The Cook Report

Did You Know?

• The programme and its production team won eleven national and international awards.
• Roger Cook received a BAFTA special award in 1997 for 25 years of outstanding quality investigative reporting.

History

For twelve years and sixteen series, Roger Cook traveled globally to look into serious crime, official failures, and injustices. The show was famous for its undercover sting operations, where Cook would directly confront those he was investigating, often resulting in verbal and physical attacks on him and his crew. It was the most-watched current affairs program on British television, with peak audiences exceeding 12 million, and was widely recognized for leading to multiple criminal convictions and several legal reforms. The program covered a vast array of topics, including protection rackets in Northern Ireland, baby trafficking in Brazil and Guatemala, canned hunting in South Africa, loan sharks, the ivory trade, people smuggling, drug dealing, timeshare fraud that led to the convictions of Graham Maynard and John Palmer, mock auctions, counterfeit goods, manipulation of the UK singles chart, war criminals in Bosnia, Clenbuterol in British beef, friendly fire incidents during the Gulf War, illegal exotic bird trading, the rise of triads in Britain, Neo-Nazis in Germany, the Hillsborough disaster, steroid dealing, cot deaths, child and computer pornography, the Russian black market for weapons-grade plutonium, and Satanic ritual abuse. In July 1990, the program examined the tainted blood scandal, detailing how haemophiliacs contracted HIV from contaminated blood products. At that time, 1,243 people in the UK had been infected, with around 100 having died from AIDS; by 2017, the death toll from HIV infection had reached nearly 1,000. The scandal has remained a subject of ongoing debate in the British parliament, as victims and their families continue to seek justice.

News of the World allegations

In February and April 2000, the News of the World published front page allegations claiming that The Cook Report had faked a number of programmes in which crimes were set up for Cook to solve. Roger Cook and members of the relevant production teams issued libel writs against the paper. The newspaper demanded an investigation by the Independent Television Commission, which after an eighteen-month investigation in October 2001 exonerated the programme. The News of the World initially dismissed the commission's findings as 'a whitewash', but after key witnesses for the defence voluntarily retracted their paid-for testimony, the newspaper reluctantly agreed with the ITC's conclusions. In open court, the News of the World stated: 'The News of the World accepts that neither Mr Cook nor Carlton [TV] nor the editors, producers, legal advisers and researchers were a party to any fakery or deception.' It was also accepted that the allegations were false and should never have been published, though a short correction was printed on page 38. Roger Cook's solicitor, Ian Bloom, described the allegations as 'devastating for Mr Cook both professionally and personally'.