The production company attached to the controversial Donald Trump Panorama only found out that it was about to cause one of the biggest crises to befall the BBC this decade when they read about it in the papers last week, Deadline understands.
October Films, which is in production on a Nigel Farage Reform documentary that Reform has just stopped co-operating with in light of the Trump scandal, co-produced the Panorama titled Donald Trump: A Second Chance with the BBC in-house current affairs division. October and the BBC developed the idea jointly and most of the people who worked on the doc were BBC staffers.
Deadline understands that the October executives who worked on Trump: A Second Chance discovered it had been the cause of internal BBC warfare only when the excoriating Michael Prescott memo was leaked to The Telegraph a few days ago.
They were unaware that the edit had been discussed at length twice by the BBC’s Editorial, Guidance and Standards Committee (EGSC), once in January 2025 and once in May, and were not informed by the BBC that the story had leaked to the press.
Furthermore, we are told that the October executive producer who worked on the show, Neil Breakwell, or the editor, was never even aware that the footage had been spliced together in such a way that it was made to appear Trump was inciting his followers to “fight like hell.”
That decision was made by the BBC’s in-house producer-director, we are told, who had made the edit prior to the documentary being shown to EPs Breakwell and the BBC’s Leo Telling. When they were first shown the footage before the show premiered in October 2024, we understand Breakwell and Telling were not informed of the changes that had been made.
The controversial edit, which spliced together two bits of January 6 footage of Trump addressing the crowd that happened almost one hour apart, has led to the shock resignation of BBC Director General Tim Davie and news boss Deborah Turness, while Trump is threatening to sue the BBC for $1B. Last night on Fox News, Trump said he has an “obligation” to sue after his “beautiful,” “calming” speech was made to appear “radical.” The doc was not actually available in the U.S. but has of course come to the President’s attention over the past week. We are told that the documentary’s distributor, Blue Ant Media, has dropped it from its catalog.
The news will lead to questions over the BBC’s relationship and transparency with production companies, an issue that had reared its head after the Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone saga took hold of the news cycle earlier this year. It was eventually revealed that the producer behind that doc, Hoyo Films, had failed to disclose to the BBC that the narrrator was the son of a Hamas official.
In the case of Trump: A Second Chance, the situation contrasts with the Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone saga in that the production company was the one kept out the loop. During yesterday’s BBC all-staff call with Davie, the outgoing DG was questioned by a staff member over whether the “Trump Panorama and other [scandals] would have been avoided if less of our content was outsourced?,” according to a recording of the call.
Davie did not mention October’s lack of knowledge about the incident or the story behind the making of the doc, but instead said “some of our problems have been the management and the relationship with independent companies.”
He added that the BBC “needs to grip” the issue but stressed that “we have to look at ourselves [in-house] as well as [indies] on that.”
Relations between the BBC and October remain solid, we are told, but Farage’s Reform Party has just said it will no longer co-operate with a doc October was making for the BBC titled The Rise of Reform. Farage and Trump are allies and Farage is a lead anchor on the right-leaning GB News.
October has made numerous shows for the BBC down the years, including Laura Kuenssberg: State of Chaos, along with docs for Netflix and HBO Max.
October and the BBC declined comment.
