Martin Bashir’s most contentious documentaries, from Diana to Michael Jackson

Veteran broadcast journalist Martin Bashir finds himself at the centre of a storm after an internal BBC investigation concluded that he used “deceitful” methods to secure his famous Panorama interview with Princess Diana in 1995.

Mr Bashir was deemed by Lord Dyson to have made a “serious breach” of the corporation’s guidelines when he presented fake bank statements relating to members of the royal household to Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, in order to win his confidence and secure the interview.

The interviewer, who recently left his post as the BBC’s religious affairs editor on grounds of ill health, has apologised and said he “deeply regrets” the subterfuge, but denied that it had any bearing on the princess’s decision to take part in his film, which he says she was eager to do.

Mr Bashir worked for both the BBC and ITV in diverse roles over the course of a media career that began in 1986 and eventually took him to America, where he appeared on ABC, MSNBC and NBC before returning to Britain in 2016 and his first employer.

But he remains best known for his documentaries about high-profile public figures, of which the most famous are as follows.

Princess Diana

Undoubtedly the most-discussed programme of Mr Bashir’s career, An Interview with HRH The Princess of Wales would draw an astonishing 23 million viewers when the BBC ran it in November 1995, less than two years prior to Diana’s death in a car crash in Paris.

It was also one of the defining television events of the 1990s, featuring the popular princess speaking with rare candour about her unhappy marriage to Prince Charles and famously saying of his affair with Camilla Parker Bowles: “Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.”

Such was the furore after the programme aired that Mr Bashir reportedly had to go into hiding to protect his wife while she was pregnant.

“I know he went through some awful things immediately after the Diana interview,” one colleague later remembered. “Tabloid reporters were trying to pay his neighbours to talk about his private life and there were people going through his dustbins.”

He did win a Royal Television Society award and a Bafta for his trouble, however, and became a celebrity in his own right.

Michael Jackson

Mr Bashir’s fly-on-the-wall documentary Living with Michael Jackson aired in February 2003 towards the end of his five-year stint at ITV and attracted a highly mixed response from audiences, with the reclusive King of Pop’s many ardent fans accusing him of betraying the star’s trust and exploiting the rare access he was granted to Jackson’s spectacular theme park home, the Neverland Ranch in Santa Ynez, California.

The film had been agreed to by Jackson in an attempt to clear his name over persistent rumours that he had engaged in child sexual abuse, which had not gone away after he elected to settle out of court with the parents of accuser Jordy Chandler in 1993 rather than face the media frenzy of a sensational trial that might have exonerated him.

But naive remarks made by the pop star in Mr Bashir’s film only made matters worse and a complaint was duly made to Los Angeles police by Janet Arvizo, mother of 13-year-old cancer sufferer Gavin, who had spent time at Neverland as his guest.

Following a raid, Jackson was subjected to a gruelling 16-week trial after being accused of four counts of molesting a minor, four counts of intoxicating a minor, one count of abduction and one count of conspiring to hold the boy and his family captive.

He was subsequently found not guilty on all charges in June 2005 but his career was left in tatters and he died from a painkiller-induced heart attack during rehearsals for an ambitious comeback tour four years later.

Mr Bashir’s persistent questions about the singer’s behaviour towards children may have drawn fans’ ire at the time but the release of another documentary, the harrowing Leaving Neverland in 2019, suggested his approach had been more than justified.

Louise Woodward

Also for Panorama, Mr Bashir interviewed the British au pair who, at 19, was convicted in the US of the involuntary manslaughter of eight-month-old infant Matthew Eappen while caring for him at his parents’ home in Newton, Massachusetts.

“If the parents didn’t do it, who did? There’s only you left,” Woodward tells him in the film. “There’s the whole feeling that somebody had to pay - and that somebody had to be me.”

Writing about the programme after it aired in June 1998, The Independent’s Paul McCann summarised the response from fellow commentators and reviewers, who felt the journalist had been “at best, gentle” with his subject.

“Little emerged about Louise’s character and [Mr Bashir] failed to pursue some of the most interesting avenues of questioning,” he wrote. “Certainly, when Woodward seemed to be hinting that she had opinions of her own as to how baby Matthew sustained his head injury, he changed tack.”

As with the Diana controversy, there were questions at the time about precisely how he had secured the interview, with one newspaper claiming that the journalist had offered to secure Woodward a place at his alma mater, King’s College London, to study law, a story the BBC denied.

Michael Barrymore

Mr Bashir interviewed the hugely popular light entertainment show host in October 2001, not long after Mr Barrymore’s career came to a crashing halt on the night of 31 March that year when the body of 31-year-old partygoer Stuart Lubbock was found floating in the swimming pool of his Essex home.

“I saw the dead body and felt sick. My friend John called the ambulance and police. I’m ashamed to say I just panicked and ran away to stay with a friend in the village,” Mr Barrymore recalled, repeatedly stating that he did not know Lubbock and had no role in his drowning, the dead man later found to have drugs in his system and to have suffered injuries indicative of sexual assault.

The confessional interview, run as part of Tonight with Trevor McDonald, saw Mr Barrymore admit to his own substance abuse problems, saying: “I’d be drinking Jack Daniels, I’d probably do a bottle of that, white wine before that. I’d just keep going until I passed out. I smoked pot, cocaine, Es, speed, anything - whatever was necessary to change the way I felt.”

He expresses remorse for Lubbock’s death but denied that an “orgy” took place at his home and expressed a desire to return to television.

Mr Barrymore did later appear on Channel 4’s Celebrity Big Brother in 2006 and was due to take part in Dancing on Ice in 2019 before dropping out with a wrist injury and has given further similar interviews to Jeremy Kyle and Piers Morgan to deny any part in the death.

Major Charles Ingram

Another ITV documentary Martin Bashir fronted in 2003 was Major Fraud, centred on the man accused of cheating his way to the jackpot on the channel’s own game show Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? with the aid of an accomplice among the studio audience coughing to indicate the correct answers.

Ingram and his wife Diana were eventually convicted on a single count of procuring the execution of a valuable security by deception, both serving a two-year suspended prison sentence alongside co-defendant Tecwen Whittock, a college lecturer, and ordered to pay £115,000.

While none of those three were interviewed for the film, Mr Bashir did speak to the production crew and host Chris Tarrant, who told him that he had suspicions of the couple at the time, noting: “They seemed to be quite obsessed with the show and getting on there and doing well.”

Such was the excitement over this mini-scandal that Mr Bashir’s film attracted one million more viewers in Britain than his Jackson expose.

The Ingrams expressed their unhappiness with the programme, taking exception to ITV’s decision to run an advert for Benylin cough mixture in a break and claiming that the coughing sound in archive clips used had been isolated and amplified.

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