Upmarket 'Panorama'? 'The Spaghetti Tree was more rooted in reality'

Nearly six months ago in this newspaper, I welcomed the return of Panorama from its gangrenous graveyard slot to the new prime time of Mondays at 8.30pm. Shaving 10 minutes from its length and adding a front-end presenter would not, I opined, detract from its mission. The first edition attracted three million viewers and 11 per cent of the audience share with an investigation into a private IVF clinic. It was a cracking start.

So how have the first six months panned out? Panorama matters considerably for it is BBC 1's sole prime time current affairs programme. Its main role is to provide the best journalism in the world to its audience and the accessible telling of big stories. But recently there's been a troubling development and the programme is also now defining itself to "deliver impact either in terms of audience size or in take-up by the wider media" (Panorama's own mission statement). This means: get big audiences and be noticed by the press. Aha!

So how has the programme managed to reconcile journalistic responsibility and a worthy current affairs agenda with its new craving for popularity, attention and audience?

The most notorious example of this ambition was its daft programme on 14 May about scientology. This show certainly brought the audience into the tent (1.4 million above average) and all the media gurgled with delight when reporter John Sweeney lost the plot and screamed his way through an interview. Sweeney allowed his "investigation" into the cult of scientology (an old, old story) to be hijacked by an oleaginous Scientology creep who stalked and provoked him.

Sweeney's rant was undignified for him, for visual journalism and for the reputation of Panorama itself. Sweeney's programme, which failed to reveal much new about scientology, was called Scientology and Me. So what can we next expect from Panorama's personalisation of the big issue? What about "Vlad Putin's Real Holiday Pix", or "George Bush - The Hidden Talents of a Secret Gardener"?

Yet another stinker came from an extraordinary programme about the "poisoning and murder" of the Pakistan cricket team coach Bob Woolmer. For this edition, a Panorama reporter whose anonymity I will charitably maintain was offered by Mark Shields, Jamaica's Deputy Police Commissioner, a mouth-watering revelatory exclusive on the "murder" of Woolmer - in return for being allowed to take Panorama's trousers off for a full 30 minutes.

In a Mephistophelean deal and in return for precious access and interviews, this once- great programme, whose job it is to vector and vector again all its information so that it ine effect becomes a journal of record, got the story 100 per cent wrong. Now Panorama has had to endure the excruciating pain of learning publicly that Bob Woolmer died of natural causes after all. It's a mark of how much the BBC cares about this clanger that it left the original wholly incorrect Panorama report on its BBC press office website.

There have been some good editions: the recent investigation into the geriatric Nimrod spy plane; a virile special by Peter Taylor on MI5's cock-up over the 7/7 bombings; problems with midwife shortages and private prisons. But there were more turkeys too. None more embarrassing than "Wi-Fi: A Warning Signal", one of those end-of-the-world stories I used to love doing for the programme. The point about these tales is that there has to be an infrastructure of unchallengeable truth for the thing to work (something this newspaper understood when it first broke the story).

Panorama's version invest-igated claims that Wi-Fi signals in the classroom can cause long- term health effects. Paul Kenyon's report was so curiously sourced that it produced not only a very public howl of protest from real external experts but from Kenyon's very own colleagues within the BBC itself. David Gregory, the BBC's science and environment correspondent, wrote: "I can't believe such a biased and scientifically incoherent piece of TV made it to the air... frankly the April Fool Panorama on the Spaghetti Tree Harvest was more rooted in scientific reality."

But it gets worse. Lured on to the BBC's Newswatch programme by media commentator Raymond Snoddy, Kenyon was informed (for the first time it seems) that one of his best sources, a Swedish scientist, had been voted by 1,600 of his colleagues as "Misleader of the Year". "Ah," said a reddening Kenyon, "Did they? That's not good." The BBC's own website on the day of transmission shot Kenyon's fox even before the chase had begun with a piece headlined "Wi-fi fears are 'unproven'."

Remember when Panorama was the whole truth ? During my years there, one single factual error and you were bollocked. Two, and you were out. Remember when Panorama was the flagship? Now it flies mainly a flag of convenience for far too many inconsequential stories

On 28 May, the talents of John Ware were employed to secure an interview with some deeply unimportant English woman who was married to an equally forgettable mafia boss in Sicily.

Half an hour on this kind of irrelevance but not a word elsewhere about the world impact of the current administration in Washington, or in-depth reporting on the struggles of the new candidates for the White House; nothing about Putin's new aggressive nationalism and its implications; nothing whatsoever on British politics at a time of real political change. Instead, investigations into a faulty gas boiler in Corfu that killed two British tourists... ho hum; and waiting in the wings a pretty unserious-sounding sociological piece about what happens when you deprive some children of television for two weeks. If the channel really wants the patina of Endemol TV in its current affairs, why not let the real people do it?

Panorama is gradually being tugged down the populist road. The programme seems over-managed by chiefs but doesn't even have its own desperately needed investigations editor to prevent further public humiliations. The few good, exciting and, yes, worthy programmes now shine as rare exceptions.

So what's wrong with an adult and curious audience that wants to be informed, even if it numbers "only" three million? Dispatches, Channel 4's clever equivalent, has a smaller audience.

The BBC's assurance to maintain an intelligent, popular and relevant current affairs strand is looking increasingly threadbare as the programme consistently pratfalls noisily between the two stools of silly tabloid guff and serious endeavour. Six months after its relaunch, Panorama is falling well short of what was promised.

Author and journalist Tom Mangold was 'Panorama' senior reporter from 1976 to 2003