ITC Investigates Claims Of Fake C4 Documentary

The Independent Television Commission (ITC) is to investigate claims that some parts of the Channel 4 Guns On The Street documentary were faked. The programme, shown the day after the Dunblane massacre in March 1996, claimed to show the video diaries of two people in Manchester who were concerned about the local arms trade.

However, an investigation by the Guardian claims that the two men were given false names and that one of the men had a previous conviction for armed robbery. This was not disclosed in the programme. Yesterday’s Guardian also claimed that some of the sequences in the film were faked or unsubstantiated.

As a result of the programme’s broadcast, Gary Bispham, who was shown in the film reactivating a sub-machine gun, was subsequently arrested and sentenced to seven years imprisonment for firearms offences. Channel 4 says that it “unequivocally rejects the Guardian‘s implication that, because of alleged failings in the programme, the seven-year sentence handed down to Gary Bispham for gun-related offences is unjust.”

C4 began its own inquiry into the programme in January following allegations against it by someone involved in the production. Currently, independent solicitors are conducting a full investigation into Guns On The Street, the results of which will be passed to the ITC shortly. However, C4 maintains that the diarists’ identities were kept secret in order to protect them from potential danger and that the producers were unaware that one of the men had previous armed robbery convictions.

This is a testing time for documentary producers as a number of programmes have recently been exposed for containing faked sequences or witnesses (see Channel Four Documentray Found To Be A Fraud). In December last year, Carlton Communications was fined £2 million by the ITC after an inquiry found a documentary focusing on drug-trafficking, The Connection, to be fake (see ITC Fines Carlton £2 million For Fake Drugs Documentary).

Channel 4: 0171 396 4444 Independent Television Commission: 0171 255 3000