ITV pulls IRA documentary - after passing off videogame as real footage
ITV has removed the premiere episode of its flagship “Exposure” series from its ITV Player catch-up service; after it was pointed out that footage producers had labelled as a terrorist video was in fact a cut scene from a videogame.
Exposure: Gaddafi and the IRA, broadcast on Monday night, was billed as a “revealing focus” on the relationship between the Libyan dictator and Irish Republican extremists.
Instead the show revealed a highly embarrassing oversight on the part of ITV Studios, producer of the hour long investigation.
The scene claimed to depict a group of terrorists shooting down a British army helicopter, alongside narration from actor Paul McGann, who intoned: “With Gaddafi’s heavy machine guns, it was possible to shoot down a helicopter, as the terrorists’ own footage of 1988 shows.”
In fact the material had been obtained from ARMA2, a 2009 PC game.
Speculation suggests that the footage was copied from Youtube, where it had been posted with the label: “P-IRA Ambush British Helicopter, Silverbridge – South Armagh, 23 June 1988.”
An ITV spokesperson said: “The events featured in Exposure: Gaddafi and the IRA were genuine but it would appear that during the editing process the correct clip of the 1988 incident was not selected and other footage was mistakenly included in the film by producers.
"This was an unfortunate case of human error for which we apologise.”