A FORMER BBC news editor has been given a community order for downloading and distributing indecent images of children on his computer.

Graham Day, aged 58, of Park Way, Droitwich, was ordered to attend a sex offenders programme for three years and will be under the supervision of the probation service.

The ex-BBC Radio Gloucestershire man has to sign on as a sex offender for five years and he is banned for life from working with children.

Judge Richard Rundell, who made a sexual offences prevention order, said it was futile to send Day to prison as he would not be able to receive the treatment he needed.

Day pleaded guilty at Worcester Crown Court to seven counts of making indecent images of children and four charges of distributing them.

Prosecutor Samantha Forsyth said Day was a married man with three children and at the time of the offences was working for the BBC as a news editor.

Police had searched his home and examined computer equipment. They discovered images of young children had been made between June 2010 and February this year. Other images had been distributed in 2008.

Miss Forsyth said there was a total of 808 images, 691 at the lowest level but none at the most serious level. Most of the images featured boys but there were also girls with sexual acts performed on them by adults.

When interviewed by police, Day made frank admissions and said he had fantasised chats with boys aged between 14 and 16. He mentally associated himself with boys of that age.

Belinda Ariss, mitigating, said Day's mental health had been affected by his father's death in 2007. But his family was supportive and his three children knew of the offences. He had sought the help of a psychologist and hoped to get another job in the near future.

The judge said he had been impressed by the support from Day's family and the references he had received. But the offences portrayed showed incalculable harm being done to young children, which would affect them for the rest of their lives.

Day had to live with the publicity and having to look his children in the eye with them realising what he had done.