Dr Who: WHAT!!!??

Revenge is a dish best served as “one I prepared earlier”, and the publication in May of a book by former Blue Peter editor Richard Marson is likely to prompt headlines as unfavourable for the BBC as those that surrounded his sacking in 2007 after the spate of scandals over faked viewer competitions, for which many felt he was made a scapegoat.

“JN-T: The Life and Scandalous Times of John Nathan-Tuner” is the biography of the producer of Doctor Who from 1980-89, but while it has all the anorak you would expect, it also features startling amounts of dirty mac. An entire chapter is devoted to the sexual activities of Nathan-Turner and his partner and BBC colleague Gary Downie with teenage Doctor Who fans both on and off BBC premises, including Marson’s own tale of fleeing and hiding under an office desk at the age of 17 to evade the latter’s clutches.

Although Marson denies that Nathan-Turner was a paedophile (although his behaviour was illegal at the time given the unequal age of consent), he depicts Downie as an extremely predatory character and the pair’s abuse of the celebrity status that their jobs gave them as very much in the Savile mould.

“It’s helpful when you’re writing someone’s biography to have some understanding of the pressures they were under or the way in which they worked, because it gives you a greater insight,” Marson told science fiction magazine Starburst last month. “What I’ve tried to do is deconstruct or to explain how the BBC worked from within, because I think that’s something that’s very rarely understood.”

From Books & Bookmen in the current Private Eye. 

When the Daily Mail find out about this "NEW BBC DR WHO GAY PAEDO SCANDAL" - which knowing them will be sometime late next week - the world may well explode.