Tommy asks Sweeney if he’s aware of the use of threats to pressure former colleagues of Tommy to trash-talk him. Sweeney says no - whereupon Tommy shows Sweeney a screen capture of a text message in which an HNH official claims that HNH is, in fact, “steering” Panorama‘s Tommy program. Tommy asks Sweeney if HNH is working with him on this documentary. “A scumbag Irish background.” He says that it’s so rare to encounter a working-class white male in the green room of BBC’s Newsnight that it’s like running across “a cannibal from the Amazonia.” And he observes that in today’s Labour Party, it’s more common than it used to be to hear “accents like yours and mine” - i.e., middle-class establishment accents - “rather than Tommy’s.” “I have more in common with Tommy than most reporters,” Sweeney says. There’s also a good deal of nasty stuff about the lower classes.
He jokes about shooting gay people and refers to someone as a “bloody woofter” - cockney rhyming slang for “poofter.”
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He informs Brown that the way “to piss off a Greek” is to “start speaking Turkish.” He says that since he has his dog with him, he can’t take a taxi home because “Asian cab drivers don’t like taking dogs.” (As Tommy points out to him: “You’re doing what your channel does, blaming an entire continent” when in fact it’s Islam that has a problem with dogs.) Sweeney confides that one of his heroes is former IRA terrorist Martin McGuinness. In the undercover footage, Sweeney comes out with all kinds of things that you know he’d never say on TV. Watching him do so is a delicious experience. Tommy pulls all this off with the skill of a master prosecutor. So it goes again and again: Tommy poses a question Sweeney answers it with a firm no Tommy then shows him an undercover clip that proves him a liar. Sweeney also asks Brown if there’s anything she doesn’t want him to ask her on-camera, and adds: “I’m not supposed to ask this.” Indeed, he pretty much writes her a script. If she covers those three points, Sweeney tells her, he guarantees they’ll be included in the final cut. Tommy then directs Sweeney’s attention to the big screen, where Sweeney can be seen in Brown’s undercover video spelling out to her in some detail the three points about Tommy that he’d like her to make during their on-camera interview. For instance, he asks Sweeney whether he’d ever tell any interviewee what to say about Tommy. Before Sweeney can start asking questions, Tommy, who has brought his own cameraman along, sets about interrogating Sweeney. After Brown has given Tommy the video, Tommy, whom Sweeney has been nagging for weeks to do an on-camera interview, agrees to sit down with him at a site of Tommy’s choosing - a room furnished, as it happens, with a big screen. What helps make Brown’s undercover footage so riveting is the way in which Panodrama presents it. Sweeney, who had promised a “definitive” takedown of Tommy, instead provided Tommy with a definitive portrait of the sleazy journalistic hack at work. In that footage, we see Brown meet Sweeney at a pub where, presumably in hopes of loosening her tongue, he plies her with various kinds of liquor, including champagne, gin, red wine, and brandy, for a total bar bill of £220, which he put on his BBC expense account. The undercover footage of Brown’s meeting with Sweeney forms the heart of Tommy’s hour-long exposé, Panodrama, which he premiered last Saturday on a huge screen to a huge crowd in front of the BBC’s Manchester headquarters.
When Panorama reporter John Sweeney asked her to talk to him for what he promised would be a “definitive documentary” uncovering Tommy in all his “horribleness,” Brown got in touch with Tommy and agreed to wear a hidden camera when she met with Sweeney to discuss his plans.
After their split, she was offered £5,000 by HNH to badmouth Tommy for a cover story, and had to contact a lawyer to prevent a major daily from falsely claiming she’d accused Tommy of sexual allegations. The key to Tommy’s plan was Lucy Brown, a former employee whose job with him had ended in a shouting match.