Training to remind staff about the importance of telling viewers the truth will cost the BBC more than £1 million in staff time and expenses.

About 17,000 BBC staff have to attend a two-hour course, in which employees are invited to discuss where the line should be drawn between artifice and deception in the wake of a series of scandals.

Vin Ray, the director of the BBC’s college of journalism, said that the direct cost of the course would be “a maximum of £500,000”, but the cost of taking each employee out for a half day more than doubled that figure.

Mark Thompson, the Director-General, introduced the scheme after the corporation admitted a series of faked broadcasts, including made-up winners to phone-ins for Children in Need and Comic Relief and a misleading edit of a promotional video for a documentary about the Queen. Employees in BBC Vision are to be shown a video of Jeremy Clarkson driving to the North Pole in a July episode of Top Gear. They are then told that in some of the scenes a stunt driver drove the vehicle and that the BBC believed that to be acceptable, as long as the basic integrity of the story — in this case the fact that Clarkson did reach the North Pole — was not compromised.

Blue Peter faces new scandal

It has emerged that production staff ignored the result of a viewer poll to choose a name for the Blue Peter cat last year

BACKGROUND

• BBC fined £50,000 for Blue Peter scandal

• BBC boss and the Queen’s ‘huff’

• Time to hang up on TV phone-ins

• GMTV cheated 25m of its phone-in callers

BBC journalists, meanwhile, are asked to discuss clips that include a Newsnight report, in which the film-maker Jamie Campbell tried and failed to secure an interview with Gordon Brown when he was running to be leader of the Labour Party.

The film included two encounters with a Treasury press officer that were shown in the wrong order, implying that Mr Brown recognised Mr Campbell and summoned police.

At the time of the complaint in July, the BBC said that the sequences would “have the same meaning if we had run them in reverse order”. But yesterday Mr Ray said: “You can’t muck about with the chronology.”

The training exercise begins with an irreverent video by Charlie Brooker, the television critic.

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