UPDATE. Apparently the British news sources got the “cabbie” angle all wrong and Guy Kewney himself has chimed in on the matter with what may be the real story.

First let’s start with Guy Kewney. Here’s what he looks like. He’s been a fixture in British hi-tech reporting for 30 years.

He’s been featured on the BBC before (linked here).

So apparently he’s scheduled to do a BBC interview and some bonehead grabs a cab driver (by some reports) or another person named “Guy” by later reports — instead of Kewney — and nobody notices. Here’s the video feed:

related link:
Times article on the gaffe itself. Hilarious!
Another article here.
Even AFTER the fiasco the BBC didn’t get the situation correct. Watch this.

UPDATE

Now considering all the stories to date this new angle shows up in my inbox. We’ll see where this goes. It adds a new dimension.

More as this unfolds, Guy and me have a BBC source. And I guess a
Daily Mail guy is all over it….

That “Guy” – he really is a Guy, and not a cab driver, either!

by Guy J Kewney | posted on 15 May 2006

OK, reset everything you’ve heard about my appearance on the BBC: they’ve found the “taxi driver” and (as I have constantly tried to explain to everybody) he isn’t a taxi driver.

His name is Guy Goma – which goes some way to explaining why he (and the BBC receptionist) assumed that someone asking for Guy Kewney was asking for him.

And he wasn’t there to pick up a fare, because he’s not a cabbie. He’s a Business Studies graduate, from the Congo, and he was there in reception because he was applying for a high level IT job with the BBC.

Apparently the unflappable Mr Goma assumed the whole thing was some kind of initiation prank. His own speciality is data cleansing, and (my source inside the Beeb tells me) was “a little upset that nobody asked him about his data cleansing expertise.”

Once again, the Daily Mail proves itself to be hotter on this trail than anybody else, and a Mail reporter has been posing Mr Goma outside the White City headquarters of the BBC. A picture story will be in tomorrow’s edition, apparently.

The question you have to eventually ask is how did this story get so mis-reported over and over. And why does a tech writer, Kewney, have to come in and straighteni it out for the media? And he has to do it on a blog! Geez. These people are actually paid money to report news?

kudos to Chris Coulter