I have been irritated today by the continued ease with which inaccurate articles appear on the internet and then become deemed to be actual fact. This week for example an article appeared on the august and mighty BBC website written about BBC Records and how wacky it was in the day. This was a company I used to work for so I happen to know the truth.

The two Roy Tempests had been conflated and the wrong one (who was a bit of a rogue) placed firmly at the BBC and listed his chequered career and the effect he had on BBC Records. Now it has spread from the BBC website and onto Wikipedia so it must be true? If uncorrected it will doubtless appear for years to come without any correction, as the ‘truth’. We are definitely all going to hell in a handcart as far as checking facts on the internet are concerned.

You can see our clip below about the rogue one who was an bookings agent and it is a funny story, well worth watching, but he is not our BBC Records man. We did not manage to interview the real BBC Roy Tempest as he sadly died of a brain haemorrhage far too young and is not here to defend his honour.

This one of the reasons why the RockHistory interviews are so important. The truth and nothing but the truth – even though some of the participants memories are starting to fail and get a bit hazy. But cut and paste journalism is even more rife now and it just shows you cannot believe everything you read online these days, even from the BBC. So who can we believe?

So in the interests of accuracy I can categorically state that the Roy Tempest who was General Manager of BBC Records and Tapes came to the job from Phillips/Phonogram where he had been amongst other jobs, International Export Manger before with an excellent 15 years service for them. In all fairness the BBC have now updated the article after I pointed out the error, but if I had not you would probably have taken it for fact.

So two completely different people, doing different jobs but happening to share the same name.

If you still want to read the article with its now corrected errors then try this link before it goes:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/music/articles/0d86745c-fa0c-4150-af0d-d6ea9ab85f31