The BBC has defended its controversial helicopter pictures of the police raid on Sir Cliff Richard’s house after the singer said it was guilty of a “shameful” invasion of his privacy.
Richard said the “people at the top” of the BBC “have a lot to answer for” after the BBC screened footage of police officers searching his £3m Berkshire apartment as part of an investigation into sexual assault allegations.
The singer said he was considering taking legal action against the corporation, saying: “I do feel that they owe me something. The police have apologised but the BBC hasn’t, and it owes me that. What they did was shameful.”
“Somebody at the top [of the BBC] said: ‘Good idea. Let’s get this story.’ And somehow they were able to get the police to tell them when they were coming,” Richard told the Daily Mail.
“It shouldn’t do that. I’m sure that was probably against the law. I always thought a police raid was supposed to be secret.
“Nobody should know. And yet the BBC were there. So they have a lot to answer for and that was real intrusion into my privacy. To actually film my apartment. It’s unforgivable.”
South Yorkshire police agreed a deal with the BBC after its reporter, Dan Johnson, received a tip-off about the raid on Richard’s home.
The BBC has said that the tip-off did not come from the South Yorkshire force. It filmed footage of the police operation from a helicopter which was broadcast on BBC1 news bulletins and the BBC News channel on 14 August 2014.
Richard said a “new generation” at the BBC “have a lack of respect of what’s happened before. A whole new group of people. They don’t care what we’ve done in the past”.
In a statement issued by the BBC earlier this week, after the Crown Prosecution Service said Richard would not not face charges over allegations he sexually abused four boys more than 30 years ago, the BBC said it had applied “normal editorial judgments” to its reporting.
“We applied normal editorial judgmnts to a story that was covered widely by all media and continued to report the investigation as it developed including the CPS’s final decision – which ran prominently across our news output,” said the BBC.
The BBC’s director general, Tony Hall, and director of news and current affairs, former Times editor James Harding, defended its coverage when they appeared before MPs last year.
Hall said: “In a variety of different ways allegations of sexual abuse going back many, many years are sadly, regrettably a matter of public interest. What you saw from the air was a number of police cars and you saw the scale of the operation.”
Asked if he felt any sympathy for the singer because of the extent of the BBC’s coverage, Hall told MPs: “Our job was to make sure what Sir Cliff had to say about the search and about his own innocence was properly reflected.”
Richard said: “For me, the BBC is Paul Gambaccini, Gloria [Hunniford] when she worked for them, all the DJs that I’ve met, all the people who work on the Today programme, World at One. That’s the BBC. They are not to blame for what happened to me. It’s the people at the top.”
Richard said he was unaware of what he had been accused of until coverage of the raid appeared on BBC News.
He told the Mail: “That was my introduction to what they were doing and how it looked on the screen. It was really terrifying, really horrible, and of course that’s when I discovered what I was supposedly accused of.”
Labour MP Keith Vaz, chairman of the House of Commons home affairs select committee, said last year that the BBC had acted “perfectly properly” in its reporting of the affair.
Critics including broadcaster Michael Parkinson accused the BBC of participating in a “witch-hunt” and behaving like the worst tabloid newspaper.
At the time of the raid, BBC insiders said it reflected the increasing competition of 24-hour news and the pressure on the corporation’s news organisation to match the scoops of its rivals ITN and Sky.
The story was later shortlisted for the scoop of the year prize at last year’s Royal Television Society awards.
