Martin Young
BBC journalist who co-founded the award-winning Rough Justice, exposing wrongful convictions
MARTIN YOUNG, who has died aged 76, was a dogged investigative reporter who, with Peter Hill, co-founded Rough Justice, the award-winning BBC programme which investigated alleged miscarriages of justice, but from which both men were suspended in controversial circumstances in 1986.
The programme, with Young as its frontman, was inspired by the work of Tom Sargant of the reform group Justice. Sargant had told them that he knew of at least 250 cases of wrongful imprisonment, and the idea of creating a series highlighting and investigating such cases was accepted by John Gau, head of news and current affairs at the BBC.
The first programme in the series, “The Case of the Handful of Hair” (April 7 1982), reinvestigated the conviction of Mervyn “Jock” Russell, then serving a life sentence for the murder of Jane Bigwood in Deptford, in 1976. By showing that hair clutched in the dead girl’s hand did not match that of Russell, the programme makers helped to secure his release after six years in prison.
Over the programme’s first four years, Young and Hill investigated cases which led to the release of five people who had been wrongly imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. They earned record audiences for a current-affairs programme and notched up three prizes, including a special award for journalism from the Royal Television Society.
In 1985, however, they launched an investigation into what Young, in his memoirs Opposable Truths (2015), described as “the most extraordinary case yet” – that of Anthony Mycock, who had been convicted in 1983 in Manchester of assaulting and robbing Anne Fitzpatrick, and jailed for five years.
Mycock had been convicted on the testimony of the alleged victim alone; there was no forensic evidence. Young and Hill found two of her ex-flatmates and interviewed them about the alleged crime. “We emerged from the meeting… and looked at each other,” Young recalled, “and almost in unison said, ‘I don’t think there was actually any crime. I think she made it up.’”
They traced Anne Fitzpatrick to a family home in Los Angeles where she was working as a nanny. She subsequently gave the two men a “nervous and tearful” interview in which she admitted that Mycock was not the man who had attacked her, and when asked whether there had been a crime, replied: “No, I made it all up.”
It was her public confession on television that forced the Home Office to order an appeal (which had previously been refused). The Appeal Court judges, headed by the Lord Chief Justice Lord Lane, had little option but to overturn Mycock’s conviction.
Lord Lane, however, chose to believe Anne Fitzpatrick’s claim in court that the BBC journalists had blackmailed her into admitting she made the story up by threatening to “out” her as a lesbian. The methods used by the Rough Justice team had been “outrageous” and “investigation by menaces,” Lane declared.
Young admitted that they had threatened Anne Fitzpatrick over her immigration status and false references which she had used to get her job in the US. “We had told her very openly what would happen if she did not retract evidence … that we would reveal her lies in England.” But in his memoir he rejected as “fantastical” and “ludicrous” her story that she had been blackmailed over her sexuality.
The result of the appeal was to turn press attention from the miscarriage-of-justice case itself to the BBC, with critics in the press piling in to condemn the corporation and the Rough Justice team.
The furore led the corporation to conduct an internal investigation and in January 1986 Bill Cotton, the BBC’S managing director of television, announced that Hill and Young were being suspended for three months without pay and barred from working on investigative programmes for two years, bringing an end to their time on
Rough Justice. A BBC spokesman said that mitigating factors, including the sustained high standard of the series, had saved the two men from being fired. The blow was also softened by the fact, as Young gleefully later admitted, that no one had told the accounts department about the sanction. He continued to work, on and off, for the BBC. As he recalled in his memoir, when asked why by a “fresh-faced young thing”, he replied: “Because I owe the Halifax Building Society a lot of money.” Even so, he regretted accepting a suspension which entailed a vow of silence: “I should have resigned, spoken out about the ludicrous treatment from the BBC and the sheer wrongness of their judgment about our behaviour.” Martin Young was born in Glasgow on July 5 1947 and was educated at Dulwich College and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was President of the Marlowe Society and a member of Footlights.
In this capacity, he met his future wife, Susan, at an audition – jokingly, if not tactfully, remarking at a subsequent reunion that she was “the best of a bad lot”. They were a devoted couple, the “long-suffering Susan”, as she was known to their friends, a constant support throughout his occasional career scrapes. He began his career as a researcher for Border Television in 1969 and became a reporter and presenter for Tyne Tees Television in 1970 before joining BBC Look North.
From 1973 he spent six years with Nationwide . The highlight of his time with the early evening magazine series, he recalled, was playing the King of the Munchkins in a Nationwide
Christmas panto, with the Chancellor of the Exchequer Denis Healey starring as the Wizard of Oz.
He went on to work on Newsnight and Panorama, reporting from the Iranian Revolution, from Gaza and the West Bank and telling the story of the Mafia in New York and Sicily before co-founding Rough Justice.
“I have been shelled in a low-tech kind of way on the battlefield,” Young wrote in his memoir, “but I was fully napalmed in the more august surroundings of the Court of Appeal by a man in a wig.”
After that debacle, he co-presented LBC’S hour-long Midday News
programme alongside Brian Widlake; hosted the panel game Who Goes There?
on BBC Radio 4; was a guest on the first three series of Have I Got News for You;
and gave training sessions for media interviews, although, as he explained to PR Week, he refused to train politicians, to avoid putting himself in a position where he might hear something confidential that he would be tempted to use as a journalist.
In 2012 Young was one of the few old BBC hands brave enough to give an interview to Panorama for its report “What the BBC Knew”, about the corporation’s failure to investigate rumours about Jimmy Savile, posthumously revealed to have been sexually abusing underage girls for 50 years.
As a young reporter on Nationwide,
Young recalled, he had joined Savile on a charity run and found him lying on the bed in his campervan with a teenage girl. “I thought he was a pervert,” he told Panorama presenter Shelley Jofre.
Did he think about reporting it? “No, it never crossed my mind, and I take my share of blame for that.” Later, he confessed to friends that he feared his obituary would ignore his journalism and be headlined “Jimmy Savile Man Dies”.
A man of unstarry self-deprecation, Young had the gift of finding the absurd in everything, a treasury of anecdotal gossip and, according to his Rough Justice successor David Jessel, the loudest laugh ever heard when, at his happiest, he was surrounded at table by friends.
In 1971 he married Susan Fowler. She survives him with their two children, Jonathan and Annabel.
Martin Young, born July 5 1947, died May 10 2024