It never took place.

I think the public interest -- it's just the question you asked about how you define the public interest. In my view, it isn't difficult. If you look at when public interest justifies invasions of privacy or breach of the Data Protection Act -- if you look at the MP ...

Just one thing on the public interest, sorry.

To my mind, the newspapers understand one thing, which is money, and I think the undercover meetings that we've shown show that the PCC adjudications are as good as meaningless, really, in terms of correcting behaviour. So if you had a body that could exact penalties and fines, then ...

I think it's perfectly simple to me and lots of people how the PCC needs to be reformed.

Exactly, and for the viewer at home, they're not aware of this. They're just watching stuff and they're completely unaware of what is regulated by who. And what you, in my view, need to do is just level it and have parity, either of two regulators or ...

Ofcom's a very sort of tough regulator for television, and I think in some circumstances that's probably quite necessary, but I think when it comes to journalism and current affairs, it's far too onerous. This isn't just my opinion; this is widely held opinion.

The penalties ...

Elsewhere in the film, yes.

Yes.

No, not to the best of my knowledge or the knowledge of anyone I've spoken to. We just generally assumed that they would start looking, but they didn't.

Did I personally ask them to investigate? No, we kind of thought it was something they might have the initiative to do themselves.

It's film parlance. When you say reviews are mixed, it generally means "not good". Yes. Alison Hastings spoke to some journalism students at City University and was apparently very disparaging about the film. Stephen Abell from the PCC wrote a letter to the -- Dublin Times, was it? Belfast Telegraph ...

The Express gave us four STARS, which I thought was very nice of them. A nice bit of -- I actually got a nice letter from them as well, thanking us for the first decent bit of publicity they'd had in a long time. But no. I missed The Sun ...

No, sorry. The upshot was -- there was three legal teams in one week who all tried unsuccessfully to order us to edit the journalists and the News of the World out of the film, and we basically said, "We'll see you in court", and they went away.

It wasn't Mr Crone, actually. It was -- I can find out who it was. It was someone who worked just beneath him. It was their in-house legal team, certainly someone working under Mr Crone, basically saying that they felt that their journalists had been libelled and they wanted to ...

The News of the World obviously got quite upset that we'd invaded their privacy and they contacted our lawyers. The in-house legal team of the News of the World contacted our lawyers.

No, no. There was absolutely no pick-up by the British press whatsoever.

Well, no one wanted to help us, I think, but that's probably because the very people we need to help -- you need to help you when you release a film were all criticised within the film. So people weren't -- all media organisations weren't going to help a ...

Yes.

But I think the source is actually important because if, for example, it was her friend or her PA who tipped off the News of the World, and they ran it based on that, that wouldn't involve a breach of the Data Protection Act. That's just someone giving ...

I don't know what the source of the Fern Britton story was. In fact, no one knows --

No. No. We sort of crafted them as -- I say "crafted" -- we created them as such, so we wanted to pick things that definitely could not qualify in the public interest. I find it hard to see how any story of a similar nature could be classed as in the ...

No, certainly not in terms of something about someone's private life.

Sorry.

No. Whether a story is funny or not is -- I don't think should have any bearing -- I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think it has any bearing in law of whether it's a defence --

Mm.

No, we didn't want to go anywhere sort of near there. We couldn't jeopardise them actually printing something, because this isn't about Sarah Harding being secretly into quantum physics. This is obviously a story about plastic surgery. So we went, I think, as far as ethically we ...

Yeah. The confidentiality -- actually, I had a look for that word. Nick Owens talked about confidentiality issues, but mainly as something to be overcome, to be sidestepped and basically something that needed to be overcome, and he didn't think there would be a problem overcoming them, and actually confidentiality ...

Please do. Sorry, to return to the point I made about still breaking the rules because she was trying to set News of the World up as a data controller. So she was still asking me to impart verbal information to her that had no public interest so they could ...

Definitely.

Yes.

Yeah. I mean, I think -- I don't know what we expected, actually, when we went to this film, when the news of this investigation was made public, but there was no comment from the Mirror Group about the behaviour of the journalists at The People or the Sunday Mirror ...

Certainly. I think this -- they all sort of cross the line to different degrees, and I'd be -- I think it's important to make that point, and I think with Owens, as he says right at the start, he has the eye and the ear of the news editor ...

No, because it was a voicemail phone. It was a 'pay as you go', so we didn't.

As is in my witness statement, she called more than once and she was very keen to run the story. I actually felt a bit sorry for her because obviously I'd just basically ceased contact and she was obviously under pressure to -- it seemed, to be under pressure to ...

Yeah -- you'll -- I don't --

Yeah.

It sounds like what journalists put in their Twitter bios, doesn't it? "All views are mine and not that of my newspaper". As I say, it's just a rare glimpse of honesty, of how journalists view their regulator. I'm not saying every single journalist believes that, but ...

Very briefly. You gave it to me just before I came in, so I haven't actually --

I think her comments on the PCC speak for themselves, really. That's why we intercut them in the way we did within the film. I think we've just got honesty, really, about how journalists view the Press Complaints Commission. Actually, right down at the bottom here, this idea ...

By hinting that it's Cheryl, by knowing the readership will think that it's Cheryl and they buy the paper from the front page. They buy the paper and they get home and it's not Cheryl, by which time they've already spent their money.

So just a ...

Sure. Well, her opening remarks:

"Obviously, it's very legally dodgy."

Which I think is what the Guardian used in its headline when it broke the story.

"I was batting around with my news editor who you spoke to before, Tom ..."

Which indicates he's sort of across this story ...

Mm-hm.

Mm-hm.

Not particularly. I think the telephone is call is in its entirety, so it's all there. She's working under the supervision of her news desk, it seems to me, so I think that in fairness to her, she was not a rogue reporter in this instance.

Yeah.

I think what he's opening the door to, as I was going to come to in a second, is this concept of harvesting. So what he's saying, I think, is to sort of give himself some kind of cover, to say, "Look, there are a new wave of ...

Mm-hm.

Not particularly. I mean, it's just we told him what we were about and he said, "Great", and put us through to the journalist.

First of all we spoke to a news editor, Tom Carling, who I understand is still news editor of The People, and he listened to our story first. This is actually in an annex which I supplied to the Inquiry. We explained to him -- I explained to him first what ...