A producer at the BBC proposed running an investigation into child abuse carried out by Jimmy Savile hours after the presenter's death, it has been revealed.
An email, released among thousands of pages of evidence from a report into the corporation's handling of the Savile affair, said that producer Meirion Jones suggested the show soon after it was known the former DJ had died.
Mr Jones - who was involved in the axed Newsnight investigation that prompted the Pollard inquiry - proposed the idea in an email headed "Jimmy Savile - paedophile".
He told BBC news bosses that some of the girls who had been molested by Savile were ready to talk about their experiences.
The email is among hundreds of documents and transcripts of interviews with senior figures that have now been released by the BBC.
The review led by Nick Pollard, former Head of Sky News, came in the wake of the fallout from Newsnight's decision to shelve an investigation into whether Savile was a paedophile.
Sky News' Media Correspondent Niall Paterson says the material from the report is in a format that makes it very difficult to review quickly.
Paxman: Savile was 'absurd' figure He said it has been scanned and placed online by the BBC in a way that does not allow it to be electronically searched - meaning anyone wishing to locate particular passages must pore through the entire report.
Many of the pages feature sections that have been redacted to remove passages that lawyers feel could be libellous.
It has emerged that the Savile piece would have been shown on December 7, 2011 but Newsnight editor Peter Rippon decided the focus of the story should be changed to look at the Crown Prosecution Service's involvement.
Meirion Jones warned just days before the planned broadcast that it should go ahead because otherwise the BBC would be accused of a "cover-up" and a scandal could blow up.
He wrote: "I think if we go ahead with TX (transmission) next week there will be minor embarrassment to the BBC.
"If we cancel or delay till after Christmas there is a risk of another BBC scandal on the scale of the Queen or Jonathan Ross and similar damage to our core value of trust."
He urged the broadcast to go ahead because he said it would come out eventually, adding: "We know News International are all over this story."
Among others whose comments have been published is Jeremy Paxman. Eight out the 76 pages of what he told Mr Pollard have been blacked out.
Mr Paxman told the inquiry it was common gossip at the BBC that Savile liked young girls.
He told the inquiry: "It was ... common gossip that Jimmy Savile liked ... young ... girls... But I had no evidence of it, and I never saw anything that made me take it more seriously than it being common gossip."
The Newsnight presenter questioned how Savile had been allowed to rise to prominence within the BBC, referring to him as "this absurd and malign figure".
He said: "Suddenly pirate radio comes along and all these people ... suddenly have to deal with an influx ... of people from a very, very different culture and they never got control of them and I'm not sure even now they have."
'Flawed': Peter Rippon comes in for criticism in the report Mark Thompson, who was Director General at the time of Savile's death and when the Newsnight piece was shelved, told the inquiry he knew of the investigation but had only been made aware of it at a party by a colleague.
He said: "The phrase that stuck in my mind is, 'You must be worried about the Newsnight investigation into Jimmy Savile'."
Mr Thompson said he did not regard Savile as "a kind of BBC person particularly" and said he would have been more worried if the investigation had been into a current member of staff.
Another of those interviewed, former Director General George Entwistle, told the inquiry the BBC had self-censored hundreds of comments placed by members of the public on a corporation tribute website to Savile.
The comments, which included one person who wrote "One of my best friends in 1972 was molested by this creep Savile. He was never the same again. Killed himself in 1985. How's About That Then?", were stopped from being published by a team of moderators.
The Director of News at the time, Helen Boaden, said she was not aware of the rumours that Savile was a paedophile.
She said: "When (Peter Rippon) first told me about the story, which was through an accidental meeting, I did actually get... hold of the wrong end of the stick because he said, 'We're doing this investigation which might be embarrassing for the BBC'.
"When I asked him what it was, he said, 'Jimmy Savile and teenage girls'. And since this, I think, was about three weeks after Jimmy Savile had died I thought it was one of those slightly tabloid-esque stories involving groupies... You often see them in the press when somebody has died.
"And I said, 'That doesn't sound like core Newsnight territory', but Peter went on to suggest that it was a very different story from that... It was about sexual abuse of teenage girls. So the taste issue for me wasn't critical."
But she said she then spoke to the Deputy Director of News Steve Mitchell who gave her a different impression.
She told Nick Pollard: "I took the strong impression from my conversation with Steve that actually this (Savile abuse story) was smoke without fire largely.
Ms Boaden said she was also concerned over the Savile story because... "I had just had a very painful experience with Primark... where we lost a very serious complaint. Essentially, Panorama put something on air which we couldn't demonstrate was true."
The Pollard Review - which cost the corporation about £2m - concluded that the investigation was abandoned because of a "flawed" decision by the show's then editor, Peter Rippon.
Mr Rippon told Mr Pollard how he felt about making the decision.
He said: "It was a fine judgement ... particularly because you are conscious of the kind of obligation and duty of care to the women that they are doing, that it makes it quite a big judgement to make."
The latest evidence is likely to place further criticism on the corporation for an apparent reluctance to hold to account executives whose actions brought about the crisis.
BBC chairman Lord Patten said: "These documents paint a very unhappy picture, but the BBC needs to be open - more open than others would be - in confronting the facts that lie behind Nick Pollard's report.
"A limited amount of text has been blacked out for legal reasons, but no one could say that the effect has been to sanitise this material, which again puts a spotlight on some of our failings. We need to acknowledge these shortcomings and learn from them."
Meanwhile, Scarborough Council has said it is likely that Savile will be formally stripped of his freedom of the borough title.
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