Yes I think that's probaly a major part of it Charlie but it didn't seem that he was at aware of this! It was all clearly a complete shock and "overkill" when the Flying Squad turned up. After two years waiting, the judgement suggests that he was nowhere near anything dubious, let alone criminal activity but he clearly felt obliged to keep his head down. This may explain why he was deprived of the opportunity to bequeath the collection properly. The fact that this was compensated for later [to some extent] doesn't excuse what might have very easily been a massive complete loss of archive material [resulting from a spurious prosecution] that the Media organisations couldn't be bothered with in the first place.
It is true that some people saw his public persona as perhaps a bit shifty and over-eager and he was described as a "marmite" individual on the program. That sort of anxious, eager to please presentation is also common in young people who have had a bad experience in childhood and his mother clearly had her own difficulties. I began to take him seriously when [counter-intuitively perhaps] he had a 30 minute program about vintage cinema on Radio 2, using extracts from the collection-although I thought they originated from other sources at first. This was in the 80's. I've not been able to find much about it so far but that may not be significant.
I read an article about his collecting and it was mentioned that some Video was being recorded on a semi-pro Beta machine [a C9?] and that impressed me. I always intended to record those programs but sadly, I never did
I would have liked to have met him!
Dave