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A new documentary about Michael Barrymore claims that the presenter’s personal assistant removed evidence from the scene of Stuart Lubbock ’s death.
Lubbock was found dead in the swimming pool of Barrymore’s home in Essex in March 2001, an incident that the TV star has insisted he had nothing to do with.
In the new Channel 4 special, titled Barrymore: The Pool in the Body , Essex Police’s Detective Chief Inspector Stephen Jennings says he believes the presenter’s PA, Michael Browne, swiped a pool thermometer that is believed to have caused internal anal injuries, which an autopsy found Lubbock had suffered around the time of his death.
The object had earlier been photographed next to the scene of the crime.
“Browne was wrongfully allowed back into the scene where he was seen to be tidying up some items after we’d managed to photograph the scene,” he says in the documentary. “Those items have gone missing...”
Show all 20 1 /20The best UK TV shows of every year this century The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2000: Big Brother After endless tawdry seasons dominated by kitchen-sink bustups and diary-room rants, it’s easy to forget how revolutionary Big Brother was when it arrived at the dawn of the new century. Adapted by Netherlands production company Endemol from its already notorious Dutch hit, Big Brother was a grand social experiment repurposed for prime time. Random individuals were plucked from obscurity and forced to share a glorified Portakabin for a month. Overnight, heroes and villains were created. And, when Celebrity Big Brother came along in 2001 (Jack Dee the first winner), the vaguely famous jumped at the opportunity to humiliate themselves too. After it moved to Channel 5 in 2011, the law of diminishing returns kicked in and it was announced that this year’s Big Brother was to be the last, leaving us with memories good, bad, hilarious and disturbing.
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The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2001: The Office Alan Partridge had arguably beaten Ricky Gervais to the punch in exploring the tragicomedy of life as a middle-aged man labouring under delusions of cool. But as World’s Hippest Boss David Brent, Gervais (with co-writer Stephen Merchant) perfected the art of making us cringe and laugh in the same heartbeat. Using the fly-on-the-wall documentary style of the period, The Office was also the arguably the first workplace sitcom to capture the soul-shrivelling tedium of sitting at a desk all day, nothing but your fag break to look forward to. And there was a genuinely affecting romantic arc, as besotted colleagues Tim (Martin Freeman) and Dawn (Lucy Davis) overcome impossible odds – ie Dawn’s idiot fiancé – to be together.
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The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2002: Top Gear It would end in a punch-up over a cold-meat supper, but when Jeremy Clarkson and producer Andy Wilman rebooted the BBC’s creaky motoring show as a lad mag in TV form, they were doing something genuinely revolutionary. Top Gear was TV for Blokes that wasn’t in the least apologetic about it. Cyclists were jeered at, expensive cars driven at speed, single-entendres dropped like breadcrumbs at a pigeon convention. Top Gear quickly became BBC’s global cash-cow. The audience spanned continents and, at its peak, the franchise was worth an estimated £50m annually to the corporation. Clarkson and co-presenters Richard Hammond and James May left under a cloud when Clarkson lamped one of his crew in 2015. Top Gear has since struggled to replace the dynamic trio. Cheeky duo Freddie Flintoff and Paddy McGuinness were recently unveiled as the latest strapping in for a test drive. We wish them well – perhaps in vain.
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The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2003: Peep Show Step aside David Brent. If The Office made us glance away in embarrassment, David Mitchell and Robert Webb’s two-hander had audiences doubled over wincing. With the laconic comedians playing housemates and straight men to one another, Peep Show was embarrassment comedy at its finest and starkest – a buddy movie as scripted by Samuel Beckett.
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The best UK TV shows of every year this century The X Factor (2004) We’ve long since stopped caring but there was a time The X Factor loomed large in the national conversation. At its peak, the talent show ran from the sublime to the ridiculous – or, to put it another way, from One Direction to Jedward. It minted genuine stars – the aforementioned 1D – and gave us a lifetime supply of sob stories. The greatest TV villain of the 2000s, moreover, was early-period Simon Cowell, who, merely by frowning, could crush the dreams of a 15-year-old ingenue.
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The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2005: The Apprentice Where the original New York-set Apprentice featured a pre-Apocalypse Donald Trump and legions of shiny-toothed Americans, the British version was something else entirely. With contestants’ patter drifting between conventional English and the glossary of self-help business manual, The Apprentice interwove comedy and drama like no other reality show. Whether the “candidates” were trying to buy a bucket of eels for a fiver off a recalcitrant fishmonger or shrinking before Alan Sugar’s stubby finger of doom, The Apprentice was – and largely remains – consistently amusing. Here was a reality show that reminded us nothing is quite so ridiculous as an ordinary person shoved unprepared before the cameras.
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The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2006: Life on Mars It was always widely understood the Seventies were rubbish – a blur of Ford Capris, smoke-filled rooms and sexist “banter”. But Life on Mars, with John Simm as a Manchester policeman sent (or so it seemed) 30 years back in time, brought the era of a three-day week and Bovril for supper grippingly to life. It also gave us one of the great TV antiheroes in detective Gene Hunt (Philip Glenister).
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The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2007: Skins “Yoof” drama finally exorcised the ghost of Grange Hill. Chronicling the ups and downs of teenage friends in Bristol, Skins unflinchingly unpacked issues such as substance abuse, sexual identity, bullying and mental illness. By daring to show adolescence as it was lived – rather than as how adults wished to remember it – father-and-son writers Bryan Elsey and Jamie Brittain had sparked a low-key revolution. Skins also served as a star factory, with Nicholas Hoult and Dev Patel among its cast.
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The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2008: The Inbetweeners As if to countercheck Skins’ gritty portrayal of teendom, Damon Beesley and Iain Morris’s The Inbetweeners brought a charming bawdiness to its portrayal of pubescent derring-do. Will, Simon, Neil and Jay were virginal young men at a hard-knocks comprehensive, their lives an obstacle course of cruel teachers, aloof girls and oblivious parents. The Inbetweeners would never win awards for subtly, but for all its crudeness, the show’s heart was always in the right place, and in the end it was its sweetness that made it beloved.
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The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2009: Red Riding Future Spider-Man Andrew Garfield became enmeshed in a web of murder and secrets in darkest Seventies Yorkshire in this riveting adaptation of David Peace’s Red Riding quartet of novels. As with the source material, the feature-length miniseries portrayed Yorkshire’s West Riding as a baroque backwater, sustained by rumour and lies. And the paedophile plot at the heart of the story was horrifically fleshed out as we left behind Garfield’s cub reporter Eddie Dunford in 1974 and moved on to the Eighties. Here, Paddy Considine and Mark Addy, skirting the real-life story of the Yorkshire Ripper, played outsiders stumbling upon a skin-crawling conspiracy.
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The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2010: Sherlock It was elementary the Benedict Cumberbatch-Martin Freeman caper would make our shortlist. Despite the present-day setting, Cumberbatch’s Sherlock was almost definitive – his Baker Street detective at once aloof, amused (and amusing) and also faintly ridiculous. Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatiss sent Holmes and Watson on ever more convoluted adventures and in the end even the two stars would appear to be a bit fed up with the fandango. But early on, and with Conan Doyle’s source material to work from, Sherlock was sublime.
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The best UK TV shows of every year this century 2012: Line of Duty Jed Mercurio’s first proper blockbuster gave us cops investigating cops within the Met’s anti-corruption unit. Martin Compston’s DS Steve Arnott, Vicky McClure’s DC Kate Fleming and Adrian Dunbar’s Superintendent Ted Hastings were our entry into a world of lies, betrayal and paranoia. Lennie James, Keeley Hawes and Thandie Newton were among those playing friends and foe (occasionally both at once) across four absorbing series (with a fifth due in 2019).
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He continued: “A lot of the witnesses were saying that they thought it was a drowning. We probably believed it at that point.”
Coroner Michael Heath adds: “An object like this or even this object could have produced the injuries I identified on Stuart’s anus if this had been passed into the anal canal a number of times.”
Barrymore claimed he found Lubbock’s body at a party he was holding and called out for others to help retrieve his body. Ahead of the documentary, Lubbock's father Terry has urged Barrymore to "come clean" about the events that led to his son's death.
He plays no part in the documentary, but a representative has been contacted for comment.
Barrymore: The Body in the Pool will be broadcast on Thursday 6 February at 9pm on Channel 4.
