The fiasco of Operation Yewtree: C4’s The Accused – National Treasures on Trial reviewed

At 4.38 a.m., one morning in October 2013, the radio presenter Paul Gambaccini was understandably asleep when the doorbell rang. He was then arrested for sexually assaulting a minor on what proved to be the word of a drug addict with a history of making false accusations.

The trouble for Gambaccini, though, was that this wasn’t proved for another 11 months. In the meantime, the allegations were all over the news, he was dropped by the BBC, lost around £100,000 in earnings and started having panic attacks.

And Gambaccini, of course, wasn’t alone in being arrested and publicly named like this – not merely without being charged, but before any investigation had taken place. After the 2012 ITV documentary by Mark Thomas-Williams that exposed the late Jimmy Savile, the police had set up Operation Yewtree and it was pretty much open season on British celebrities. As the then editor of the Daily Star told us in The Accused: National Treasures on Trial, tabloid journalists were soon ‘playing a kind of paedo bingo in the newsroom’, as well as printing ever more lurid stories (‘Savile ring made from glass eye of a corpse’).

Meanwhile, rather as the drugs squad in the 1960s gradually worked its way up to the Beatles, the Met moved on from the likes of Dave Lee Travis and Fred Talbot to raid Sir Cliff Richard’s house in the full glare of BBC cameras. As with Gambaccini, the accusation against Sir Cliff was from a source that the police should obviously have dismissed, but apparently didn’t even question. It then took him 22 months and £5 million to clear his name.

In the circumstances, you might expect the cops and journalists who appeared in the programme to have exhibited something between regret and paralysing remorse. Instead, they didn’t even manage much in the way of sympathy. According to the BBC’s Danny Shaw: ‘If you go into showbusiness, you have to accept that with fame may come some unpleasant headlines.’ Thomas-Williams made the admittedly telling point that when an arrested celebrity was actually guilty, releasing the name encouraged other victims to come forward. (Impressively robust of ego, Thomas-Williams also took credit for kick-starting the #MeToo movement.) Yet, when it came to the likes of Cliff and Gambaccini, he complacently explained that: ‘There will be people, unfortunately, who become collateral damage’ – although he did generously acknowledge that it might be ‘very difficult’ for them to see ‘the bigger picture’.

And sure enough, it was. Cliff confessed to feeling ‘violent hatred’ for his accuser and continuing bitterness towards the police and BBC. (‘I got past it, but I don’t think I’ll ever get over it.’) For the incandescent Gambaccini, Operation Yewtree was ‘one of the greatest fiascos in the history of British justice – or should I say injustice’.

Through all this, the programme did its best to accentuate any moral complexities involved. Of the 26 men arrested, four were found not guilty and 11 were never charged. But that still leaves ten convictions, presumably helped by those other victims coming forward. We were also reminded of how titillating the story was for the public. In the end, however, it was hard to disagree with Gambaccini’s conclusion that Operation Yewtree ‘inverted the basic premise of British justice’ by treating people as guilty until proved innocent.

Last week’s opening episode of the inaccurately subtitled Wonderland: From J.M. Barrie to J.R.R. Tolkien confidently laid out the idea of the series. Between Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and The Hobbit (1937), British children’s literature saw not just a golden age but also a neatly homogenous one. Book after book created imaginary worlds that embodied the essential melancholy of their authors as they reflected on childhood as both disconcerting and the high point of any human life. Moreover, they wrote these books for children they knew, most of whom died young.

The problem is that after two episodes of four, this confidence already seems distinctly misplaced – because, now it’s got down to specifics, that overarching theory is looking increasingly ragged. Some of authors – Lewis Carroll, A.A. Milne – fit the supposed pattern only partly; and some – notably Beatrix Potter – not at all. (In fact, by my reckoning the sole perfect match is Barrie.)

Not surprisingly, this puts the programme in something of a bind, leaving it unsure whether to try and cramp everybody into the theory anyway or whether to strike out in another direction entirely, which duly means discussions of race and gender. (Thursday’s Potter section brought us the startling assertion that: ‘In the 18th and 19th centuries, writers were always men. They were not women.’)

Granted, Wonderland does contain a lot of interesting stuff along the way. Nonetheless, the overall impression is of a series struggling, and ultimately failing, to fulfil its own pitch.