewers would be completely unfamiliar with the name of Stuart Hall after the 1990s.

But that’s not to say that he’d been forgotten by any means. Well, that’s not true, he’d probably been forgotten by quite a lot of people. “It’s a Knockout” was very much a product of its time and was not the kind of thing to get a repeat run. It quickly faded from memory in much the same way as CB radios, tank tops, spud guns, The Brotherhood of Man, and Showaddywaddy.

But there were some who still celebrated Stuart Hall. As we mentioned near the top of the video, BBC Radio 5 Live devoted a whole night of programming to Stuart Hall in 2009 to mark his 50th year of broadcasting and his 80th birthday. Broadcast live from Manchester City Stadium – or ‘The Theatre of Base Comedy’ – the special tribute show featured Hall as the guest of honour reflecting on his long career as he was showered with praise from the likes of Liverpool legend Graeme Souness, and former Manchester City stars Mike Summerbee and Francis Lee.

Just a few years later in 2012, Hall was recognised by none other than Queen Elizabeth II as he was awarded an OBE in the New Year Honours list for services to broadcasting and charity. The honour was personally presented to him at Buckingham Palace by the Queen whom it seems may have finally forgiven him for participating in the embarrassing debacle that was “It’s a Royal Knockout.” We think it would have been fitting if she’d made him try and grab the medal by climbing up a slippery pole whilst dressed in a giant foam penguin costume and getting custard pies lobbed in his face by Prince Edward, but alas the ceremony was disappointingly traditional.

Stuart Hall OBE was dead chuffed with the honour, though. He told the press: “I’m overjoyed. It’s a recognition that you’ve put something in. I’ve worked for charity now for the last 52 years, I’ve raised millions of pounds and it’s a little thank you. I feel, in my 82nd year, a little glow of pleasure. My whole life has been a piece of self-indulgence. I have wasted my life in every direction, really. I’ve made underachieving an achievement. I intend to go on and on and on.”

That may have been his intention at the beginning of the year, but his investiture as an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire would unwittingly unleash a string of allegations and revelations that would spell the end of Hall’s career before the year was out. They think it’s all over. It is now.

The Light Imaginings of Men

In May 2012, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown was working as a journalist for ‘The Independent’ when she received an anonymous three-page letter. The author of the letter explained how she had been motivated to get in touch and share her harrowing story after feeling enraged over the recent news that a monster such as Stuart Hall had been awarded an OBE.

She claimed that when she was still a teenager in the 1970s, Hall had been invited to her school to hand out prizes to top students including herself. The headteacher later informed her that Hall had been so impressed with her work that he had extended an invitation for her to visit him at the BBC studios. It would be the first of many visits.

The shy teenager had initially been over the moon during the early visits when Hall appeared to take a genuine interest in her life, studies, and future. But then the abuse began. She claimed that Hall had actually been grooming her before eventually plying her with alcohol and sexually assaulting her, often aided and abetted by friends within his inner circle.

Whilst Jimmy Savile had died before his crimes had ever been exposed, the writer of the letter strongly expressed her hopes that Hall might actually answer for his crimes before he escaped to the other side.

Some journalists may have been tempted to bin the anonymous letter. With no name attached, it may have been difficult to envision how the matter could ever be taken any further. But Yasmin Alibhai-Brown was deeply touched by the openness of the letter, and felt that it contained vivid details and dates which could feasibly be checked out on some level.

The journalist still admits that she was having second thoughts when she took the letter to Ealing police station with the intention of handing it over to the Metropolitan Police. She was kept waiting in an overcrowded reception area crammed with drunks and angry victims of robberies. During this time, she pondered over whether an anonymous letter would really be taken seriously by the police, and considered walking out and forgetting the whole thing.

But she remained in the station until the letter had been handed over.

A few weeks later, she was interviewed by Detective Constable Rukin from Lancashire Police who revealed that Stuart Hall had never been on their radar, but a new line of inquiry had been opened in light of the anonymous letter. It’s often assumed that the matter was handled by Operation Yewtree as this was certainly the same timeframe in which the operation had been set up in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal to identify potential abusers in positions of power and influence. But oddly, this was not the case. The Metropolitan Police referred the matter to Lancashire Constabulary, a move which meant that it never fell under the jurisdiction of Yewtree.

However, Lancashire Constabulary were doing a pretty good job on their own. They quite incredibly managed to track down and identify the anonymous writer of the letter. But before they had gotten that far, they had also managed to track down three other alleged victims. By the end of 2012, Stuart Hall OBE had been arrested and charged with three counts of indecent assault alleged to have taken place between 1974 and 1983.

He pleaded not guilty to the charges at Preston Magistrates Court. He had nothing to say to the media himself at this point, but his solicitor Louise Straw gave a strongly worded statement to Radio 5 Live in which she insisted that her client was innocent, complained that he had not been given an opportunity to attend a police station voluntarily, and declared that suspicious leaks to the media had given a misleading picture as to the nature of the charges.

Hall was released on bail, but the media coverage had led to further victims coming forward to the police. Within the space of just over a month, he was now facing a total of fifteen charges for sexual offences alleged to have taken place between 1967 and 1986. A single charge of rape from 1976 related to the oldest complainant, a woman who was aged 22 at the time. The other 14 charges of indecent assault involved ten girls aged between nine and seventeen.

Some of these offences were alleged to have either taken place on BBC premises or in locations that were linked to Hall’s work for the BBC. Other offences were said to have taken place inside Hall’s home during a period when Hall was supposedly offering elocution lessons to young girls aged between 11 and 14. Hall had apparently insisted that the girls took a bath in his presence before they were told to get dressed in nothing but a man’s shirt. During his initial police interview, Hall didn’t deny that he asked some girls to wash and change into only very loose upper clothing, but he insisted that this was a system he had devised for his elocution lessons which helped to correct a girl’s posture.

He had also told the police that he believed he was a victim of an ongoing vendetta against people in the public eye in which people were coming out of the woodwork to say whatever they wanted. And when asked directly if all the girls were lying, he replied: “Well, yes. Dreams and the light imaginings of men.”

That might seem like a baffling response for anyone not familiar with the works of the English romantic poet Shelley, but it’s a direct quotation from his 1820 lyrical drama ‘Prometheus Unbound’ which conveys the fragile and insubstantial fantasies of the human mind. Having spent decades quoting the works of great poets in his football commentaries, he was perfectly happy to carry on quoting Shelley in police interview rooms whilst under arrest.

Stuart Hall pleaded not guilty to all fifteen charges on 7th February 2013 at Preston Magistrates Court. He was largely expected to remain silent following his exit from the court. But he took the press by surprise when he stopped to face the cameras and made a statement which banged on about the misery of his current situation whilst pouring doubt over the claims of the alleged victims.

He complained: “May I just say these allegations are pernicious, callous, cruel, and above all spurious. And may I just say I am not guilty and will be defending these accusations. Like a lot of other people in this country today I am wondering why it has taken 30 or 40 years for these allegations to surface.

The last two months of my life have been a living nightmare. I have never gone through so much stress in my life and I am finding it difficult to sustain. Fortunately I have a very loving family and they are very supportive and I think but for their love I might have been constrained to take my own life.

They have encouraged me to fight on, to fight the charges and regain my reputation and good name and whatever I have represented to this country down the years. I was a healthy 83-year-old, but I am now incubating a heart complaint and I’ll be very lucky to survive another couple of years. But I hope to survive those two years and regain my honour and reputation and more than ever, my life.”

It was a fiery defence which sparked further debate over the thorny issue over whether people accused of sexual offences should be named in the press before they have been found guilty. Hall appeared suspicious over why it had taken three or four decades for these new victims to come forward, implying that they were simply jumping on the bandwagon after the original claims had emerged in the newspapers. An argument for allowing suspects to be granted anonymity before a conviction is that entirely innocent names could be dragged through the mud for weeks or months before they are judged to be not guilty in the courts. This happened several times during the era of Operation Yewtree when high-profile celebrities got their faces plastered over the press in connection with sexual offences but were ultimately found to be innocent of all charges.

In this case, many of Stuart Hall’s supporters may have assumed from his angry statement that this was yet another ageing innocent celebrity whose health was being put at risk by false allegations in a perceived witch-hunt orchestrated by the Metropolitan Police. Just like poor old Rolf Harris, for example. Ah, maybe that was a bad example. Or maybe it was a very relevant example of a celebrated figure who it was thought couldn’t possibly be guilty of a sickening crime.

Just over a week after his public protestations, Hall’s solicitors were already approaching the prosecution team with guilty verdicts. And on April 16th 2013, Stuart Hall attended a pre-trial hearing in which he pled guilty to fourteen charges of indecent assault.

We didn’t actually get to hear about this for over two weeks because of reporting restrictions slapped on the case which prevented the press from running the story. This was all down to the other single charge of the rape of a 22-year-old woman which Hall still denied. It was felt that public knowledge of Hall’s guilty pleas could potentially prejudice a future trial on this charge.

However, the Crown Prosecution Service – in agreement with the claimant – decided not to pursue this charge after the claimant declared that she would not be giving testimony at a trial. The charge would instead be left to lie on file for the foreseeable future.

This development meant that the reporting restrictions were lifted on May 2nd, at which point it was revealed to the UK that Stuart Hall OBE had pled guilty to fourteen charges of indecent assault against children. His tone had notably changed since his earlier statement, although the famously eloquent commentator was now largely only speaking through his solicitor. Hall had been attending a court hearing on the day that the reporting restrictions were lifted, after which his solicitor read out a statement in which Hall conveyed his regret, remorse, and unreserved apologies to his victims and his own family members.

However, the statement does then drift into self-pity as it points out that the most recent charge was from 1986, and as it had now been a whole 27 years since he last indecently assaulted a child, this investigation had come as an especially bitter blow at this stage of the 83-year-old’s life. As Hall left the court and was pressed by the waiting reporters for a verbal apology, he simply mumbled that he was suffering from a heavy cold.

The Sentencing and the Outcry

Whilst it had taken a little while for Hall to change his stance from defiantly innocent to remorsefully guilty, the eventual guilty plea did spare the victims the need to relive their experiences in court whilst facing a potentially tough grilling from a defence barrister. The stories and impact statements from these victims - who chose not to be named - were instead read out during the sentencing of Stuart Hall at Preston Crown Court in May 2013. Whilst we don’t want to venture into explicit details regarding the abuse of children, it’s important to get a broad idea of some of these appalling acts to which Hall had admitted.

The oldest victim was a 17-year-old girl who had been selected as a cheerleader for an episode of “It’s a Knockout” in 1973. After recording of the episode, Hall tried to follow the victim to her hotel room whilst she was still dressed in her cheerleader’s outfit. He grabbed her in the corridor and forced himself upon her before somebody else just happened to wander down the corridor, allowing the victim a chance to flee from his grip.

The youngest victim was only nine years old in the 1980s when Hall molested the child in her own bedroom. Hall had been invited to the parent’s home as a dinner guest, and had offered to read the child a bedtime story in what appeared to be a coldly pre-calculated move.

Another party at the home of a family friend on Boxing Day 1976 led to a situation in which Hall assaulted an intoxicated 13-year-old whilst she was trying to be sick in the bathroom.

We’ve already heard of the supposed elocution lessons held at Hall’s own home in which the celebrity breached the trust of the parents of victims aged between 11 and 14 by demanding that the children take a bath in his presence and forcing them to wear loose clothes afterwards. Another 10-year-old girl was also assaulted at his home after he had invited her to use his swimming pool and then given her champagne.

And of course there was the original claimant who had anonymously written that letter to the journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and sparked off the whole investigation. She had later been identified by police and her story of being abused by Hall on BBC premises after meeting him at an awards ceremony in her local school was shared with the court.

Nazir Afzal, the chief crown prosecutor for the north west, noted that none of the victims had known each other yet provided strikingly similar accounts of assaults that had taken place over the course of nearly two decades. He later observed: “Whether in public or private, Hall would first approach under friendly pretences and then bide his time until the victim was isolated. He can only be described as an opportunistic predator.”

Hall did have a few high-profile names turn up to court to speak favourably about his charity work. This included the chairman of Wigan Athletic, Dave Whelan, and on a far more controversial note, Patricia Manning, who worked as a volunteer for the NSPCC. The children’s charity was quick to clarify that the opinions expressed by Patricia Manning were the personal views of a volunteer and did not represent the views of the NSPCC.

In his closing statement, Hall’s defence barrister Crispin Aylett took the curious step of comparing his client to Jimmy Savile, but only in a bid to make out that at least Hall wasn’t as bad as him. Whereas Savile is believed to have abused well over four hundred victims, Aylett noted that Hall had abused “all of thirteen victims,” almost making it sound as if his client should be given credit for only sexually assaulting thirteen children. Aylett also focused on Hall’s charity work – such as the celebrity benefit football matches he organised and competed in – and gave the court a rundown of some of Hall’s heroic actions over the years. This included an occasion when he saved the life of a young boy who had struck his head on a diving board during a holiday in Portugal, and an incident during filming of an episode of “It’s a Knockout” when a grandstand collapsed and Hall took control of a situation which could have led to serious injuries to several members of the audience.

Crispin Aylett concluded by reiterating that Hall wished to extend his apologies to the victims through him, and stating: “He is not a man easily moved to self-pity, but he is only too aware his disgrace is complete.”

During the sentencing, Judge Anthony Russell QC acknowledged Hall’s commendable charity work and noted from his character references that he appeared to be well-regarded in the dock of the courtroom. It was also acknowledged that Hall appeared to have reached a decision to stop his criminal behaviour in 1986, as there was no evidence to suggest that Hall had abused victims at any point during the previous 27 years. Hall had claimed to his probation officer that he had decided to become celibate and stopped drinking spirits in 1986 in a bid to become a reformed character.

Whilst the judge gave partial credit to Hall for pleading guilty and sparing the victims the ordeal of testifying in court, he couldn’t give full credit on the grounds that Hall had not done this at the earliest opportunity. In fact, Hall was reminded that instead of maintaining a dignified silence at the original preliminary hearing, he had made a public statement which described the claims of the victims as “pernicious, callous, and spurious.”

Judge Anthony Russell took the time to pay tribute to the bravery of the victims who came forward after living with shame and embarrassment for decades. And he commented on how the general public were now aware that there was a darker side to the jocular TV celebrity which he had concealed to abuse the trust of parents and abuse the powerful position he had enjoyed as veteran broadcaster.

But the judge faced something of a dilemma when it came to determining the length of time that Hall should serve in prison for his crimes. The offences were committed long before the introduction of the 2003 Sexual Offences Act which made new provisions to protect children and led to tougher penalties of up to ten years for the kind of assaults of which Hall was convicted. However, the judge was bound by the maximum sentences available during the times at which the offences were committed, as set out by the 1956 Sexual Offences Act which recommended far more lenient sentences.

After taking Hall’s age and health problems into account, Judge Anthony Russell ran through the sentences for each count on which Hall had pled guilty, with the individual sentences ranging from between three months to fifteen months in prison. However, as the judge had decided that all sentences would run concurrently, this meant that Hall was ultimately sentenced to a maximum of fifteen months in prison at HMP Wymott in Leyland, Lancashire, near Preston.

No compensation was awarded to the victims as the judge felt that he had insufficient information to do so, but he pointed out that the victims could pursue compensation in civil courts. Hall was also ordered to pay over £11,000 towards the prosecution costs.

But some of you may now already be reeling at the lightness of the sentence. A maximum of fifteen months in prison – half that with good behaviour – hardly sounds like an appropriate sentence for somebody who indecently assaulted thirteen children from as young as nine years old. How was he allowed to get away with that?

Whilst it’s true that the judge was bound by the laws of the time, another hugely controversial point is how the judge ruled that the separate sentences should run concurrently. If Stuart Hall had been required to serve the full amount of time imposed on every individual charge consecutively, he would have been sentenced to a total of 84 months – or seven years – behind bars. But as all the sentences ran concurrently, he would only effectively serve the heaviest individual penalty of fifteen months.

Concurrent sentences have always been a bit of a prickly issue. The official reasoning and logic behind them is that an overall sentence should be just and proportionate to the totality of the crimes, and that consecutive sentences could potentially lead to ridiculously long stints in prison for the persistent offender. For example, if you’re a serial shoplifter who has been caught red-handed stealing small quantities of low-value items from supermarkets on dozens of occasions, it would feel a bit extreme if you get sentenced for every separate incident and end up spending about 130 years in prison for thieving Pot Noodles.

But critics of the concurrent sentencing principle argue that it feels like some criminals get away with committing extra crimes with no consequences, and that this is a particular problem when we’re dealing with crimes as serious as sexual offences involving children. A sex offender could in theory be found guilty of one charge of assaulting a child and sentenced to prison. But another sex offender could be found guilty of assaulting thirteen children and given the exact same prison sentence. In that sense, some of the victims might feel that the offender was given a free pass for twelve of those charges and that justice hasn’t entirely been served.

Hall’s sentence also appeared to be strangely lenient when compared to, say, the greasy publicist Max Clifford who had been arrested around the same period under Operation Yewtree. Clifford would later be found guilty of eight charges of indecent assault against four victims aged between 15 and 19, and would receive a prison sentence of eight years. It’s true that Clifford had pleaded not guilty to these offences which would have been a factor in his longer sentence, but it’s also true that, unlike Hall, he never resorted to publicly denouncing the claims of the victims as “cruel and spurious.”

One of the main reasons for the significant difference is that thorny issue of concurrency which is a decision made at the judge’s discretion. Whereas Stuart Hall was given sentences that ran concurrently, Max Clifford was given mostly consecutive sentences. The judge’s discretion can make a hell of a lot of a difference when it comes to how long you’ll be putting your Netflix subscription on hold.

The attorney general Dominic Grieve received 165 complaints about the leniency of Hall’s sentence, and several influential figures joined in the call for the sentence to be referred to the Court of Appeal for review, including the shadow attorney general Emily Thornberry, and deputy Labour head Harriet Harman. The case was indeed referred to the Court of Appeal pretty swiftly, and Hall’s sentence was reviewed in July 2013.

Despite another long and rambling defence from Hall’s barrister Crispin Aylett who argued that the original sentencing had been entirely applicable and fair, the court of appeal judges disagreed. Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge – hard to see where the title ends and the name begins on that one – proclaimed that the original sentence had “failed adequately to reflect the gravity of the totality of the offences.” It was ruled that the sentence should be doubled to thirty months.

Some were a little confused as to how the Court of Appeal was able to double the sentence when they too would have been bound by the lighter laws of the time, but again it all rolls back to the matter of concurrent sentencing. In this case, the Court of Appeal ruled that some of the sentences should run consecutively, opening the doors for a longer sentence behind closed doors.

Critics felt that even doubling the sentence still meant that Hall had got off lightly. But this wouldn’t be his last battle in court. However, the outcome of his next appearance was destined to have a very different sort of outcome.

The Second Trial

Stuart Hall was still living rent-free in HM Prison Wymott when he next stood trial on May 6th 2014. A fresh set of allegations of rape and sexual assault had surfaced during the very same month that his sentence had been doubled, and Hall was now facing a further 21 charges relating to two female victims who claimed to have been assaulted multiple times from between the ages of ten and fifteen during the period between 1976 and 1981.

Hall initially denied all the new charges and expressed his concern that they had only materialised after he had pleaded guilty to the previous charges, suggesting that he would be unlikely to get a fair trial now that it was already known he was a sex offender. Of course, we also know that he had a habit of changing his mind over his innocence, so perhaps nobody was placing too much faith in these early protestations. But this time round, he didn’t exactly have a complete change of heart. He pleaded guilty to just one charge of indecent assault, but still maintained his innocence in court over the other twenty charges.

The first victim, known only as Girl A, alleged in the courtroom that she had been assaulted numerous times by Hall, including on BBC premises. She claimed that she had intercourse with Hall at least thirty times. The defence barrister Crispin Aylett put it to the claimant that her case was simply about squeezing money out of Hall. He noted that her solicitors had initially pursued a civil claim in which they were asking for a full and final settlement of £20,000.

Girl A replied: “You are making me sound like a bit of a gold-digger. Well, there are easier ways of making money. If I was purely after compensation, do you really honestly believe I would have put myself through this, now knowing that it is all out in the open?” Hall denied all seven charges put forward by Girl A.

Girl B also alleged that she had been assaulted multiple times by Hall in his BBC dressing room. She was the daughter of a family friend and often accompanied the broadcaster to football matches on which he was commentating. She conveyed how he often seemed proud of his conquests and once placed a cutting of her pubic hair behind a picture in his dressing room as a trophy. Hall admitted one charge of indecent assault against Girl B which took place in her own bedroom after Hall had been invited around to her family house for a meal.

But he denied the other thirteen charges.

Stuart Hall did not speak in his own defence, a situation described by the prosecution as “a deafening silence,” although the judge, Mr Justice Turner, reminded the jury that his refusal to give evidence was not necessarily a sign of his guilt.

Hall’s barrister Crispin Aylett had initially requested that the jury should not be informed of Hall’s previous convictions as this could prejudice the trial, which was a bit of a barmy notion that was rightfully dismissed. Bearing in mind that Hall’s face had been plastered all over the press the previous year, it’s a bit of a stretch to imagine that any member of the jury would have suffered from a complete memory lapse.

In his closing speech, Hall’s barrister Crispin Aylett reiterated his stance that Girl A was simply seeking compensation and had been more interested in approaching her solicitors rather than making a complaint to the police. It wasn’t denied that Hall had engaged in sexual relations with both girls, but the defence suggested that they were 15 or 16 years old at the time, and had given their consent. As Hall was again being prosecuted under the outdated 1956 Sexual Offences Act which made provisions for the consent of underage girls, the defence’s argument was that he could only be found guilty of unlawful but consensual intercourse with a girl under the age of 16 rather than indecent assault or rape. And the problem for the prosecution there is that the 1956 act also stipulated that there was a 12-month time limit in which a claimant could pursue a charge for unlawful intercourse.

Following deliberations that stretched out to seven hours and fifteen minutes, the jury found that Hall was guilty of one further charge of assault against Girl B when she was under the age of 16. But he was acquitted of all nineteen other charges. In these cases, it would seem that the jury felt there was insufficient proof to convince them of Hall’s guilt on the specific charges of rape and indecent assault that had been levelled against him.

Stuart Hall maintained his silence at the verdict but was seen mouthing the words “Thank you” to the jury as he left the courtroom with a further 30 months added to his original prison sentence. This included a new 12-month sentence for the charge on which he pled guilty, and an 18-month sentence for the conviction on which he had pled not guilty. And Mr Justice Turner had decided at his discretion that these sentences should run consecutively.

The Untouchables

Naturally enough, Stuart Hall OBE had been effectively cancelled and wiped from history immediately after he had pled guilty to the original charges of indecent assault in 2013. For starters, he wasn’t going to be an OBE anymore. A notice published in ‘The London Gazette’ in October 2013 confirmed that Hall had been stripped of his honour.

It was reported that Hall told his fellow in-mates that he had no intention of ever handing back the actual medal, which does raise the interesting question of what exactly would happen in such a situation. It seems unlikely that the Queen’s Guard would barge down Stuart Hall’s door in an effort to retrieve it. And he could always claim to have lost it in a game of poker or sold it on eBay. We don’t know for sure if he ever did hand back the gong, but even if he kept hold of it, any sense of genuine honour has long been sucked out of the medal.

Hall also lost his job at BBC Radio 5 Live and was dropped as the sporting columnist for ‘Radio Times’. But aside from that, it could be argued that there wasn’t an awful lot that needed to be cancelled or wiped. It’s not as if everyone was regularly looking back with great fondness at “It’s a Knockout” and clips from his twenty-five-year stint on regional news. So it’s perhaps a relatively rare moment when you notice that someone has taken a pair of scissors to TV history – such as a programme that celebrates fifty years of ‘A Question of Sport’ without ever mentioning the very beginning of ‘A Question of Sport’.

The BBC had made it clear that they would not be working with Hall again under any capacity. But as was the case with the Jimmy Savile revelations, there was speculation over just how many people inside the BBC may have been aware of Hall’s behaviour, and whether or not he had a reputation as a sexual predator which had been an open secret. And that kind of depends on who you speak to.

Charlie Lambert was a BBC presenter who worked alongside Hall on ‘North West Tonight’ in the late 1980s. He claims to have been shocked and appalled when his old broadcasting buddy first pled guilty to charges of indecent assault as he didn’t have the faintest inkling. He says: “He had his dressing room but it wasn’t closeted away, it wasn’t as if he had a secret den in another part of the building. He was always cheerful and jovial, looking on the light side of life.

He was quite a big character but not in a sinister way.”

However, others tell a very different story. Linda McDougall was a producer for BBC Manchester in the 1960s and she recalls an offensive man who was “a damned nuisance” and who found it impossible to walk past a woman in a corridor without trying to touch her. In contrast to Charlie Lambert’s claims, Linda McDougall recalls that Hall’s dressing room was an old medical room which very much sounded like a semi-private den.

She regularly spotted Hall escorting female guests in there and it seemed clear that they weren’t just being offered cups of tea. As Linda puts it: “You would have had to have your eyes shut and not been at work at all to not know what was going on.”

When asked why it took her forty years to speak out on this, she responded that raising a complaint against such a powerful star would almost certainly have got her sacked at the time. But she also emphasised that she had been shocked to learn that his offences involved children, as she had seen no evidence of this during her own time working at the BBC.

The broadcaster and Tory MP Gyle Brandreth had actually alluded to Hall’s behaviour in the old medical room a few years before the first wave of allegations emerged, but without directly naming him. In his 2009 book ‘Something Sensational to Read on The Train’, Brandreth recalled that his wife used to travel up from the south to work as a continuity announcer and newsreader for BBC Manchester in the 1970s. He felt quite aggrieved that his wife was forced to find her own hotel accommodation during these trips.

The old medical room should have been made available and would have provided handy free overnight accommodation, but apparently the quote “Star Presenter” of BBC Manchester used this room for his sexual liaisons and he wasn’t prepared to hand over the keys to anyone. It was only much later that Gyles Brandreth confirmed that the mysterious star presenter was of course Stuart Hall. But whilst Brandreth maintained that Hall’s sexual exploits in the medical room were common gossip, he too emphasised that nobody at the time ever thought for a minute that Hall was inviting children in there.

Not everyone agrees with that last point, though. Studio worker Gerry Clarke remembers that he saw Hall inviting girls into his medical room who were aged between 14 to 16. He witnessed this up to ten times and he suspected that the girls weren’t Hall’s nieces, but admits that he wasn’t too bothered about it at the time as he just wasn’t inclined to think that anything seriously troubling might be going on in there.

Former BBC Manchester producer Deborah Robinson also witnessed teenage girls hanging around in Hall’s dressing room on more than one occasion, but again she wasn’t harbouring any particularly dark thoughts. She later told the BBC: “The thought of a celebrity doing something unspeakable with young girls on public premises…I didn’t think it was possible. It was only afterwards when all these accounts came out, and you realised that, yes, what I saw was wrong, then. You just didn’t think that child abuse could occur in a public office.

How could you?”

That’s one of many questions in need of a good answer, and the hope was that some of them might eventually be answered in The Dame Janet Smith Review. This independent review led by the former high court judge Dame Janet Smith was first commissioned in 2012 with the original remit of examining how Jimmy Savile was able to carry out his campaigns of abuse for decades whilst working at the BBC. Any mention today of The Dame Janet Smith Review is likely to quickly bring up the focus on Jimmy Savile, but it’s now often forgotten that by the end of 2012, the scope of the review had been extended to cover the crimes of Stuart Hall when he was working for the BBC.

It took about three and a half years to compile the report which stretched to 372,000 words which we’d now like to reproduce in full. Except of course that we’d be here all day, so let’s boil it down to the basics instead. Or at least try our best to boil it down to the basics, as the conclusions are a bit confusing.

After speaking to 147 witnesses, many of whom had worked with Hall on ‘Look North’ between the ’60s and ’80s, the report found that Hall had assaulted 21 female victims whilst working at the BBC, the youngest of whom was ten years old. The assaults took place between 1967 and 1991, which contradicts the claim in court that Hall had made a decision to stop offending, quit drinking spirits, and become celibate in 1986.

Hall was described as a “laddish” character who enjoyed risqué banter and often displayed unwelcome tactility with women he’d only just met. Whilst no evidence was found that anyone working at the BBC had direct knowledge of what exactly was going on inside Hall’s medical room, there were certainly rumours circulating around the studios that Hall was engaging in inappropriate sexual conduct on BBC premises. One former journalist described how there was a bit of a “nod, nod, wink, wink” atmosphere whenever it was known that Hall was in his dressing room with female guests.

Even if any BBC employees did have any concerns about Hall’s behaviour, they were unlikely to risk their jobs by raising any kind of complaint to senior management, as Hall was apparently considered to be “untouchable,” giving him free rein to behave exactly how he wanted. A former reporter explained: “Stuart Hall was ‘Look North’. Stuart knew this, often alluded to it and I believe traded upon it. More to the point, BBC management knew it.”

Some BBC employees were singled out for criticism in the report on the grounds that they could have done more to stop the behaviour, most notably the former regional television manager at BBC Manchester, Ray Colley. At some point in 1970, Colley was said to have “took Hall to task” about the rumours swirling around the studio regarding his inappropriate conduct. There was a clear lack of protest or denial from Hall during this conversation, but Colley failed to follow this up with further steps or checks.

Whilst there was no evidence to suggest that Ray Colley ever knew about the full extent of what was going on, he was certainly aware of the rumours and the strong possibility that the presenter had been engaging in inappropriate sexual conduct on BBC premises. The report observed that Colley had under-estimated Hall, and that the later string of criminal offences that took place in Hall’s dressing room could have been avoided had Colley taken further positive steps.

Ray Colley said in his defence that he had spoken to Hall about the unconfirmed rumours in 1970, and felt that Hall had been compliant to his strong message about how BBC premises were out of bounds for sexual activity. But he also stressed that he had never been approached directly with facts, and he would have taken immediate action if that had been the case. Colley also dismissed the perception that Hall was “untouchable”, and suggested instead that he was very much disposable. He said: “I was more than able to sort Stuart Hall.

I did not fear him in any way. He was not essential to my operation.”

The ultimate conclusions of The Dame Janet Smith Report could be described as a little hazy. On the one hand, it suggests that the BBC should not be held responsible as a corporate body for the actions of either Jimmy Savile or Stuart Hall. Although it singled out the failures of a handful of employees who missed opportunities to take action, the report concluded that the primary responsibility for the behaviour lies with the perpetrators of the abuse.

This led to criticism from some quarters that the report fell way short in terms of truth and accountability. Liz Dux, a specialist abuse lawyer who represented 168 of Jimmy Savile’s victims, was far from impressed with the conclusions and dismissed the report as “nothing more than an expensive whitewash.” She told the press: “Despite millions having been spent on the inquiry, my clients will feel let down that the truth has still not been unearthed.

It’s implausible to suggest that this did not reach the upper echelons of the BBC. It is unfortunate that Dame Janet had no power to compel senior managers to give evidence.”

But whilst Dame Janet wasn’t prepared to condemn the BBC or pin all the blame on a vast corporation, she did observe that there were several worrying cultural factors and system failures at play. She felt that there was a culture of reverence and fear towards celebrities which may have prevented some employees from raising a complaint, and that an “atmosphere of fear” was still prevalent in the corporation today.

The report made a long list of recommendations for the BBC, every one of which was acted upon swiftly by the corporation. This included the implementation of new child protection policies, improving the complaints and whistle-blowing process, an examination of the corporation’s attitudes towards star talent, and regular independent audits to ensure ongoing compliance.

The BBC themselves certainly couldn’t be accused of shying away from the matter and they weren’t mincing their words when it came to addressing their own failures. Following the publication of the report, the BBC director Lord Tony Hall apologised to the victims of both Hall and Savile. He said: “The BBC failed you when it should have protected you. Much of this was down to the culture of the BBC at the time. I’m deeply sorry for the hurt caused to each and every one of you.”

The BBC Trust Chairman Rona Fairhead expanded upon this in a public statement: “No one reading the reports can be in any doubt that the BBC failed them. It failed not just them, but the public, its audiences, and its staff. It turned a blind eye where it should have shone a light. And it did not protect those who put their trust in it. On behalf of the BBC and its staff past and present, I want to apologise to the survivors for all they have suffered.”

The Dame Janet Smith Review had made the rather disturbing point that the possibility of another predatory child abuser lurking in the corridors of the BBC today could not be completely ruled out. But it also emphasised that no organisation could be completely confident that it does not harbour a child abuser. And this is an interesting point.

The BBC often cops a lot of flak for reportedly being an incubator for sexual predators, particularly in decades gone by. It often feels as if we’re just waiting for the next scandalous revelation to emerge about one of our favourite TV stars from history. But a lot of this has to do with the high profiles of the relatively few offenders and the fact that such a revelation is obviously going to make a big news story.

Perhaps there’s some truth in the idea that television celebrities are put on a particularly high pedestal which gives them the power and opportunities to commit offences that could never have taken place if they’d led a more ordinary life. But Donald Findlater, a former director of child protection charities, puts it this way: “Any suggestion that this is a unique problem of the BBC is a distraction. There are acres of children being abused every day. Maybe with celebrities they’re on a different psychological track with children, because they’re people they look up to, who are big in their world, but we could say the same about sports coaches.”

Whilst it would be easy to just vent all our frustration at the BBC for being the single evil entity that is somehow responsible for decades of child abuse, the truth is naturally not quite as simple and clear-cut as that.

Pond Life

Stuart Hall ex-OBE was released from prison on 16th December 2015, having served just half his sentence – a total of two years and six months. He was released just in time to celebrate his 86th birthday on Christmas Day. But he was being released into a very different kind of life that he had been living prior to 2013.

Hazel, his wife of 58 years, had stood loyally by her husband during the original convictions, but it appears that the relationship became particularly strained when Hall was back in court facing a fresh list of charges. One former inmate at HMP Wymott claimed that Hall once threw his wedding ring into a prison pond following an extremely heated argument with his wife on the telephone. Hall was said to have regretted this move and requested that the pond be dredged so that he could retrieve it, but his request was denied.

His wedding ring was certainly nowhere to be seen on the photographs taken after his release. But then again, neither was his wife.

By February 2016, it was reported that Hazel had sold the old family mansion in Wilmslow, Cheshire, and moved to London to live with her daughter. The mansion was entirely hers to sell, and this is because Hall had deployed a common trick after first getting banged up in prison: Land registry documents reveal that he signed the house, valued at £1.2 million, over to his wife, most likely in a bid to shield his wealth from any future civil claims pursued by his victims. He denied that this was the reason, of course. He told The Daily Telegraph that he was liable to “pop off” at any minute because of an extreme heart condition, and he simply wanted to get his financial affairs in order.

At least seventeen women still filed civil claims against Hall, and it’s reported that he offered ridiculously low settlement figures in light of him now being a pauper with no £1.2 million home to call his own. Although no figures have ever been disclosed due to confidentiality agreements, it’s believed that he eventually reached settlements with most of the victims.

But specialist abuse lawyer Liz Dux again expressed that she was far from satisfied with the outcome from all this. She said: “Hall has settled the civil claims against him without any admission of culpability and with no sense of remorse for the harm he had done. His victims will feel he has got off lightly and is now free to live the rest of life unaffected whereas they are left with the consequences.”

Hall may have thought he was being clever by signing the house over to his wife, but we can’t help wondering if he regretted the move after he was released from prison. We don’t know all the details about the state of the marriage or the personal financial arrangements – as things stand, there’s no public record of any divorce proceedings, for example. But it’s not entirely inconceivable that shortly after Hazel became the sole owner of the property, she decided to sell it and take all the money that was now rightfully hers.

And there wasn’t a thing that Hall could have done about it. This is pure speculation, but that could be one of the reasons why he angrily ditched his wedding ring in the prison pond. He should have kept hold of it for when he got a chance to take it to the pawn shop.

We do know that his new living arrangements weren’t quite what they used to be. He moved into a fairly modest council house that he rented from a friend situated in what has been described as a “pretty rough” patch of Greater Manchester. A ten-year-old Mercedes is parked outside, but it’s reported that he has just borrowed this from the same friend. According to neighbours, he doesn’t leave the house much but he can sometimes be spotted enjoying a cigar on his front doorstep.

Apparently, some neighbours have complained that he is living on the same street as children and that the house is not that far away from a school, but this is a common complaint when you release sex offenders back into a world that contains children. When the ‘Manchester Evening News’ knocked on his door to ask if he had any response to these complaints, he replied: “I have nothing to say to you, young man.”

He had a bit more to say in early 2016 when he gave a brief interview to The Sun. Literally a day before The Dame Janet Smith Review was due to be published, Hall appeared to seize the opportunity to take a pre-emptive strike against some of his victims and have a general whinge about his life. He said: “To go from being a national treasure to the bottom of the pond has been very difficult. The vindictive malicious people who have impugned me will think again. I’m hoping for fairness from everybody.”

We’re not quite sure what he means by that, as whilst it was true that he was acquitted of most of the later charges, it surely couldn’t have carelessly slipped his memory that he was found guilty of sixteen charges of indecent assault and pled guilty to fifteen of them. Naturally, his outburst and utter lack of contrition didn’t go down well too with the victims, with one of them telling the press: “When he gets to Hell I hope he rots there.”

The Forgotten Monster

At the time of recording this video, Stuart Hall still seems like a long way off Hell. Despite constantly making out that he was on the very brink of death ever since the allegations first emerged in 2012, he’s still knocking around today at the age of 96. Should he make it to the age of 100 though, we doubt that he’ll get a special birthday tribute on Radio 5 Live or ‘North West Tonight’ or even in the personal ads in The Manchester Evening News. And although this was a man who was apparently once regarded as a national treasure with a career in broadcasting that spanned well over fifty years, it does seem that he has slipped under the radar since then and very rarely gets mentioned in the same breath as Jimmy Savile today.

Perhaps the ‘National Treasure’ label is a bit misleading. Come to think of it, only Stuart Hall himself appeared to refer to himself as that, and we’re not convinced that it really counts if hardly anybody else follows suit.

The truth is that Stuart Hall’s career probably just isn’t particularly well remembered. “It’s a Royal Knockout” may have garnered 400 million viewers around the world, but Hall shared the presenting duties on that one whilst countries outside the UK provided their own commentary. Global viewers were more interested in the sight of the man formerly known as Prince Andrew getting involved in a competitive tussle with Meat Loaf rather than the strange laughing man holding a microphone. Whilst the main series of “It’s a Knockout” was big in its day, it was hardly held up as an example of classic TV in later years.

So unless you happened to be around in the 1970s, unless you lived in the North West of England and watched regional news programmes, or unless you regularly listened to football on the radio, you’d be unlikely to have heard of Stuart Hall today. Things may have been different if he’d hosted ‘Top of the Pops’ for about twenty years, but the reality is that Stuart Hall is a largely forgotten figure, although not a figure likely to be ever forgotten by his many victims.

There may have been one or two clues as to his true nature that we missed along the way. For example, during a Saturday morning panel show broadcast on Radio 5 Live in 2005, Hall was engaging in a lively discussion about whether football players should be penalised for using foul language on the pitch when children might be in earshot. Here’s what Hall had to say about the matter: “This is all nonsense. People are getting hot under the collar about nothing.

Your average 10-year-old can instruct you in oral or anal sex.” How exactly a 75-year-old man would be such an authority on this subject may have felt a bit baffling. Quite remarkably, this comment made on a Saturday morning radio show didn’t spark a single complaint at the time but received far more uncomfortable scrutiny in later years.

Maybe there was another very subtle clue to be picked up right at the very beginning of his long career when he was commentating on that very first football match shrouded in thick fog and he couldn’t see a thing. “I just lied my way through it, and I have been inventing stories ever since.”

Realistically of course, we might have needed more substantial evidence than that. And Stuart Hall might well have never faced justice for his crimes had it not been for the bravery of the anonymous victim who first wrote a letter to ‘The Independent’ journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, paving the way for other victims to finally come forward after decades of suffering in silence. Whilst the matter of publicly naming a suspect of sexual offences before a conviction is still a highly controversial issue, there’s no doubt that in this case, it encouraged more victims to share their own experiences and reveal the full extent of Hall’s campaign of abuse.

Credit must also go to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown for bringing the matter to the attention of Lancashire Police who took the complaint seriously and didn’t hang about when launching a full investigation. And in an odd kind of way, we believe that Queen Elizabeth II deserves a tiny slice of the credit, too. Had the original anonymous victim not felt so outraged at the sight of her abuser receiving an OBE from the Queen, she may never have felt compelled to put pen to paper.

An honour from the Queen was the step too far that set the wheels of justice in motion. Maybe Stuart Hall should have paid a bit more attention to the English romantic poet Shelley whom he was so fond of quoting. In the 1812 text ‘Declaration of Rights’, Shelley wrote: “Titles are tinsel, power a corruptor, glory a bubble, and excessive wealth, a libel on its possessor.”

A more traditional commentator may just conclude that Stuart Hall led a life that was a game of two halves, and you just couldn’t write a script like this. Key Takeaways Stuart Hall, a BBC broadcaster for over 50 years, was convicted of 16 indecent assaults on victims as young as nine. His crimes were exposed after an anonymous victim wrote to journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown outraged by Hall’s 2012 OBE award.

Hall’s initial 15-month sentence was doubled to 30 months on appeal after public outcry over concurrent sentencing. The Dame Janet Smith Review found Hall assaulted 21 females at the BBC between 1967-1991, with staff fearing him as ‘untouchable.’ Despite his conviction alongside Jimmy Savile in a major inquiry, Hall has largely faded from public memory unlike Savile.

Frequently Asked Questions Who wrote the article ‘The BBC Monster Nobody Talks About’? Danny Salter wrote the article ‘The BBC Monster Nobody Talks About’. What was Stuart Hall’s connection to ‘A Question of Sport’?

Stuart Hall presented the original black-and-white pilot episode of ‘A Question of Sport’ back in 1968, which was only broadcast regionally in the North of England. He was replaced by David Vine when the show was commissioned for a full national series. What phrase did Stuart Hall claim to have coined to describe football?

Stuart Hall claimed to be the man responsible for first coining the phrase ‘The Beautiful Game’ as a description of football, though the article notes this claim is disputed and the term had been connected with football since the 19th century. What was Stuart Hall’s most high-profile television role? Stuart Hall’s most high-profile television role was as presenter of ‘It’s a Knockout’ from 1972, an ultra-wacky outdoor gameshow in which teams competed in absurd sporting events.

The show often reached 15 million viewers in its heyday. What honour was Stuart Hall awarded in 2012, and what happened to it? Stuart Hall was awarded an OBE by Queen Elizabeth II in the 2012 New Year Honours list for services to broadcasting and charity.

He was stripped of this honour in October 2013 after pleading guilty to indecent assault charges. How did the investigation into Stuart Hall begin? The investigation began when journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown received an anonymous three-page letter in May 2012 from a victim who was outraged that Hall had been awarded an OBE.

Alibhai-Brown took the letter to Ealing police station, and Lancashire Police opened a new line of inquiry. How many charges of indecent assault did Stuart Hall plead guilty to in 2013? Stuart Hall pled guilty to fourteen charges of indecent assault on April 16, 2013.

He was later found guilty of one additional charge in 2014, bringing his total convictions to sixteen indecent assaults. What was Stuart Hall’s original prison sentence, and how was it changed on appeal? Stuart Hall was originally sentenced to a maximum of fifteen months in prison in May 2013, with all sentences running concurrently.

Following 165 complaints about leniency, the Court of Appeal doubled his sentence to thirty months in July 2013 by ruling that some sentences should run consecutively. What was the Dame Janet Smith Review, and what did it find regarding Stuart Hall? The Dame Janet Smith Review was an independent inquiry originally commissioned in 2012 to examine how Jimmy Savile was able to abuse children while working at the BBC; its scope was later expanded to cover Stuart Hall.

The report found that Hall had assaulted 21 female victims whilst working at the BBC, the youngest of whom was ten years old, between 1967 and 1991. What did Stuart Hall do with his family mansion after being imprisoned? After being imprisoned, Stuart Hall signed his family mansion in Wilmslow, Cheshire, valued at £1.2 million, over to his wife Hazel.

This was widely seen as a move to shield his wealth from civil claims by victims. Hazel later sold the mansion and moved to London in 2016.

Key Takeaways

• Stuart Hall, a BBC broadcaster for over 50 years, was convicted of 16 indecent assaults on victims as young as nine.
• His crimes were exposed after an anonymous victim wrote to journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown outraged by Hall’s 2012 OBE award.
• Hall’s initial 15-month sentence was doubled to 30 months on appeal after public outcry over concurrent sentencing.
• The Dame Janet Smith Review found Hall assaulted 21 females at the BBC between 1967-1991, with staff fearing him as ‘untouchable.’
• Despite his conviction alongside Jimmy Savile in a major inquiry, Hall has largely faded from public memory unlike Savile.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who wrote the article ‘The BBC Monster Nobody Talks About’?

Danny Salter wrote the article ‘The BBC Monster Nobody Talks About’.

What was Stuart Hall’s connection to ‘A Question of Sport’?

Stuart Hall presented the original black-and-white pilot episode of ‘A Question of Sport’ back in 1968, which was only broadcast regionally in the North of England. He was replaced by David Vine when the show was commissioned for a full national series.

What phrase did Stuart Hall claim to have coined to describe football?

Stuart Hall claimed to be the man responsible for first coining the phrase ‘The Beautiful Game’ as a description of football, though the article notes this claim is disputed and the term had been connected with football since the 19th century.

What was Stuart Hall’s most high-profile television role?

Stuart Hall’s most high-profile television role was as presenter of ‘It’s a Knockout’ from 1972, an ultra-wacky outdoor gameshow in which teams competed in absurd sporting events. The show often reached 15 million viewers in its heyday.

What honour was Stuart Hall awarded in 2012, and what happened to it?

Stuart Hall was awarded an OBE by Queen Elizabeth II in the 2012 New Year Honours list for services to broadcasting and charity. He was stripped of this honour in October 2013 after pleading guilty to indecent assault charges.

How did the investigation into Stuart Hall begin?

The investigation began when journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown received an anonymous three-page letter in May 2012 from a victim who was outraged that Hall had been awarded an OBE. Alibhai-Brown took the letter to Ealing police station, and Lancashire Police opened a new line of inquiry.

How many charges of indecent assault did Stuart Hall plead guilty to in 2013?

Stuart Hall pled guilty to fourteen charges of indecent assault on April 16, 2013. He was later found guilty of one additional charge in 2014, bringing his total convictions to sixteen indecent assaults.

What was Stuart Hall’s original prison sentence, and how was it changed on appeal?

Stuart Hall was originally sentenced to a maximum of fifteen months in prison in May 2013, with all sentences running concurrently. Following 165 complaints about leniency, the Court of Appeal doubled his sentence to thirty months in July 2013 by ruling that some sentences should run consecutively.

What was the Dame Janet Smith Review, and what did it find regarding Stuart Hall?

The Dame Janet Smith Review was an independent inquiry originally commissioned in 2012 to examine how Jimmy Savile was able to abuse children while working at the BBC; its scope was later expanded to cover Stuart Hall. The report found that Hall had assaulted 21 female victims whilst working at the BBC, the youngest of whom was ten years old, between 1967 and 1991.

What did Stuart Hall do with his family mansion after being imprisoned?

After being imprisoned, Stuart Hall signed his family mansion in Wilmslow, Cheshire, valued at £1.2 million, over to his wife Hazel. This was widely seen as a move to shield his wealth from civil claims by victims. Hazel later sold the mansion and moved to London in 2016.

Sources

• Original Scandal video: The BBC Monster Nobody Talks About
• Hero image source by openverse, cc0.

Related Coverage