BBC top brass turned a blind eye to Hall’s actions

London: BBC managers turned a blind eye to Stuart Hall’s regular practice of luring young girls into his dressing room, it was claimed.

In an echo of the Jimmy Savile sex scandal, a former studio worker claimed Hall took a “string of girls” into BBC Manchester, sometimes describing them as his “nieces”.

Gerry Clarke said: “Of course, they [BBC managers] were aware of what was going on ... Stuart could do what Stuart could do.”

A former producer said Hall frequently took over a medical room at the BBC studios to entertain “lady friends”.

One of the presenter’s victims, 16 at the time, revealed how she had been lured into his clutches after he invited her to BBC Manchester.

It has also emerged that at least one of his offences had taken place on a day when he was filming It’s A Knockout for the BBC.

The similarities to the Savile scandal, where the Jim’ll Fix It presenter used his position at the corporation to groom and then abuse youngsters, are striking.

The corporation is already at the centre of a major inquiry into the decades of abuse carried out by Jimmy Savile. Last night MPs said the corporation should launch a separate probe into Hall’s activities to establish whether any current BBC staff were implicated in it.

Ex-floor manager Clarke, said: “In the early days there were a string of girls in Stuart Hall’s dressing room. There was quite of a lot of them, particularly during the It’s A Knockout years. We used to put it down that he was auditioning the score girls in his dressing room. They looked as though they were 18-ish and in the later years when we moved to New Broadcasting House he referred to some of these girls as ‘his nieces’.”

Clarke said the age of the girls had preyed on his mind. “After the story of Jimmy Savile happened, as retired staff we got letters from the director general asking us if we had any recollections of events regarding Savile — well I hadn’t,” he said.

“Then the case of Stuart Hall came up and I thought ‘They need to know all’s not well in Manchester’.”

Another former colleague, Linda McDougall, who worked as a producer at BBC Manchester in the 1960s and 1970s, told the World At One on Radio 4 that Hall had a reputation as “a ladies’ man”.

She said he had an “amazing set-up” at the BBC where the old medical room was reserved for his use.

McDougall said: “Stuart occupied this during the afternoons while we were rehearsing for Look North and he had lady friends who came and went happily on to the BBC premises and kept him occupied during the afternoons. I can’t say that he was having sex with them there because I wasn’t ever in the medical room at the same time but I always thought that they weren’t coming for cups of tea at the BBC in the afternoons. But of course everyone else knew. We all made jokes about it. You would have had to have your eyes shut and not been at work at all to not know what was going on.”

The BBC said it would not be setting up a separate inquiry into the Hall case and neither would it be setting up a hotline for allegations about the presenter.

But the broadcaster confirmed it would be forwarding “some information about Stuart Hall” onto the Dame Janet Smith review. It said it had “to date” not uncovered any written record of complaints of a sexual nature made against Hall.

A spokesman said: “The BBC is appalled by the disgraceful actions of Stuart Hall and we would like to express our sympathy for his victims. We will continue to work with the police to assist them in this and any other inquiries they are making.”

— Daily Mail