Gotcha! Film doses tabloid editors with own medicine

Richard Peppiatt

Senior British tabloid editors are shown naked, embarrassed and scuttling for cover in a new documentary targeting them with the kind of treatment usually dished out by their own newspapers.

One Rogue Reporter, a film made by former Daily Star journalist Richard Peppiatt which opens in Britain this month, includes stings carried out on some of the most powerful figures in the British press.

The film has been celebrated by press reform campaigner, actor Hugh Grant, who said it exposed the hypocrisy of some newspapers claiming to champion freedom of speech.

In the hour-long documentary, Peppiatt arrives on the doorstep of the editor-in-chief of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, to confront him at his London home with a sex toy. He subjects the Mail Online editor Martin Clarke to a paparazzi-style hosing down as he returns from the shops, snapping a picture of his exposed belly button. And he ambushes Hugh Whittow, editor of the Daily Express, while he walks his dog by plastering his car with front-page Express stories about Madeleine McCann.

Notorious figures from the history of Rupert Murdoch's tabloid stable are also targeted, with the former editor of the Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie, questioned by Peppiatt (disguised as an overseas TV producer) over lewd text messages he allegedly sent to a woman. MacKenzie pulled off his microphone and left the room.

The former chief reporter of the News of the World, Neville Thurlbeck, perhaps suffers the most, being exposed naked in security camera footage taken at a Dorset bed and breakfast where he was researching an expose for the defunct Sunday paper.

Peppiatt quit the Daily Star in 2011 after a series of humiliating assignments that included being made to wear a burkha, dress up as Santa Claus and pose as a transvestite. He was better suited to making movies.

Unlike the 2009 film Starsuckers by Chris Atkins, which carried out stings on reporters, Peppiatt targets those at the top of the editorial tree.

"The main purpose of the film is to push forward into people's minds where the boundaries lie between privacy, public interest and freedom of expression," he said.

Dressed in the raincoat and trilby uniform of the stereotypical tabloid hack, he confronts the Mail Online editor outside his home and brazenly requests a "few quotes" to go with the pap shots. "Are you on a diet, or are you detoxing?" he asks.

"Who the hell are you?" the editor replies.

The sting on Whittow follows the Express editor's suggestion at the Leveson Inquiry that the Press Complaints Commission should have intervened to prevent the paper's repeated publication of stories about the McCanns. In the film, the editor finds his car covered in Express articles and Peppiatt saying: "You should've stopped me, you should've stepped in!" The editor drives away without speaking.

- Independent