The camera is turned on tabloid editors in Richard Peppiatt's 'One Rogue Reporter'
Hugh Grant said the film would highlight issues raised by Leveson
For free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails
Sign up to our free breaking news emails
Sign up to our free breaking news emails
Senior 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, includes stings carried out on some of the most powerful figures in the British press.
The film has been celebrated by the press reform campaigner Hugh Grant, who said it exposed the “hypocrisy” of some newspapers in claiming to champion freedom of speech.
In the hour-long documentary, Mr 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 is out walking 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 Mr Peppiatt (disguised as an overseas TV producer) over lewd text messages he allegedly sent to a woman. Mr 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 exposé for the defunct Sunday paper.
Mr 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, Mr Peppiatt goes after 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 shot of a belly button exposed beneath a summer shirt is then packaged in the style of the world’s most popular English language news site. “Peekaboo. Curvy Martin Clarke lets it all hang out as he dares to bare in London.”
The sting on Mr 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 Mr Peppiatt saying: “You should’ve stopped me, you should’ve stepped in!” The editor drives away without speaking.
Mr Grant, an outspoken campaigner for press regulatory reform, claimed that One Rogue Reporter, which opens in cinemas on 7 November, would increase public understanding of issues around tabloid excesses highlighted at the Leveson Inquiry. He described Richard Peppiatt as “a bit of a hero”.
'One Rogue Reporter' is in cinemas from 7 November and VoD from 10 December. Visit: oneroguereporter.com/