ITV uses videogame footage in Gaddafi documentary and claims it’s a real IRA attack: a case of déjà vu for Peter Fincham?

Breaking news isn’t really the Thursday Bucket’s forte – it was deliberately chosen to be a one-day-a-week job because I spend the rest of my time oscillating between downing enough gin to fill a bathtub, and building glittering little forts out of the empties. Nevertheless, sometimes an absolute whopper of a story just falls into your lap, as juicy and irresistible as a chunk of prime ribeye, demanding so much attention that it’s enough to distract from uniboobs and ladies’ luggage and whatever else is crusting up the pipes over at Britain’s favourite newspaper site.

The news, currently doing the rounds of the blogs but likely to emerge on the big sites fairly soon, is that an ITV documentary on Gaddafi’s relationship with the IRA features one particularly poorly-chosen segment of footage. It purports to show the actual real-life IRA shooting actual real-life bullets at an actual real-life helicopter which then chucks out great heaving gobbets of smoke and plummets into the actual real-life ground. However! That footage is quite obviously fake, and was in fact created using the videogame ArmA 2: a “lifelike combat simulation” created by Bohemia Interactive.  You can watch it yourself on ITV Player here (the offending segment starts at 28:20). EDIT: it looks like ITV have just this minute taken the video down from their site, but not before a kind soul managed to lift out the evidence (which now headlines this piece) and preserve it in Youtube aspic for future generations. This vid from the wonderful jordan8445 also helpfully includes the full, uncut footage in which its gamey origins are plain to see – look at the wibbly fires, the flatpack trees!

The original fan-made video apparently came from this odd channel, NOTICIATUBE, which seems to specialise in showing wartime reconstructions – here, ancient film of knackered Equity members in Napoleonic gear rubs shoulders uncomfortably with newer incidents mocked up in ArmA 2, in the same trademark style of “wobbly camera, terrible sound”. Indeed, their latest effort is an old conspiracy theorists’ favourite – that HMS Invincible was sunk during the Falklands War, but it was all covered up by the British government. This definitely didn’t happen, but NOTICIATUBE seem to have no problem knocking together a simulation in ArmA 2 and presenting it as fact – or, as they put it, “BREAKING TV NEWS”.

They’re not, then, the most reliable of sources. Having said that, the helicopter incident was real: a Lynx helicopter was forced to make an emergency landing over South Armagh in 1988 after coming under fire, and one soldier was slightly injured by the force of the landing. Michael Buerk was all over it in the days before he went all cranky and started hating women – though the original news broadcast came without the rubbish flute music, which is a recent addition courtesy of the IRA fanbase.

What went wrong, then, deep in the bowels of ITV Studios? Well, as much as I’d love for this to be a part of some massive conspiracy, with the Pope and the Illuminati and Simon Cowell all scheming together, the chances are it really was all a simple mistake. An unlucky, frazzled researcher needed to get the footage quickly, panicked and nicked the first thing they found on Youtube: after all, journalists are left with less and less time for fact-checking these days. Or maybe they just got their tapes mixed up: in the claustrophobic confusion of a busy edit suite, it can happen. The programme cuts maniacally from talking head, to reconstruction, to ominous footage of empty chairs, to newsreel clips and back to talking heads again so quickly and so regularly that just watching it made my head hurt and my eyes spin like caffeinated breakdancers – stitching it all together must have been a nightmare as the producers deftly intertwined fact and fiction.

EDIT #2: ITV has just released a statement : “The events featured in Exposure: Gaddafi and the IRA were genuine but it would appear that during the editing process the correct clip of the 1988 incident was not selected and other footage was mistakenly included in the film by producers.”

Still, this really should have been picked up before the show went out. Especially in a week when the tabloid rags have been shrieking, so loudly that it was almost funny, about how we’re all doomed because nobody can tell the difference between games and reality (though I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that this claim is a cube of solidified gnat’s farts). The fact that it went un-noticed when the crew reviewed the final cut suggests that they must have been operating on a horribly tight schedule – it’s a fact of life that many shows are polished off at four a.m. in a cramped Soho edit suite.

So what happens now? My money is on ITV leaving things at the “it was all a mistake” statement for now, waiting overnight to see how bad the damage is after it gets picked up in tomorrow’s papers. It was an in-house production by ITV Studios, so they can’t palm off the blame on some poor independent company. They’ll certainly conduct an internal review, and if the public reaction is really severe they might rush out a new set of guidelines – these won’t address the central problem that the crew didn’t have enough time to check it properly, but will use a lot of words like “tight compliance” and “thorough analysis” which won’t really mean anything in terms of changes on the ground, though they might add a bit more unneeded aggro for producers.

However, if the reaction is really bad, and they’ve got the Mail and the Express and all the other jackals frothing all over their lapels, then ITV management might have to sacrifice one of their own, regardless of whether they deserve it. This wouldn’t be without precedent:  last time something like this happened, in 2007, the controller of BBC One – Peter Fincham – was forced to resign when it turned out that footage of the Queen had been grossly mis-represented in the final edit.

So – who at the top of ITV is most likely to be quaking in their X-Factor pyjamas? I can’t say I personally know who was involved in commissioning the show, but I’d keep my eye on Michael Jermey – he’s the Director of News, Sport & Current Affairs – and Alison Sharman, the Director of Factual & Daytime. They’re probably safe, though, because in these situations the baying masses prefer to get their blood right from the very top, taking a scalp from the Board of Management itself. Which means that the one person who could be in real trouble would be the Director of Television – and who might that be, but a certain…Peter Fincham, who may be one of the unluckiest men in TV.

This will be all from The Bucket this week – normal service resumes on Thursday next