In 2004, on a stage lit for the fifteenth birthday of the British Comedy Awards, Jonathan Ross described the ceremony as being, like all fifteen-year-olds, "drunk, unpredictable" and "probably going home with David Walliams". The audience laughed, the cameras kept rolling, and the line passed into the archive as an unremarkable piece of light entertainment. Two decades later it reappears in an hour-long documentary, and what once sounded like a throwaway gag now plays as something closer to a public confession of an open secret. The film, produced after a three-year investigation by ITV and the Guardian, was released first on YouTube and then on ITVX, reportedly after Walliams and his lawyers tried to the last to keep its findings from being aired.

Its format will be familiar to anyone who has followed similar cases: women sit before a camera and describe, in measured and sometimes disguised voices, how a famous man approached them. Some were fifteen when they met him, one was seventeen, others eighteen or nineteen, and he was generally about twice their age. They describe attention, gifts, invitations and show tickets, followed by situations they say they did not expect, did not want or felt unable to refuse. What gives the documentary its peculiar force is the juxtaposition of testimony and old television.

Alan Carr, a few years after Ross, compared Walliams's approach to women to that of "an illegal taxi driver", luring them into false security before pouncing. The reviewer watching feels, in the Guardian's phrase, a kind of mental vertigo: the culture was not blind, it was amused. That raises the harder question the film leaves hanging.