Panorama: Jimmy Savile - What the BBC Knew, BBC One, review - Telegraph For over two weeks, the BBC has relied on two principal defences against suspicions that the original Newsnight investigation, in December last year, was pulled by the programme's editor, Peter Rippon, for improper reasons (not least, it has been speculated, to save two Jimmy Savile tribute programmes which were scheduled for broadcast at Christmas). First, said the BBC, Newsnight was not doing its own investigation into paedophile assault allegations against Savile - but rather, an examination of whether Surrey Police properly investigated allegations made to them in 2007. But in this edition of Panorama, Liz MacKean - the Newsnight reporter who had been working on the Savile investigation, said plainly: "The story we were investigating was very clear cut. It was about Jimmy Savile being a paedophile, and using his status as a charity fundraiser and television presenter to get access to places where there were vulnerable teenage girls he could abuse. Secondly, the BBC has claimed that Newsnight dropped its investigation because no evidence of "institutional failure" was found at Surrey Police - in other words, that Surrey Police carried out a proper investigation, of all the evidence, and dropped its inquiries because that evidence was found wanting. Yet Meirion Jones, MacKean's producer on the Savile investigation, said during Panorama: "The key witness, Karin Ward, categorically told us she had not gone to the police - and Peter [Rippon] was reminded many times that this was the case, both verbally and in writing." Jones spoke passionately, and we saw an extract from an email of protest that he had sent. With advance notice of these bits of the Panorama programme, BBC management were yesterday forced to admit that Rippon's defence of his actions - posted in a blog early this month - was "inaccurate or incomplete." Yet that served only to inflame tempers inside the BBC yesterday, with insiders starting to wonder openly not only if Rippon can survive - but also about the future of Helen Boaden, the director of news, and even of the newly-anointed director-general, George Entwistle, himself. The Panorama programme showed an email from MacKean to a friend at the end of November last year, recounting that Rippon "says if the bosses aren't happy... [he] can't go to the wall on this one." But Panorama didn't offer any evidence that Boaden (or indeed any other BBC management) had applied any kind of pressure on Newsnight to stop its investigation being broadcast. What Panorama did have - from an unnamed source - was evidence about what Boaden told Entwistle. The programme said specifically that they spoke at an awards ceremony on on 2 December 2011 for less than 10 seconds - but 10 seconds in which Boaden told Entwistle that if the Newsnight investigation went ahead, he might have to change the Christmas schedules. It was impossible not to wonder who had briefed Panorama on that conversation, and why. So Panorama was a programme that left open more questions than it answered. We still weren't given a convincing explanation as to why Rippon decided to pull the Newsnight investigation at all - and, in particular, to pull it completely, instead of allowing it to gather more evidence. We still don't know what dealings Rippon had with his BBC News bosses before he made that decision. And most tantalisingly of all, we still don't know Entwistle's rationale for going ahead with the Savile tributes last Christmas. But this Panorama was nonetheless a game-changing piece of journalism - and all the more compelling, in a car-crash kind of way, because it was made by one bit of the BBC about another. The fact that that can happen at all is testament to the tenacity of the BBC's journalists. But the strength of BBC management is still being tested.