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- Crime pays unfortunately - 3rd June 2026
During 23 years with the BBC, and a 42 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, there was always a fine line between humour and incredible pathos, with this now highlighted by a new book about a celebrated mistake 20 years ago when a hapless individual who had arrived at the BBC for a job interview, was mistaken for an expert, and was interviewed about the subject of the day live on air!
Some mistakes the audience never hear about, but others cannot be covered up and become a media sensation.
Thankfully I never quite reached this point when I referred to an error in the graphics section during one live political results programme, because it only (as far as I know) made it into ONE newspaper.
It was on BBC Cymru Wales (BBC CW), where I was presenting a graphics representation of the results as they came in, but these graphics had not been thoroughly tested, and didn’t work properly.
So I said live on air as I looked at this giant screen: “Plaid Cymru have just made a gain in Pontefract! (quieter) That can’t be right…”
This incident made it into The Independent’s 10 best mistakes of the night, but luckily that’s as far as it went!
There were, though, lots of others that were not known about at all (except by those in studio).
On a political programme which follows a count you are joined by a succession of punters – experts, and winning or losing political figures.
I am terrible with names anyway, so I found it extremely hard to remember who the person was, even after the moniker was shouted in my ear piece by the producer.
I hold my hands up to this, and admit that I am actually not very good on live television, because there is so much going on and it is hard to concentrate.
Hosting a live TV programme entails a special skill which I don’t have, and I salute the presenters involved.
I like to think I was all right on live radio, because the audience couldn’t see the person presenting the programme when he was in trouble.
This time I FORGOT who the interviewee was, so I had to get her to introduce herself live on air.
I pretended this was for the audience’s benefit, but in fact it was for MINE because I DIDN’T KNOW WHO SHE WAS!
Another absurdly funny incident which people never heard about (although it wasn’t exactly a mistake, BUT it’s STILL worth including here) happened because we were trying to pretend we were down with the kids using modern technology.
I was interviewing Alun Michael (then First Secretary of Wales [FSW] as it was known at the time) online, with the questions sent in by viewers digitally.
Obviously this was going out UK wide, and a friend of mine in Oxford sent one in saying: “What does Mr Michael think of making Monmouth (my hometown) the capital of Wales?” Ha! Ha!
Other mistakes, though, are glaring, occurring in front of everybody’s eyes – they then become a media sensation (and with the internet now it is even easier for the sequence to be passed on).
One such cringey incident happened to one poor guy, the Congolese-French Guy Goma, who had arrived at the BBC thinking he was going for a job, but instead was mistaken for an expert on technology, and interviewed live on air.
In May 2006 Mr Goma was interviewed in place of technology journalist Guy Kewney by BBC News 24 presenter Karen Bowerman about the Apple Corps v Apple Computer legal dispute.
Yet Guy Goma, who was a business studies graduate from Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo, had only come to the BBC to be interviewed for a job as a data cleanser!
The comedy moment became one of the BBC’s most widely reported bloopers – going around the world, and continuing to do so today.
Facebook (FB) declared: “Watch the moment the BBC mistakenly interviewed Guy Goma, a candidate for a job at the BBC, live on air…“.
On Reddit it was posted recently: “20 years since the funniest case of mistaken identity ever to grace a news channel, when the BBC accidentally put a random Guy on air and interviewed him about Apple Inc vs Apple Corps”.
So after all those years, Guy Goma, has co-authored a book about the hilarious episode entitled The Wrong Guy: The Inside Story of TV’s Greatest Cock-Up.
Mind you, the title is a bit deceiving – I’ve made mistakes almost as big, it’s just that they aren’t known about!
The memories of Phil’s decades-long award-winning career in journalism (including some of the hilarious incidents he was involved with) as he was gripped by the rare disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in another book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
Tomorrow – after decades in journalism, Phil knows better than most that for an investigative journalist like him, relying on the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act almost NEVER works!
