Martin Young, who has died aged 76, spent much of the 1970s as one of the reporters bringing lighthearted news to the screen in the BBC programme Nationwide. However, his greatest contribution to television journalism came through creating, with its producer, Peter Hill, the series Rough Justice, revealing legal miscarriages.
Young and Hill, who had worked together on reports for Panorama and Newsnight, were told by Tom Sargant, the secretary of the law reform group Justice, that he knew of at least 250 cases of false imprisonment caused by shortcomings in the police and justice system.
When the pair sought to have their programme commissioned by John Gau, the BBC’s head of news and current affairs, they were concerned that he might think this to be “trial by television”. Gleefully, Gau responded: “No, no, this is retrial by television.”
They hit the ground running in 1982 with an investigation titled The Case of the Handful of Hair, about Mervyn “Jock” Russell, convicted in 1977 of fatally stabbing a female art student who was found with a clump of her murderer’s grey hair in her hand.
By proving that it was not Russell’s, which was dark, as well as exposing other weaknesses in the prosecution case, they helped to secure his release from prison in 1983 – five years after a previous appeal had failed. A special programme the following year, Verdict Unsafe, chronicled his first few weeks of freedom following the quashed conviction.
Some of the proven miscarriages took longer to rectify. An appeal followed The Case of the Tortured Teenager (1983), about a mother falsely imprisoned for murdering her 14-year-old son, but it was unsuccessful. She was eventually released in 1989.
Young and Hill worked on the first three series of Rough Justice (1982-85). Audiences of up to 11 million watched, accolades were forthcoming – including Royal Television Society and Broadcasting Press Guild awards – and five people were released from prison.
But the BBC pulled the pair off the series following criticism by the lord chief justice Lord Lane, following a 1985 episode titled The Case of the Perfect Proof, in which the alleged victim of a burglary admitted that it had not taken place. “I made it all up,” said Anne Fitzpatrick.
Despite the programme leading to Anthony Mycock’s conviction being overturned by three court of appeal judges, Lane accused Young and Hill in court of “outrageous” behaviour and “investigation by menaces”. Hill told the Guardian: “Martin and I knew Lane was after us because of our previous work on the programme.”
Despite concerns expressed in both houses of parliament about Lane’s forthright comments, the BBC’s managing director, Bill Cotton, hauled Young and Hill into his office, suspended them for three months and banned them from making investigative journalism programmes for two years. He said an internal BBC investigation accepted they had not threatened Fitzpatrick with exposing her as a lesbian, as she claimed, but it still believed “unjustifiable threats” had been made. “It ruined Martin’s career – unjustly,” said Hill.
Young wrote in his 2015 memoir, Opposable Truths: “Among our many misjudgments was that we thought we were the free press fighting the establishment, without realising that the BBC was itself very much part of the establishment.” Rough Justice itself carried on until 2007.
Born in Glasgow, Martin was the son of Margaret (nee Boyd), a secretary, and George Young, a Glasgow Herald reporter. On leaving Dulwich college in south-east London, he studied English literature at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, where he performed with the Marlowe Society, of which he was president, and the Footlights comedy troupe.
After graduation in 1969, Young worked in the city’s Pye electronics factory on a police radio production line and then went to Border Television in Carlisle as a holiday relief researcher. In 1970 he joined its fellow ITV company Tyne Tees in Newcastle as a news reporter on Today at Six and eventually also presented the programme. He crossed the city to become a reporter on the BBC’s Look North in 1971.
On Nationwide in London (1973-78) he relished reporting on offbeat stories such as the Black Angels bikers of Sunderland, lauded locally for their charity work; a new trend for gold bathroom fittings – with film of him in a bath with a golden rubber duck; and a Yorkshire woman who claimed to have encountered the Cottingley fairies in 1917.
For a journalist who was a budding actor at university, he was also thrilled about playing King of the Munchkins in the programme’s 1977 Wizard of Oz pantomime, alongside the Labour politician Denis Healey in the title role.
There was no frivolity when he switched to Tonight (1978-79) and, for its first year, Newsnight (1980). His exposés included proof of Ayatollah Khomeini’s forces bombing the Kurds in Iran (where he was briefly thrown into jail), the harm done by video cassette pirates and Peter Sutcliffe’s final murder.
He also made reports for Panorama (1980-85) and Everyman (1986-87) and a three-part series, Hanging Fire: The State of Israel (1981), looking at the conflicts at the heart of Israeli society.
Following the Rough Justice saga, Young was less high-profile and spent two years as presenter of The Education Programme (1987-89). He switched to radio to present the Midday News on LBC Newstalk (with Brian Widlake, 1990-92) and, particularly successfully, Who Goes There? (1995-2002), the BBC Radio 4 panel game about celebrities and historical characters. He was also a media trainer.
In 1971 Young married Susan Fowler. She and their children, Jonathan and Annabel, survive him.