'It's the last chance for Panorama'

The current affairs flagship's leading reporter talks to James Silver about being accused of Islamophobia, and how the show must avoid gimmicky presentation if it is to survive the pressure of its new peak-time slot

"A notorious pro-Israeli Islamophobe", "desperate to discredit Muslims", "a track record for displaying unfairness and twisting the truth". Panorama's leading reporter, John Ware, is not quite public enemy number one for many British Muslims - that is an accolade no doubt held by Bush or Blair - but postings such as these on the Muslim Public Affairs Committee website show he comes a close second. His latest film, Faith, Hate and Charity, which aired last month, investigated the Muslim charity Interpal, provoking the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) to call him "an agenda-driven pro-Israel polemicist". It also inspired one activist to claim that Ware was, in fact, a "Mossad hireling", on the Israeli government's payroll rather than the BBC's.

Sipping a whisky in his suburban garden strewn with children's toys, on the outskirts of north London, the somewhat bumbling but sharp-as-tacks Ware, 58, would make an improbable secret-service agent. He says he is one of five journalists - the others are Martin Bright, the political editor of the New Statesman, Melanie Phillips of the Daily Mail, the Observer's Nick Cohen and the Times writer-turned-Tory MP, Michael Gove - who have been labelled by the MCB as "being in the vanguard of Islamophobia in this country". "We don't meet up like witches to discuss it," jokes Ware. "We've all come to this view independently that - potentially - politics and Islam is an incendiary mix."

He first attracted the wrath of Muslim groups after his Panorama film last year accused the Muslim Council of Britain of being in "a state of denial" about the scale of Islamic extremism in the UK. The MCB hit back by accusing the BBC of pro-Israel bias and dismissing the programme as "deeply unfair" and "a witch hunt". If Ware, whose citation when he won the James Cameron Prize in 2004 praised his "moral vision and professional integrity", is perturbed by the onslaught he has faced, he certainly does not show it. "This is just rhetoric and quite a lot of it is abusive rhetoric," he says of his detractors. "They are aggressive and too rarely do they engage on the facts. In our programme last year, we manifestly did not accuse the MCB of being extremist. I don't think the MCB are extremist. I know that their leadership is appalled by 7/7. What we said was that they didn't completely 'get' the origins and the roots of extremism and that some of their own affiliates were kind of nursery slopes for extremism. And for them to suggest that extremism lives in a vacuum and doesn't have some sort of connection with teaching and history is absurd."

But critics of that Panorama special say that by devoting his interview with then-MCB secretary general, Sir Iqbal Sacranie, almost entirely to the Israel-Palestine conflict, Ware revealed bias. "The reason I focused on Israel in last year's film and this time is because I think the Israel-Palestine conflict presents the toughest test, in a way, for all the high-minded principles, including tolerance and peace, which political Islam claims to have," he responds. "I appreciate the Middle East conflict has a dynamic of its own, but there were people on the MCB who felt it was justifiable to support the targeting of civilians in Israel on theological grounds but not in London. I think those two positions must be incompatible, I really do."

Is he, as is claimed, a Zionist? "No ... I'm not an anything 'ist'. I'm really not someone with any ideological baggage. I brought all the evidence into the public domain about how [former leader of Westminster council] Dame Shirley Porter was politically corrupt and how she was using, as it then was, rate-payers' money for her own political ends. I made two programmes on her. One in 1989 and one in 1994 and I went nearly to the wall to get the second one on. Now, if I was a Zionist in the marrow of my bones, would I really have gone for someone like Shirley Porter who has given vast amounts of money to Israel?"

Nor, insists Ware, is he Islamophobic. "Islamophobic meaning an irrational fear of Muslims? Absolutely not. I think there's a huge amount Islam can teach us about our obsession with material goods and wealth. If we were a lot more spiritual we would probably be better off. But I don't think it's irrational to be afraid when standing, as I was, in Trafalgar Square in February of this year, in the wake of the [Danish] cartoons, at a rally which was called to demonstrate the great moderate mainstream of Islam, which manifestly exists in this country, when [Muslim Association of Britain spokesman] Azzam Tamimi got up on the stand and said ..." Ware pauses. He wants to quote Tamimi accurately, so excuses himself to go and rifle in his office.

He returns a few minutes later with the words scrawled on a Post-it. "Tamimi said: 'We are for peace if you give us peace. But if you insist on stepping on us, if you insist on humiliating us, it's not peace you'll get. Let it be understood.' His voice was screeching at this point. 'Don't mess with our prophet, we are one fifth of the population of the planet.' Now, if that wasn't a threat ... I'm in no doubt that in saying this I will be accused of being Islamophobic, but he's a brilliant speaker and wound the crowd up into a frenzy. A chill ran down my spine when he said that."

Ware - whose partner is the BBC executive, Wendy Robbins, with whom he has three young children - joined the Panorama team in 1986, and by that time, he had been a journalist for 15 years. After spells in local newspapers and as Ireland correspondent on the Sun, he moved into TV on Granada's World in Action. His landmark films for Panorama include exposing, in 1984, two Scotland Yard flying squad officers in the act of setting up an armed robbery, which led to their trial at the Old Bailey, and the award-winning Who Bombed Omagh? in 2000.

Ware regards last month's announcement that Panorama would return to a weeknight peaktime, though shortened, slot - Mondays at 8.30pm from January next year - as a cause for guarded optimism rather than celebratory cartwheels. "It is, I think, the last chance for Panorama, but I don't want to imply by that it's on its uppers, because it isn't," he says. "By last chance, I mean it's had a lot of reconfigurations both in terms of its duration, its slot and the sort of stories it's going to cover and if that's transmitted one thing to people it's a sense of insecurity. We don't quite know who we are, where we are and where we are going."

Although Ware characterises Panorama as "a very happy ship" under previous editor Mike Robinson, there was also "a bit of an obsession [within the current affairs department] that we sort of sulked in the corner, not wanting to be a team player". Ware thinks that perception was unfair. "By and large, the programme felt distanced from the rest of the department rather than the other way round because so often what we got was complaints, grousing and whingeing. We were sometimes accused of being elitist. The signals which were being transmitted from the controllers down were very demoralising. I'm not suggesting that the criticisms were all without merit, but the combination was very destabilising."

Does Ware, who has been courted by Channel 4, consider BBC1 controller Peter Fincham to be a fan of the programme? His reply picks through the minefield carefully. "I'd like to think Peter Fincham is interested in trying to translate ideas into television. He's interested principally, though not exclusively, in what I call rock and roll narrative. I, too, like rock and roll narrative, but I also think it's possible to explore ideas and ideologies.

"For example, political Islam needs to be explored robustly on BBC1, it should not be tucked away late at night on BBC2. I wouldn't be confident that Peter Fincham would agree with that. I think he has a view that BBC1 should be an uplifting experience and shouldn't come out of dark corners. The overwhelming impression we've had is that that channel is about entertainment and that the benchmark for current affairs would be undercover stuff."

Ware has previously argued that "there is more to current affairs than going undercover" and that secret filming can be gimmicky and overwhelm the journalistic content. Now, he expands on that: "It's not very challenging to strap on a camera and go and work in a bloody hospital and tell people how dirty it is. That's an important issue, but infinitely more important and memorable journalism than that has been done by reporters with a new take on things.

"The new slot for Panorama is a tremendous achievement, but we don't know what kind of format it's going to have and whether the emphasis is going to be on stunty presentation. I truly hope it isn't. Whenever we do go a bit stunty, when we use too much music or do too many fast cuts or try desperately, almost pathetically, to be too funky, rather like Tony Blair dropping his aitches eating fish and chips in Durham, it just doesn't work, people can smell it."

He dissolves into laughter, his eyes dancing mischievously. "I don't want to sound like some sort of dinosaur, but we funk up, as it were, at our peril."