Harry Monk:
Apparently, this was actually recorded during the last series of “Have I Got
News For You” when Jimmy Saville was a guest on Paul Merton’s team.
That ‘transcript’ was supposed to be from an episode recorded in 1999 and contained parts that were never aired.
This appeared in 2000 angelfire.com/super/sotcaabi … thing.html
and reveals it to be a hoax. You’ll have to read the whole (very long) thread to put it into context
HIGNFY Transcript Posted Wed Jul 19 20:42:54 BST 2000 by Rob S
Ok, it’s looks like have to try and set a few things straight with regard to the HIGNFY transcript… the reason for our silence up til now is because of the unclear legal situation. Those who want to believe our silence is due us ‘not being bothered’ about an unfinished/unedited article being taken from our server and republished without our knowledge (and thus putting us in a very tricky situation) are sadly mistaken.
The transcript was never intended to be published on this website, without an explanatory article. After working so hard on the site for many months we wouldn’t of been so reckless. The transcript is quite obviously a hoax, as several forum users spotted. The original target of the hoax was a specific journalist rather than Internet users in general…
A commented out reference to the file was indeed left on the ‘Hidden Archive’ menu page, but this was invisible to regular websurfers. As Dr H has already pointed out, that page uses a Javascript trick to try and prevent users from viewing the source code of the page (which works in both Netscape and IE). This wasn’t to protect the commented out transcript info, but instead to try and hide the location of the pages which link to the unreleased Monty Python album. Basically, we wanted to try and discourage people downloading the whole album and then posting it elsewhere on the net - it’s not foolproof by any means, but hopefully it discourages the casual leecher. You’ll notice the ‘Comment’ menu has exactly the same protection to hide the ‘Knowing Knowing Me, Knowing You’ files…
It’s a fairly safe bet that the person who discovered the transcript wasn’t looking for hidden parts of the site, but trying to download the Python album - but this is all getting off the point…
Now the file has been discovered and someone decides to post a link to it in the forum… after receiving an email asking about the legal situation of that forum thread, I discovered the link and swiftly removed the file. I mistakenly thought the file had already been deleted as part of one of our updates…
After a few conspiracy theories on why I’d deleted the file (and a few dozen email requests), the transcript was posted on Geocities, from where somebody else decided to tip off several other websites of it presence. This effectively removed all control we had over the file. I felt emailing Geocities would of had little effect as someone would of undoubtedly posted it elsewhere and we’d already had the file sent to us by a few mailing lists… this made much more difficult for us to say anything, particularly as it still had the site’s copyright upon it.
The Corpses have written a detailed examinaton of the hoax which will be published on the site in a few days time, but this is the full story on how it became public - not quite as exciting as you would imagination, but it is the facts…
Thanks
Rob
p.s. The other threads in this forum relating to the transcript have been removed to prevent further confusion.