- Yet ANOTHER Huwge mistake… - 9th December 2025
- Strictly poison part one - 9th December 2025
- Restricted growth… - 8th December 2025
Shocking news that ANOTHER star of hit BBC show Strictly Come Dancing has been arrested on suspicion of rape, puts centre stage concerns that the new boss will be inheriting a poisoned chalice, as well as their REFUSAL to answer The Eye’s questions about the huge number of scandals which have engulfed the giant corporation.
Details of the accusation (which centred on an alleged incident in 2024 after a BBC event) come less than three months after another star of the BBC’s flagship dance show was arrested in an allegation of rape.
The woman who claims she was assaulted was not a contestant or pro dancer, but the pair had met as a result of the star’s participation in the contest, which has been rocked by a vast number of scandals in recent years.
In August the BBC launched an investigation into accusations of Class A drug use by two of the stars of ‘Strictly’, and in the same month it was revealed that a male star of the show had been arrested for rape — which is separate to the latest allegations.
This suspect was also questioned by police over allegations involving “non-consensual intimate image abuse”.
Other recent scandals to beset ‘Strictly’ include a bullying probe last year into Giovanni Pernice, when it emerged that Amanda Abbington had launched a formal complaint against the Italian, who denied any wrongdoing.
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The following month the BBC issued an official apology to Ms Abbington after six of 17 complaints were upheld.
But the list of controversies is incredible.
Pro dancer Graziano Di Prima was fired from the show in July last year for gross misconduct, after a video showed that he had kicked celebrity partner Zara McDermott in the back during rehearsals.
The most recent ‘Strictly’ live tour was shrouded in controversy after Welshman Wynne Evans was axed for using the term “spitroast” during a photocall, and he himself had made accusations of cocaine use.
EastEnders star Jamie Borthwick was also sacked after a video emerged of the actor using derogatory language.
Last year the BBC announced new safeguarding measures for ‘Strictly’ in the wake of the scandals, which included having chaperones in all rehearsal rooms, adding two new welfare producers and providing additional training for the dancers, production team and crew.
However, the-then BBC Director-General Tim Davie admitted to MPs in September this year that “we may see more things coming out”.
But these issues have left insiders and those who have left the enormous corporation reeling.
Our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry (who spent 23 years with the BBC) declared: “I just can’t believe what has happened – and now there is another scandal. Whoever takes on the top job will have to clear up the mess Tim Davie left behind. It is a poisoned chalice”.
It is clear that Mr Davie had hung on for too long (one publication described him as “Teflon Tim”), it seems, though, that taking disciplinary action earlier against him was tempered by the knowledge that there were few alternatives, but the decision was taken out of the hands of senior officials by his resignation.
The Chair of the Culture, Media and Sport (CMS) committee Dame Caroline Dinenage, proclaimed in the wake of his resignation, that it was “avoidable”.
She said: “…there is no escaping the fact he (Tim Davie) was very slow to act on this particular issue”.
As possibly Dame Caroline has alluded to here, he and his lieutenants had known about a mistake in editing for months, but, as far as we understand, DID NOTHING ABOUT IT hoping, perhaps, that it would all go away.
From this it is obvious that the BBC’s entire media operation needs to be looked at, because embarrassing facts NEVER go away. They are ALWAYS leaked to papers like the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph.
Quite apart from this case, their astonishing silence can also be seen in their reaction to our questions about the awful scandals recently.
This is the (extremely polite) request we put to their Media Office (MO) on December 19, and we were encouraged because on the BBC’s website it is declared: “Enquiries from journalists will be responded to as quickly as possible”.
Hello.
I am Editor of a news website called The Eye.
Could you please answer the following questions:
1. In the light of the Gregg Wallace, and other affairs, what, if any, programmes are now not to be transmitted, and how many of them are there?
2. What, if any, changes have been made to your Whistleblowers’ Charter, and what are the dates of these?
3. What, if any, changes have been made to your safeguarding policies, and what are the dates of these?
Statements can be made by return to this address – it is checked constantly and is totally secure.
Thank you,
Phil Parry
To date, though, there has been NO reply apart from two automated messages saying that the requests had been received.
It appears there had been a rift between the BBC board and the news division with some arguing the corporation has, for too long, failed to address institutional bias. and others questioning whether what’s unfolded has been an orchestrated – and politicised – campaign against the organisation which has claimed two big scalps.
The BBC had allowed the ‘re-editing’ story to fester – and the White House called the scene in the programme at the heart of it all “fake news”.
The story of ‘bias’ (in support of what programme-makers did or opposing it) simply won’t go away, and in another episode the leading Dutch philosopher and historian Rutger Bregman said that the organisation had used ‘censorship’ in relation to Donald Trump when the term “openly corrupt” was cut from a broadcast.
In his Reith lecture he employed the controversial phrase, but in the BBC Radio 4 version it had been dropped.
The original ‘re-editing controversy’, meanwhile, had led to Mr Davie’s abrupt departure.
The US president himself weighed into the debate saying in a post on his Truth Social platform, that he celebrated the resignations and accused the BBC of “doctoring” his speech as well as of “trying to step on the scales of a presidential election”.
The background to all of this is extraordinary, because former Prime Minister (PM) Boris Johnson had unleashed a furious tirade against the BBC, in which he had also slammed two veteran presenters, while demanding Mr Davie‘s resignation.
The ‘re-editing’ issue proved the final straw for Mr Davie and Mr Johnson’s demand was fulfilled.
An edition of Panorama, aired last year and made by an independent production company, featured spliced together clips of a speech by President Trump given on January 6 2021, which suggested that he told the crowd: “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol and I’ll be there with you, and we fight. We fight like hell”.
Yet the programme-makers had stitched together the incendiary statement from two unrelated remarks.
After the Daily Telegraph published a memo from a whistleblower within the BBC on November 3, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, called the BBC “100 per cent fake news”.
The next day Mr Davie stepped down, and Mr Trump claimed victory, posting that “The TOP people in the BBC…are all quitting/FIRED, because they were caught ‘doctoring’ my very good (PERFECT!) speech“.
Worries have been raised in the past, too, about the corporation’s impartiality, despite Mr Davie declaring in Cardiff soon after his appointment: “If you want to be an opinionated columnist or partisan campaigner on social media then that is a valid choice, but you should not be working at the BBC”.
BBC rules underline this, and announce that staff should also avoid using disclaimers such as ‘My views, not the BBC’s’ in their biographies and profiles, as they provide no defence against personal expressions of opinion.
However the accusation of bias is only one thing the new DG (whoever he or she is) will have to deal with, now there is also that further allegation of rape by a ‘Strictly’ star…
The memories of Welshman Phil’s astonishing decades long award-winning career in journalism (including his years at the BBC), as he was gripped by the rare neurological disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in the book ‘A Good Story’. Order it now.
It would make a good Christmas present – Nadolig Llawen!
Strictly poison part two is published soon, where we look at how further controversies have struck the hit BBC show, again highlighting their silence over the scandals.
Tomorrow – why during that career, for Phil crime stories have often dominated, and now there is new information about one of the biggest alleged heists ever – the multi-million pound theft of treasures at the Louvre in Paris, as lawyers prepare for the court case.
