There are still 27 people left in the British Isles – at the time of writing – who are unaware of the name of the BBC presenter who allegedly paid a teenager lots of money to look at pictures of their bottom and so on. Some of them are on the remote windswept island of Foula, I believe. The rest are members of the chap’s family.

I quite envy those who have not yet been told via that conduit for concentrated human misery, social media. There was a rather wonderful couple of days when the name was unknown and we had to guess, which was done, universally, with a sort of untrammelled, lascivious glee. ‘Please let it be…’ formed the preamble to every stab in the dark. I totted up the names of the (troubled? Vulnerable? Disgraced? Vile? Pick your favourite red-top epithet) presenters other people wanted it to be and while Rylan Clark and Graham Norton got the nod many times, Gary Lineker was way out in front. It never seemed likely to me, even before Lineker issued a very swift denial – much as did Clark. Poor old Jeremy Vine and the blameless Nicky Campbell also saw their names in the frame and raged about the ‘sewage’ emanating from social media. Well, sure, so what’s new? Social media is the rest of us and sewage is, unfortunately, what we do. Such was the antipathy to many of these names that I suspect even when the curtain is finally lifted, those who have had their hopes dashed will continue to believe that their own personal bête noire did the same sort of thing too and probably worse and it almost certainly involved goats as well.

It all leaves the BBC looking somewhat troubled. When I worked there I very occasionally solicited photographs of my colleagues’ arses – the ‘Thought for the Day’ presenters, the late Marmaduke Hussey – but only rarely was I afforded satisfaction. Perhaps a different ethos held sway at the corporation in those days, a greater sense of propriety.

There is the age-old question to be asked, mind: is there something in the lucrative accidie of television presenting – its mindlessness, its specious gravity and the bestowal of fame – that makes such a comparatively large proportion of its practitioners display weird sexual peccadilloes and perversions? Or is it simply the case that we know about these incidents because the people involved are famous – and in truth the same proportion of unanointed ordinary folks are also perpetually trawling Only Fans, craving a glimpse of some teenage chav bumhole. An eternal mystery. I cleave towards the first suggestion, that the weirdness of television is somehow implicated in this sexual dysphoria. But that’s maybe just because I don’t want to contemplate the idea that half the country is up to the same sort of thing. Your postman, or greengrocer, or insurance loss adjuster. All recipients of youthful anuses flying, like a flock of pinkish, bifurcated geese, through cyberspace.

You have the advantage over me – the advantage of time – in knowing how this imbroglio plays out. From where I’m sitting it seems as if the BBC has already gone into its habitual self-destruct mode. The point of the Sun’s original story was not that the presenter had done anything illegal, or even that he had done something unseemly – these days we are conjoined not to judge but instead to accept that all forms of behaviour, except racism or misgendering someone, add to the rich tapestry of life – but that the parents of the youngster had complained almost two months ago to the BBC about their suspicions and nothing whatsoever was done about it.

Regardless, then, of what to me seems to me to be an infraction of public morality, it is a question yet again about the BBC, terrified out of its wits, becoming defensive and withholding the truth from both the complainants and the general public.

It seems that quite a few BBC employees are aggrieved at the way in which the corporation has behaved, not least in its attempts to protect its star. We are told, too, that the director-general, Tim Davie, only learned of this issue comparatively recently and that the police have now been informed twice about the matter.

The problem, then, is that the BBC complaints procedure even now – after Jimmy Savile – is not designed to discover the truth and adjudicate appropriately, but to dissemble and fob off the general public as far as is humanly possible until one day, a long way down the line, when it really hits the fan, at which point the director-general resigns or something similar. In other words, it is not a genuine complaints procedure: it is not designed to give the licence-payer the satisfaction of knowing that his or her complaint has been taken seriously.

I know this from good experience, after once being subjected to a tirade of politically motivated abuse on Newsnight from its then presenter Emily Maitlis. Many people complained – and were told by the BBC to get stuffed. It was only through the decency and diligence of a very senior BBC exec that eventually the complaints were properly considered and it was decided that the interview did indeed suggest to viewers that Emily might be a bit biased. Not that anything was actually done after this finding, mind – the programme was ticked off a bit but it did not remotely change its approach to interviewing people with whom Emily dis-agreed politically. They still got dog’s abuse.

In the latest case it would seem that the BBC battened down the hatches and simply hoped to God that the story would go away. That the complaints unit did not tell the director-general that one of the corporation’s stars faced these allegations suggests to me a stupidity bordering on the criminal. And, of course, that despite all those promises and a sacked DG, nothing, since Savile, has actually changed at the BBC.