INVESTIGATES
With her long blonde hair and pretty smile, it’s easy to see why Claire McAlpine wanted to pursue a glamorous career in showbusiness. the tall, outwardly confident teenager, described by one newspaper as being ‘ so stunningly beautiful that eyes followed her wherever she went’, made a striking adornment to the magazines and catalogues that employed her as a professional model.
Still just 15, she got her big break in the summer of 1970 after being hired as a dancer by Emperor Rosko, a Radio One DJ who, with colleague Dave Lee travis, hosted the station’s first touring roadshow.
Later that year, she travelled to the studios of Yorkshire television in Leeds to star in several episodes of Junior Showtime, helping comedian Bobby Bennett i ntroduce t he variety programme.
Considered a rising star — in her home town of Watford, at least — McAlpine was hired to take the ceremonial kick-off at a celebrity football match hosted by hatfield town FC, featuring TV actors Jeremy Bulloch and tony Selby.
Publicity photos show her in hotpants and knee-length socks sitting on the knees of play- ers, grinning broadly. As McAlpine’s profile grew, she found herself being regularly invited to attend the filming of top Of the Pops.
She would dance with abandon a few yards from the stage where the hottest pop acts and famous DJs of the day strutted their stuff.
On a good week, the teenager might even be picked out by a cameraman and beamed into the living rooms of 20 million viewers.
On February 4, 1971, she was interviewed by the Mail with three other teenage girls in an article headlined ‘Secrets of the top Pop Dollies,’ which profiled the ‘ swinging dollies’ who ‘appear week after week on TV’s top Of the Pops’.
Calling herself ‘ Samantha Claire’ — a name she used for professional assignments — she discussed her decision to drop out of convent school to pursue a career in entertainment. ‘i was always in trouble with the nuns,’ she said. ‘But [leaving full-time education] was worth it. Already i have worked nine days as a model, for £35 a day!’
So far, so harmless. Or so you might think. But just under two months later, her visits to top Of the Pops would become part of a dark and troubling tragedy.
On the morning of March 30, Claire’s body was found on the floor of her bedroom in the modest terrace home she shared with her mother, Vera, and stepfather, David.
Next to her were two empty pill boxes which had contained Vera’s sleeping tablets — and Claire’s red leatherette diary including a suicide note.
the following Sunday, tragedy turned to scandal when Vera gave a lengthy interview to the News Of the World. the grieving mother claimed that pages of Claire’s diary had contained a vivid account of how her young daughter had in the months before her suicide been sexually exploited by not one, but two of the famous BBC DJs she met in the top Of the Pops studio.
Vera claimed to have made this shocking discovery a few weeks earlier, when she came across the diary and the key that opened it, while tidying up her daughter’s bedroom.
‘i read how Samantha [as McAlpine was calling herself] had become friendly with **** and stayed the night at his home,’ she said.
‘the man was a disc jockey. the diary said he had given Samantha a pill that made her feel as if she was floating in a cloud.
‘then i saw a reference to **** [a man the News Of the World dubbed “another disc jockey, equally famous”]. Some of the passages were so shocking that i would rather not repeat them.’
Deeply troubled by what she read, Vera said she had banned Claire from going to top Of the Pops.
She also phoned the first DJ to tell him he ‘had no business giving her a drug’ before calling the duty office of the BBC to make a formal complaint about the second DJ.
‘ i demanded to speak to the man right at the top,’ she said. ‘But they said quite abruptly that this was impossible.
‘Some time later they rang back and said they had asked the DJ about it and as he had denied it there was nothing more to be done.
‘they simply shrugged it off as though nothing had happened.’
to Vera’s dismay, detectives chose not to question, let alone identify, the famous men named in Claire’s red notebook.
‘it would be ridiculous to connect anyone or anything mentioned in her diary with reality,’ a police spokesman said at the time.
the inquest, days later, took a similar line, concluding that the teenager had committed suicide ‘ while her balance of mind was disturbed’ after realising that her ‘daydreams’ of becoming a pop star would never come true.
in other words, the police and the coroner decided that Claire McAlpine was a star- struck fantasist whose suicide, however tragic, had nothing whatsoever to do with a celebrity sex scandal.
With that, her name would have been more or less forgotten by the public were it not for the series of events that saw the BBC sack tony Blackburn last week.
the veteran DJ was forced out by the Corporation after claims that he gave misleading evidence to Dame Janet Smith’s inquiry into the Jimmy Savile scandal.
Blackburn, 73, turns out to be the second DJ who featured in Claire McAlpine’s long-forgotten diary.
it allegedly accused him of sexually exploiting her following a top Of the Pops recording after which he invited her back to his ‘sumptuously furnished’ West London residence.
At this stage, it should be stressed not only that Mr Blackburn denies any wrongdoing, but that Dame Janet Smith’s report made no finding as to whether his relationship with the girl was or wasn’t improper.
Blackburn, for his part, insists that he was never even aware of Vera’s 1971 complaint to the Corporation.
his version of events — which he gave in an interview in the Mail last Saturday — is, however, directly contradicted by several contemporary BBC memos stating that two ‘senior officials’ at the Corporation discussed the matter with him.
it also sits at odds with a report into a number of alleged scandals relating to top Of the Pops that was produced for the BBC in 1972 by Sir Brian Neill, an eminent QC.
Sir Brian states that he formally interviewed Blackburn, who told him ‘the girl had come to see him on several occasions and had invented stories for the purpose of getting access to him . . .
‘he said she seemed to him to live in a sort of fantasy world,
Claire was barred from seeing the father she loved