Stefan Rousseau / AFP - Getty Images

In this file picture taken on March 22, 2012 British presenter Stuart Hall poses with his Officer of the British Empire (OBE) medal presented to him by Britain's Queen Elizabeth II at an investiture ceremony in Buckingham Palace.

A veteran BBC TV and radio presenter was charged with three counts of indecent assault by British police on Wednesday, the latest high-profile figure to be questioned since a sex scandal erupted at Britain's publicly funded broadcaster.

The charges will be a further embarrassment for the BBC, which was thrown into turmoil when it was revealed in October that one of its former top stars, the late Jimmy Savile, had been one of Britain's most prolific child sex offenders.

Stuart Hall, 82, best known for hosting the popular TV program "It's a Knockout" in the 1970s and 80s and who still appears on radio, was not charged with rape, police said.

"The offenses are alleged to have been committed between 1974 and 1984 and to involve three girls aged between 9 and 16 years," police said in a statement.

Hall has been released on bail and will appear before magistrates on January 7, police said.

"There is sufficient evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction," John Dilworth of the Crown Prosecution Service said in a statement.

'Ghastly mess' at BBC: Ex-chief's pay questioned, more quit amid sex scandal

The presenter still regularly appears on BBC airwaves, delivering erudite and grandiose soccer reports for which he is well-known to sports fans.

His agent declined to go into detail about the arrest and referred queries to the BBC.

"In light of the very serious nature of these charges Stuart Hall will not be working at the BBC while the police continue with their inquiries," a spokesman for the broadcaster said in a statement.

BBC scandal: Wronged ex-politician vows to sue Twitter users who spread sex claims

After revelations about Savile emerged in October, police launched an investigation into the presenter and potential accomplices. They have so far quizzed five people including the former glam rock singer Gary Glitter and comedian Freddie Starr, who both deny any wrongdoing.

Hall's arrest is not part of that investigation, but revelations about Savile have prompted a flurry of allegations to police around the country.

The BBC's much-criticized response to the Savile disclosures and suggestions it had covered up allegations against the late BBC presenter led to the resignation of its director general George Entwistle last month.

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Andrew Stuart / Associated Press

Lord Alistair McAlpine, who served as treasurer of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Party while she ruled Britain during the 1980s, was wrongly linked to a child sex abuse scandal as a result of a botched investigation by the BBC's "Newsnight" program.

LONDON -- The British child abuse scandal enveloping the country’s much-loved public broadcaster, the BBC, has descended into who said what to whom. But this being 2012, much of it was said through Twitter.

Lawyers for the former Conservative politician, Lord Alistair McAlpine, who was wrongly implicated in connection with sex abuse claims by a BBC show, have vowed to end the so-called trial by Twitter. They said they were looking at a "very long list" of users who wrongly repeated the allegations regarding Lord McAlpine with a view to taking legal action in the British courts. Simply deleting the messages would not be enough, the lawyers told The Guardian newspaper.

High-profile Tweeters are first in line -- one of them has already received a legal warning. Sally Bercow, wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons, has been told she may be sued for claims she made on her social media account. Her first Twitter response to the warning was: "*gulps*". Then "I guess I’d better get some legal advice then. Still maintain was not a libelous tweet – just foolish."

Chris Jackson / Getty Images, file

House of Commons Speaker John Bercow with his wife Sally arrive at Prince William's wedding at London's Westminster Abbey on April 29, 2011.

Sweeping child abuse scandal shakes BBC and other British institutions

If the legal action goes ahead it could be one of the first examples of celebrities sued for claims they have made on Twitter. Some well-known users now have followings greater than the readership of many newspapers.

Prominent writer Geroge Monbiot went so far as to offer an "abject apology" for "tweets which hinted" at McAlpine's involvement in child abuse.

"I helped to stoke an atmosphere of febrile innuendo around an innocent man, and I am desperately sorry for the harm I have done him," he said on his website. "I apologize abjectly and unreservedly to Lord McAlpine."

The BBC has already agreed to pay McAlpine $295,000 for its incorrect broadcast about him. Newsnight, the show on which the claims were made has an audience of 700,000. Sally Bercow’s Twitter account has a following of almost 60,000.

And who said what inside the BBC has been another continuing question. Before the most recent controversy about wrongly identifying Lord McAlpine, the first scandal surrounded the BBC’s failure to identify a child abuser within its own ranks.

Jimmy Savile was a hugely popular BBC host and radio DJ. A year ago a BBC investigation into him was shelved. Mark Thompson, who was director-general and editor-in-chief of the BBC at that time, this week took over as the New York Times' chief executive. In October he said: “During my time as director-general of the BBC, I never heard any allegations or received any complaints about Jimmy Savile.” 

Yet Friday, the New York Times itself reported that in September Thompson threatened to sue the London Times over an article it was proposing to write connecting him to the spiking of the Savile story.

'A steep fall' for BBC as child sex abuse scandal rocks the UK

The newspaper quoted the letter from Thompson’s lawyers in September as referring to, “the behavior of the late television and radio presenter, specifically that he took advantage of a series of young women. Some of the alleged assaults took place on BBC premises.”  

One former television executive, Stuart Purvis, now a professor of television journalism at London’s City University, said in his blog the controversy could tarnish the reputation of Thompson and his new employer:

“The bottom line would appear to be that the man who now runs one of the world’s great newspapers did , earlier this year in his BBC role, put his name to a threat of legal action against one of the world’s other great newspapers after they put to him an allegation about Savile’s behaviour at the BBC that now seems to be accepted as fact.”

NBC News contacted Thompson and his spokesman but did not receive a response.

But in a statement to Purvis this week,Thompson's representative said the former BBC chief:

“Verbally agreed to the tactic of sending a legal letter to the paper, but was not involved in its drafting, nor was he aware of the detail beyond the central and false allegation put to the BBC that he had influenced the decision to abandon Newsnight’s investigation into Jimmy Savile.”

Rob Wilson, a member of Parliament who has followed the case closely, said Thompson’s role in the affair gets stranger and stranger.

BBC boss Entwistle quits amid turmoil over network's child sex abuse scandal

"I would be concerned if I were in New York. Mr. Thompson also presided over an office that for some reason failed to inform him on several occasions of serious allegations concerning Savile and, by extension, the BBC,” he told NBC News. "Now it appears legal threats were issued using his name against a newspaper over claims that he hadn't bothered to read, let alone investigate, but which turned out to be true."

Carl Court / AFP - Getty Images, file

Mark Thompson served as director-general of the BBC before joining the New York Times.

This week the New York Times' public editor Margaret Sullivan praised her newspaper's robust coverage of its new chief executive, Thompson.

The New York Times had “pulled no punches,” Sullivan wrote, but had found “nothing close to a smoking gun.”

She did acknowledge, however, how sensitive the issue was.

“What happens in London reverberates in New York," she said. "And the chaos at the BBC -- in which many of the people Mr. Thompson has supervised stepped aside as recently as this past weekend — feels uncomfortably close to home.”

Follow NBC News' Keir Simmons on Twitter.

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The director general of the British Broadcasting Corporation, George Entwistle, resigned Saturday after only 54 days in the role -  the latest to be caught in the wake of a child sex-abuse scandal that has thrown the 90-year-old publicly funded behemoth and other U.K. institutions into deepening turmoil.

The scandal, which began with allegations against a single former BBC employee, has since engulfed hospitals, children’s homes, even the police.

It also poses questions for Mark Thompson, Entwistle's immediate predecessor, who on Monday becomes chief executive of The New York Times.

For an entire week, one of the BBC's key news shows suggested a leading Conservative party politician, who wasn’t named, had been involved in the rape of a young boy in Wales decades ago. The man accused denied it; the victim himself now says it was a case of mistaken identity.

Many networks ran interviews with the victim -- one even asked whether a pedophile network had been protected by a masonic conspiracy. Did a judge who led an early inquiry into the abuse at a North Wales children’s home deliberately hide the names of famous or influential abusers?

Max Nash / AP

The BBC Director General, George Entwistle, announces his resignation from the BBC outside New Broadcasting House in central London, Saturday Nov. 10.

In front of 1 million television viewers, a morning TV host handed a list of alleged pedophiles to the British Prime Minister David Cameron live on air. That list, allegedly including the names of other senior politicians, was compiled based on unsubstantiated Internet rumors. 

The revelation that all of this was a mistake is once again causing Britain's media organizations to question their own values, only months after news of newspaper phone-hacking. It has filled Britain with outrage, astonishment and self-doubt. 

The scandal had begun with separate claims that BBC - one of the most respected brands in journalism worldwide - had failed to expose the late BBC children's television personality and fundraiser, Jimmy Savile, as a pedophile even though it had interviewed several victims who made allegations against the star. 

It’s now clear those allegations are well founded. Yet the same BBC program, 'Newsnight', that shelved the original and apparently accurate Savile story was the first to broadcast the latest false allegations. 

'Newsnight' has apologized on air for its mistake, another inquiry has been launched, and the program has temporarily suspended all its investigatory work. On Saturday, Entwistle, who took his post in September, resigned in response to the growing scandal after a humiliating interview on the BBC’s own flagship radio news program, 'Today'. The BBC is in crisis.

BBC boss Entwistle quits amid turmoil over network's child sex abuse scandal

On Sunday, the head of the BBC's governing body - former Thatcher-era government minister Lord Patten - admitted the issue of public trust in BBC journalism was paramount, and said a "thorough, radical, structural overhaul" of the organization was now necessary.

Savile had been a British institution, presenting TV shows during the 1970s and '80s that attracted huge audiences. Now police investigators suspect that he was abusing hundreds of children, even on BBC property.

One man described how, at the age of 9, he went to be part of the audience for the Savile show "Jim’ll Fix It." He says Savile abused him in a dressing room.

“He put his hand on my knee and started touching me,” the man said in an interview.  “And grabbed my hand and forced it on top of his trousers. I was absolutely petrified.”

The allegations became public only weeks after the departure of Entwistle's predecessor, Mark Thompson, who starts his job as NYT chief executive on Monday.

In a statement last month, quoted by The New York Times, Thompson said, “During my time as director general of the BBC, I never heard any allegations or received any complaints about Jimmy Savile.”

Lewis Whyld / AP

Jimmy Savile is shown in a March 2008 file photo.

But NBC News has spoken to one of the journalists who broke the Savile story. He says he called Thompson’s office in May and outlined the allegations to his personal assistant.

“I absolutely remember saying it,” says Miles Goslett. “I always felt it extraordinary that no senior people in the BBC including Mark Thompson as director general addressed this issue.”

When asked about Goslett’s allegations, the BBC sent NBC News a prepared statement regarding Thompson’s knowledge of the affair:

“Mark Thompson has repeatedly made clear he had no personal knowledge of the allegations. While Ms. Cecil recalls Mr Goslett telephoning her to complain about a Freedom of Information request she does not recall that he mentioned the nature of the allegations against Savile." (Click here for the BBC’s full statements on the affair )

Jessica Cecil is the head of the director general's office.

This week NBC News approached Thompson for an interview, after a lecture he gave at Oxford University. Thompson declined, saying he wanted to wait for the outcome of that BBC inquiry.

But whatever its conclusions, the implications for the BBC are already becoming clear. Trust in the institution had dropped from 62 percent in 2009 to 47 percent last week, according to a poll conducted by one of the BBC’s own radio stations.

It is not alone. This scandal has rocked people’s faith in many of Britain’s institutions and left a country questioning itself and its elite.

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