HEADING FOR A SKID, MARK?

No, the irony will never escape me, but I do have to admit I owe Mark Williams-Thomas a great deal. Deprived of ITV’s top investigative reporter rising without a trace in 2012, I certainly wouldn’t be writing this and you wouldn’t be reading it. Thanks to the tireless efforts of the fearless ‘former police detective’ and ‘child protection expert’ in alerting the nation to the scourge of celebrity paedos hiding in plain sight, I have been able to acquire an audience for my ramblings both in this medium and another. In fact, it was the other that enabled MWT to facilitate my first big break; and for that I will always be grateful to my generation’s Roger Cook.

The ‘Exposure’ exposé on Jimmy Savile that aired on October 3 2012 was the career-launching platform MWT had desperately been looking for, following occasional work for ‘Newsnight’ in a similar vein. It also provided me with something of a platform too. At that point, I’d been uploading videos to YouTube for a good couple of years and had slowly built a small cult following for my redubs, remakes and remodels of largely vintage TV. After watching MWT’s sensationalistic hatchet-job on a dead man who was admittedly as loathed as he was loved in his lifetime, my scepticism was superseded by a light-bulb moment. Here was a chance to combine and contrast the old world with the new one. And so Jimmy Savile became Great Uncle Bulgaria.

My first ‘Exposure’ spoof appeared within 48 hours of its source material being screened and went down well with my regular subscribers as well as helping to pick up a few more along the way. It was fairly short and quite crude – in terms of technical quality; the crudeness of the humour was a given – and I would probably have left it at that had not MWT used his newfound fame to kick-start a bandwagon he was determined to be in the driving seat of. Whilst shocking examples of the real thing were taking place at that very moment (albeit under the radar in faraway northern towns), the media’s moral crusader convinced the nation that it had actually all happened in the 1970s and 80s; the rich, the famous and the powerful had been the perpetrators, and their wicked deeds had been securely shielded from the masses by top-level cover-ups, conspiracies and secret societies until MWT had the guts to shine a light on the clandestine network of shame.

The insidious instigation of Operation Yewtree, unleashing the Cromwellian storm-troopers of the police and their allies in the legal profession, spearheaded a Hopkins-esque witch-hunt in which safely unfashionable old celebrities were rounded-up one-by-one, usually thanks to the exhausting efforts of MWT. Yes, it was boom-time for ambulance-chasing law firms, false-memory therapists, and yours truly. By placing The Wombles at the centre of my parallel universe Operation It Could Be Youtree, I was able to expand the roll-call of the guilty (till proven innocent) by substituting each of the aged accused with telly contemporaries of Wimbledon Common’s most infamous residents – Bagpuss, Hartley Hare, Mr Benn, Nogbad the Bad et al – as well as encompassing the motley crew of Icke disciples, fanatical fantasists and self-appointed paedo-hunters MWT had given the green light to.

Recently revisiting ‘Exposure’, I was surprised that my version of Mark Williams-Thomas, reborn (almost inevitably) as Mark JOHN-Thomas, doesn’t actually appear until right at the very end of the third instalment. However, as MWT became more ubiquitous on-screen whenever Yewtree grabbed a headline, this humourless, pompous individual with a hilarious absence of self-awareness quickly asserted himself as the star of my show thereafter. MWT at that time had his own YT channel and such was his delicious vanity that virtually every appearance he had made on TV was there; I had an unlimited supply of footage I could play with. And I did. By the time I’d taken so much piss out of him that his bladder must have been running on empty, MWT mysteriously removed more or less all the videos I’d pillaged. Coincidence? The fact is my series had taken on a life of its own that went way beyond my usual YT audience, even as far as those directly affected by the events I was satirising.

Whilst I’d been playing my strongest hand to parody the hysteria, others had been playing theirs in different online mediums, and I discovered the ‘Exposure’ series was being passed around like illicit contraband. Some of its most enthusiastic fans made contact and new doors were opened to me as a consequence. Episodes gradually acquired a little more sophistication both in presentation and in material as I was being fed information I wouldn’t otherwise have come across. The mainstream media was sticking rigidly to the MWT manual and no prominent journalist had yet dared to stick their head above the parapet for fear of being labelled a paedo apologist. For a good couple of years, my videos and the more forensic blogs of various determined diggers were the only places where an alternative to the consensus could be heard.

It took until celebrities whose currency hadn’t dated along with their dress-sense found themselves caught in the Yewtree net before voices belatedly began to be to be tentatively raised. Gradually, the wider public were made aware of the dubious police tactics and yet we heard little of the non-famous casualties denied access to expensive lawyers, those whose lives had also been devastated by this appalling approach to law and order. Moreover, an #IbelieveHer agenda served to conveniently mute all those women whose men-folk had been whisked away at the crack of dawn by the CPS Stasi – all those wives, girlfriends, mothers, daughters and sisters who were suffering in silence because their stories didn’t fit the narrative the MSM had opted for to present events, as ever, in simple black & white terms. Most are suffering still.

I’m lucky. I was able to walk away from the madness when I’d reached the end of the ‘Exposure’ road with a fourteenth and final episode that retold the tale in the style of Simon Schama’s ‘A History of Britain’ series. I felt I’d extracted every ounce of sap from the Yewtree and there was nothing left to say, for me at least. Firmly established as the resident paedo professor of the daytime TV sofa, Mark Williams-Thomas nevertheless continued to seek out new celebrity scalps even as more questions than ever were being asked about Operation Yewtree and its ramifications, as well as its equally unnecessary successors, Midland and Conifer. And now those questions are bringing the odious role of MWT into the public spotlight at last; prominent papers are actually saying out loud what the rest of us were saying out loud five long years ago, when we were routinely dismissed as beyond-the-pale paedo sympathisers.

Paul Gambaccini’s broadcasting clout guarantees him a sympathetic audience and gives him the freedom to openly describe what he went through as well as being critical of the system that exposed him to it, whereas others who experienced the same ordeal remain marginalised by their obscurity and tarnished in their communities. Yes, without Mark Williams-Thomas, there would be no ‘Winegum Telegram’; but without Mark Williams-Thomas, there would be far fewer damaged families and far fewer ruined individuals. I’d happily consign this blog to the same great online platform in the sky that the ‘Exposure’ series now resides in if that pound-shop Titus Oates finally received a taste of his own rancid medicine.

© The Editor

STOP THE WORLD, I WANT TO GET OFF

Ooh, where to start? A weekend of finger-pointing and retrospective accusations as summer’s ‘silly season’ is extended into the autumn has left me spoilt for choice when attempting to document the insane landscape we inadvertently inhabit. It began with that Hollywood PR exercise masquerading as a BBC TV chat-show presented by Graham Norton. Adam Sandler, one of those actors whose career provokes the question – ‘What the f**k have you ever done?’ – appeared alongside Emma ‘Miss Jean Brodie’ Thompson and actress Claire Foy, apparently placing his hand on the knee of the latter throughout the ‘interview’, something that provoked frothing-at-the-mouth hysteria on Twitter. A friend then sent me a leaked video of unknown origin in which another superstar of similar charisma – Ben Affleck – was mauling an MTV-style interviewer of Eastern European accent as she sat on his lap, a clip that climaxed with Affleck’s impersonation of a ‘spaz’. Suffice to say, he came across as an arrogant slimeball, albeit one that Tinsel Town’s system positively encourages. See also Harvey Weinstein.

This was followed by the dubious exposure of an online ‘closed group’ of ladies gossiping about various Westminster stalwarts that it’s best to avoid sharing a lift or taxi with. Lecherous old MPs groping young lobbyists, secretaries and PR trainees young enough to be their daughters? Jesus! Who knew? Call Mr Profumo! It’s not exactly Cecil Parkinson impregnating his secretary, but it’s what passes for a political sex scandal in 2017; hot on the heels of Jared O’Mara being suspended by the Labour Party following the publication of comments he made 15 years ago, we need to be vigilant, sex toys and ‘Sugar Tits’ pet-names not permitting.

Then we were told the actor who plays Todd Grimshaw on ‘Coronation Street’, the soap’s first openly gay character (currently in a relationship with a rather wet vicar on the show), has been shown the same exit door that illustrious predecessors such as Peter ‘Len Fairclough’ Adamson were shown for more serious crimes in more innocent times. Bruno ‘Todd Grimshaw’ Langley’s own crime was allegedly sexually assaulting a young lady in a Manchester night-club, though he received his cards before the allegation became a charge, suggesting the powers-that-be at Granada were waiting for an excuse to boot him out, anyway. This revelation broke more or less simultaneously with the news that a Five Live broadcaster has also been suspended on the basis of allegations he was guilty of letting his fingers do the walking where his female colleagues were concerned.

And we round off this supremely silly weekend with the convenient full-circle headline of another member of the Hollywood Royal Family being accused of a foul deed in the dim ‘n’ distant past. This time, it was the turn of none other than Kevin Spacey – someone whose off-screen activities have evaded my own personal ‘gaydar’; Spacey pre-empted an allegation of inappropriate behaviour with an underage actor in the 80s by belatedly coming out. Spacey is someone whose career has largely consisted of commendable efforts on celluloid (unlike Ben Affleck) and also included a stint as guv’nor of the Old Vic in London. Curiously, considering how ‘right-on’ the ruling elite of Hollywood are, they still have a problem with out-and-proud actors, casting resolutely straight leading men as gay characters in the likes of ‘Philadelphia’ and ‘Milk’, whereas we in Blighty have a lengthy list of gay Lord and Lady thespians, even if they tend to play it straight when cast in California.

So, what conclusions do we draw from several days of post-Weinstein allegations and accusations? Well, in the case of Ben Affleck, irrefutable evidence that he’s a bit of a prick is out there in cyberspace, so anything unsavoury levelled against him has pretty solid proof to go on re how he behaves in the company of young women. Kevin Spacey’s conduct is slightly different in that it took place before the days when everything was recorded and documented online, yet he’s still been forced into belatedly admitting his bedroom preferences courtesy of the imminent media storm. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe whatever men or women get up to behind closed doors is their own business and has no relevance to their profession unless they choose to be defined by it; personally, I don’t care if Kevin Spacey is gay or straight, but it evidently matters to media whores deprived of genuine scandal, so Spacey bows to their God-given authority before they exercise it.

Five years on from the tsunami of allegations triggered by the despicable Mark Williams Thomas’s ‘Exposure’ hatchet-job on Jimmy Savile – which served as a handy smokescreen to obscure the genuine outrage of Rotherham and Rochdale – we appear to have reached a point whereby any authentic act of deplorable misogyny aimed at the opposite sex by the male of the species has been overshadowed by the abuse of descriptive terms for actual assault, applied as they are with cavalier nonchalance to clumsy attempts at seduction, making men believe that any move on their part will be labelled ‘rape’. Perhaps it’s laying the ground for western women to adopt the burqa as a modern-day secular chastity belt, duped into the illusion of emancipation by the propaganda. Who knows? We are the dead, as someone once said. But maybe there’s life after death after all. Fingers crossed!

© The Editor

FOLLOW THE NARRATIVE

‘I remembered the stories that I had heard over the years working in newspapers about Jimmy Savile…I’d interviewed Savile back in the late 1970s and I thought he was a deeply unpleasant man, that his public face was very different from the face that he showed when it was just the two of us together…we could never tell the story at the time ‘cause we could never get enough weight of credible evidence against him. I thought, well this is a story I can tell in fiction.’

Those are the words of crime fiction novelist and former newspaper journalist Val McDermid, speaking about her 1997 book, ‘The Wire in the Blood’; in it, a famous TV personality is revealed as a secret serial killer who gets away with his crimes on account of his celebrity. The interview came from a BBC4 programme aired at the beginning of this week in which Andrew Marr focuses on three of the most popular literary genres – crime, fantasy and spy. He prefaced his chat with McDermid by making the connection between her horrific creation Jacko Vance and Jimmy Savile, reiterating ‘what we all now know’ about Sir Jim beforehand and letting the author reinforce the accepted post-2012 narrative as she discussed her novel. Oddly enough, this section of the programme made no mention of the incident that took place during a book-signing session McDermid participated in at the University of Sunderland in December 2012, when a member of the public asked her to sign a photo of Savile from a ‘Top of the Pops’ annual and then proceeded to throw ink at her.

McDermid ticks a lot of boxes in that she’s a lesbian in a civil partnership with a child born of donor insemination; she also writes books that specialise in graphic (some might say voyeuristic) depictions of sadistic violence and torture. We can’t condemn her for the latter on account of her being such a good egg when it comes to the former. After all, her conveniently suitable opinion of Savile as being ‘a deeply unpleasant man’ echoes the words of Savile’s former TOTP co-host Tony Blackburn when he quickly sought to distance himself from an ex-colleague by referring to him as ‘a horrendous man’; this was, of course, long before Blackburn himself was sacked from the BBC after being wrongly linked to an unsavoury incident from the 70s that had the popular image of Savile stamped all over it.

It was interesting that McDermid should use the excuse of creating a fictional character rather than falling back on her journalistic experience to tell ‘the truth’ about Savile because ‘we could never get enough weight of credible evidence against him’. No, she couldn’t; and nor has anyone since – unless hearsay and unverifiable accusations against a dead man count as credible evidence, of course. Oh, sorry, I forgot – they do. Coming from a journo like McDermid who was supposedly in search of a scoop 24/7, it does sound like something of a cop-out; the same could be said, however, for every journalist who is now wise after the event.

For a public figure who apparently spent the majority of his lengthy career surrounded by unseemly rumours, it was rather miraculous that Jimmy Savile was never exposed in his lifetime as the man he was exposed as posthumously. Since when have newspaper journalists ever shied away from exposing public figures as being contrary to the image they project to the masses? Even in the deferential early 60s they dared to go for the jugular of the Minister for War, someone ranking a little higher in the country’s social hierarchy than a TV and radio personality.

But Val McDermid is sticking to the story we’ve been told for the past four years and I don’t believe anyone would expect her to do anything else. Imagine if she’d described Savile as ‘a really nice guy I immediately warmed to’. No, I can’t imagine it either. It has become an unwritten rule that Jimmy Savile now has to be spoken of in such terms and the narrative cannot be questioned or contradicted. The numerous TV programmes he hosted on the BBC for over thirty years can now only be exhumed from the archives if they’re to be used in a ‘serial paedophile’ context on a news broadcast or documentary; otherwise, they must never be transmitted as mere entertainment again, lest the very sight of him provokes the awakening of a repressed abuse memory. Veer from the narrative at one’s peril, and forget ever getting to the actual ‘did he?/didn’t he?’ truth as a consequence.

The media that had lauded Jimmy Savile as a Great British Eccentric while he was still with us – despite the blunt fact that a lot of people never cared much for him at all – is the same media that now demands we accept the reverse opinion; whereas pre-2012, dissenting voices weren’t given a platform, the change to the narrative since then ironically sees an identical scenario. Few – if any – dared to go public with their suspicions when he was alive, and now few – if any – dare to publicly question the perceived wisdom on Savile now he has been reborn as the Great British Paedo. Oh, I know there’s plenty of it online; but good luck if you try saying it on the telly or the wireless. The ability to question the consensus free from persecution or litigation should be one of the foundation stones of a democracy, though it’s interesting to look back almost twenty years ago, when The Conet Project began releasing recordings of clandestine Numbers Stations on CD. The prophetic sleeve-notes penned by compiler Akin O Fernandez referenced the fear that greeted his decision to commercially release tapes of something every government denies the existence of.

‘The depth of fear we have encountered in otherwise psychologically normal people is incredible,’ he wrote. ‘What kind of nation is it that has people second guessing their every action to check its legal status?’ ‘We are living in a time of widespread fear,’ he continued. ‘This level of paranoia used to be exhibited (with good reason) in the Eastern Bloc states; now this virulent plague has crept into the western mindset. It has oozed in very slowly, which is how it seems to have been able to take such a firm and widespread grip on the population without anyone really noticing that anything has changed…in 100 years time when we are all dead and shortwave radio is a memory, our recordings and log books will be an invaluable resource to future researchers who will laugh out loud at the Wireless and Telegraphy Act when they study the insane asylum known as the twentieth century.’

Change the century and the subject, and those words could have been penned in 2016, never mind 1997.

© The Editor

A CHOICE OF VIEWING

Fiction is tailor-made for immediate post-watershed Sunday evenings; it draws in the audiences as mainstream television has a welcome armistice from endless talent contests of both the celebrity and non-celebrity varieties, providing viewers with one final distraction from imminent Monday morning blues as the weekend grinds to a halt. Period dramas appear especially suited to the Sunday evening environment, offering an additionally exotic slice of escapism from the humdrum; and running against one another at the moment are two classic examples, BBC1’s remake of ‘Poldark’ and ITV’s ‘Victoria’ (which primarily focuses on the early life of the spirited young queen).

Let’s face it – few eras of British history are as gloriously detached from contemporary reality as the Regency. This was a time when men were men – or men that were dashing, duelling bastard bucks in tricorn hats, capes and knee-breeches; and women were damsels in distress, heaving bosoms encased by bodices and all. Try to apply killjoy modern mores to the era and you can understand why it’s more alluring and attractive than ever in such a restrictive, litigious Dark Age of thought-crime.

It is a familiar pattern than an eruption of licentious free-for-all hedonism follows each era of repressive Puritanism; that a Twitter account celebrating the historic whores of Olde England should be temporarily suspended due to its profile picture depicting Charles II’s most famous mistress Nell Gwyn with exposed nipples suggests we are back in the latter era. Now restored due to some delicate airbrushing around Nell’s nipples, the fact that said picture hangs in the National Portrait Gallery for all to see without any age restrictions emphasises the ludicrous nature of online censorship. I have accidentally come across images of severed heads courtesy of your friendly neighbourhood ISIS decapitator, butchered victims of Charles Manson’s murderous cult, and shots of Pol Pot’s torture chambers when still fully functioning – none of which I sought out; I would hazard a guess most would rather look at the nipples of a woman who died over 300 years ago, but one is obviously more offensive than the other.

Yet, if the evidence points to us all residing in a century of puritanical censorship that would have Cromwell giving the thumbs up from six feet under, how does that explain the gross-out vulgarity of the likes of ‘Geordie Shore’ or naked dating programmes or endless ‘Lads and lasses on the pull in Ibiza’ shows spread across the digital TV network like a particularly pungent STD? How does it explain magazines aimed at teenage girls with info on their front covers offering them advice on how to give the perfect blowjob? How does it explain the sensationalistic and sordid sexual voyeurism screaming from the ‘Take a Break’-type rags? How does it explain the soft-porn soft-sell of female pop stars promoting their wares on MTV? How does it explain ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’?

And, all the while, our prisons are increasingly overcrowded due to an influx of inmates found guilty of the same such acts that are today promoted as a design for life, reclassified as ‘historic sex crimes’ on the basis of several mentally-disturbed individuals’ hazy allegations and a corrupt justice system polluted by a political (not say financial) agenda. Ah, but that was then.

Just as the thought of their parents having sex induces a bout of vomiting in teenagers, the notion that past generations had any sort of consensual intimacy in their youth cannot be tolerated; take that onto the next level and it’s possible to punish them for their distant salacious indulgences – whether or not these indulgences took place in the real world or in the post-therapy imagination. In television terms, this is where Sunday evening’s predilection for fiction and modern-day Puritanism meet, as the two mainstream BBC TV channels will compete for our attention tonight by offering up a documentary on the lives of the Cornish gentry during the Napoleonic Wars and an utterly fictitious drama about a dead man posthumously painted as the greatest sexual predator of all time. Sorry, have I got that right?

A couple of years ago, I met some members of the Savile family; at the time, they remained hopeful their side of the story would receive some balanced media coverage. They mentioned the name of Louis Theroux, as the geeky specky had famously spent time on camera with the dead DJ and charity fundraiser during the back-end of his life. He had apparently expressed an interest in following up this documentary and had been in touch with the family. The end result of his endeavours, however, is not being promoted as an alternative point of view; instead it has been marketed as a more sophisticated version of your average Mark Williams Thomas exercise in crass sensationalism. It will clearly not question the consensus; it will toe the narrative line. Did anyone really expect a programme on this subject produced by the BBC to do otherwise?

If BBC DG Tony Hall bends over backwards any further to appease the knockers then he will be forced to talk out of his arse – whoops, it would seem he’s been doing that ever since he got the job. On the day Louis Theroux reaffirms every belief on that cadaverous Paedo that has been set in stone for the last four years, Hall’s Corporation sacks a regular on Radio 4’s ‘Now Show’ because he’s not a non-binary, transgender disabled Asian lesbian – or something equally ‘diverse’.

Personally, I found Jon Holmes annoying, unfunny and characteristic of the kind of lame, faux-satirical excuse for comedy that Radio 4 periodically pedals, another product of the bleedin’ obvious gag factory; but that’s beside the point. He’s evidently been fired because he doesn’t fit the Affirmative Action imposed on the BBC by the same class of metropolitan suit that routinely sneers at the common people who voted Leave.

So, the BBC embarks upon another bout of self-flagellation over a deceased ex-employee and hopes the Daily Mail will go easy on it. The door remains open for a brave soul to discard the narrative and present the facts; step forward, seekers of the truth. Oops, it would seem no mainstream TV channel wants you. Why broadcast an exhaustively-researched viewpoint that contradicts the narrative? Imagine the masses having to consider such a contradiction when the story is now so engrained in the collective (false) memory. No, too much to think about when it’s Monday in the morning. Confirm your prejudices with Louis and go to bed content. I’ll be watching ‘Poldark’. Evenin’ all.

© The Editor

NATIONAL DISGRACE

Well, it was only a matter of time in a British TV landscape devoted to revivals, retreads and rehashes; and if it had to be any television channel dramatising the facts of a project so stooped in fiction as Operation It Could Be Youtree, then one would naturally imagine it had to be ITV. After all, ITV essentially sponsored the whole witch-hunt from day one, what with Essex’s answer to Matthew Hopkins, Mark Williams-Thomas, and the tabloid sensationalism of his Jimmy Savile exposé in 2012 kick-starting a free-for-all that has ruined endless lives, careers and individuals unfortunate enough to have made a mark in public life prior to the revisionist’s paradise of the twenty-first century. However, the baton of shame has been passed on to Channel 4, that one-time home of radical and innovative television and now the channel that brings us property porn, poverty porn and naked dating shows.

Robbie Coltrane, the beached Caledonian whale whose serious acting career stalled after the end of ‘Cracker’ in the 1990s (and who has subsequently been reduced to those tedious travelogue showcases for 80s has-beens that ITV specialises in), is to play a beloved celebrity targeted by a Yewtree-style Historical Sex Crimes squad in a new C4 ‘drama’ titled ‘National Treasure’ this coming week. In order to hedge their bets, C4 have even recruited genuine National Treasure Julie Walters to play ‘the wife’; Judi Dench must have been otherwise engaged when the time for casting came around.

Plugging the programme he naturally hopes will salvage his dormant thespian ambitions, Coltrane has inserted the Savile caveat into the interview promoting the series in the current issue of the Radio Times, stressing the character he plays is in no way based upon Sir Jim. It’s merely the latest missive from the publicity circuit Coltrane has been on for the past couple of weeks, and photos released to the press that unnervingly recreate the images we’ve become sadly familiar with since 2012 must bring back such happy memories for the families of Dave Lee Travis and all those other ‘perverts hiding in plain sight’.

Echoing convenient sentiments previously uttered by another face from the past struggling to re-establish his ‘rebel’ credentials – John Lydon – Coltrane declares ‘Everyone knew Jimmy Savile was a creep. Everyone. I never met him but you’d watch him and you’d feel your skin crawl.’ Indeed – the millions who tuned into ‘Top of the Pops’ and ‘Jim’ll Fix It’ every week in the 70s, 80s and 90s felt exactly the same back in the day whenever they set eyes upon that ‘wrong ‘un’, didn’t they, Robbie, which would explain why they kept tuning in. How it pays to be wise after the event.

In many respects, Robbie Coltrane is the perfect choice to play a fictitious figure whose past comes under present scrutiny in the drama; after all, he was a prominent member of the Alternative Comedy generation, those post-punk radicals whose slide into middle-aged respectability (and the establishment honours that come with it) has been utterly seamless. These early 80s undergraduates had a particular grudge against the working-class showbiz heroes of the 60s and 70s, easy targets for mock-satire as their envy of their targets’ achievements eventually led them all the way to writing appalling jukebox musicals based on the music of notable fellow radicals, Queen, on one hand, and relishing the opportunity to condemn them anew via Yewtree on the other.

It pays to remember that, whilst newspaper columnists from Hitchens to Littlejohn can today question the veracity of accusations levelled against personalities they themselves admire and revere, such voices were thin on the ground three or four years back. In the frenzied Yewtree cauldron of 2012/13/14, only thick-skinned brave bloggers dared to question the consensus during the height of the bonfire of the seventies, and they were written-off as crackpot obsessives for their troubles.

Even when the first few household names tentatively raised their heads above the parapet a couple of years ago – when, tellingly, it took the arrest of respectable broadcasters such as Paul Gambaccini to provoke them into action – it remained an unwritten rule that they had to distance themselves from Savile sympathies as they sprung to the defence of their showbiz buddies. Having been so successfully re-educated as to the ‘truth’ of the deceased eccentric charity fundraiser, the public would clearly have to be reminded that any accusation would not necessarily place the accused in the same sewer of filth as Savile. ‘Of course Jimmy Savile was an appalling human being, but…’ went the script recited ad infinitum by the fearless defenders of those caught in the net that the Met had widened.

‘National Treasure’ doesn’t come with the ‘Based on a true story’ attachment, though it’s not hard to foresee that those who still believe Fleet Street brings the Gospel to the masses will switch on and believe they’re essentially watching a documentary. Indeed, it will probably be difficult to distinguish between drama and documentary if one is a regular viewer of what passes for both on the mainstream channels, considering the recent efforts of our man from Billericay to portray himself as a cross between Roger Cook and James Bond over on ITV. I tried my best to ruin his career, but I clearly failed.

In a climate wherein Cliff Richard remains out on permanent ‘moral bail’ and questions over insecure convictions for the likes of Rolf Harris are successfully suppressed within the mainstream media, dramatising such a miserable episode in contemporary police procedure seems the apex of bad taste, though ratings are guaranteed with this kind of cynical exercise; and that’s what matters when the fate of ‘The Great British Bake-Off’ is so pivotal to the wellbeing of the nation.

There’s no doubt there is future scope for fictionalising the experience of the famous and non-famous alike where it comes to the imaginary crimes of the past impacting upon the present; but I have distinct doubts that viewers of ‘National Treasure’ will be exposed to anything other than a PR job for the Professional Victims’ lobby and the crusading integrity of both the Met and the CPS.

© The Editor

DEFENSIVE PLAY

Whenever I sign out of my inbox, Yahoo automatically takes me to what passes for their ‘headlines’, which usually consist of the kind of showbiz fluff I cross oceans to avoid. One I saw today was referring to some actress in some movie where she apparently drags up (i.e. wears a fake beard); I only know because there was a photo of her. I didn’t bother reading it because I couldn’t care less, though the headline itself caught my eye because it claimed said actress ‘defends her trans-role.’ Curious choice of word – ‘defends’. Sorry, it was my understanding that the only people who have to defend their actions are those on trial for murder and other such serious crimes. Am I missing something? What is there to defend about playing a part, which is indeed the definition of being an actor?

‘Plumber defends his decision to unblock drain!’ ‘Mechanic defends changing tyre!’ ‘Postman defends delivering of letter!’ Any sillier than ‘Actress defends pretending to be a fictional character in a completely made-up story’? Not really, though public figures over the years have often had to answer to the archetypal ‘Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ figure incensed by something they’ve seen on the TV, at the cinema or in the paper – or haven’t seen at all but have surmised they would find offensive. This seems to have expanded in recent years, perhaps a consequence of the democratisation of fame, so that those who grab their fifteen minutes also have to be scrutinised by Mr and Ms Disgusted, now firmly on the left where once they were on the right. It gives the impression that society as a whole has been transformed into one giant court of law, one in which we are all permanently on the defensive, having to justify every move in anticipation of criticism from the unofficial PC police who guard against offence.

This is a court bereft of statute books so that nobody is entirely sure what can and can’t be said and what can and can’t be done, hence the increase in habitual criminality. How helpful then, that we have our self-appointed online lawmakers who are on hand to recite the dos and don’ts, as well as intervening if we unknowingly break their laws. The novelist Lionel Shriver gave a lecture in Australia a few days ago, one that received publicity across all mediums; generally, the sense she spoke was well-received, though there was the predictable backlash from those that enjoy the lashing of backs. Shriver appeared on ‘Newsnight’ to…yes, you guessed it…defend what she had said.

Essentially, Lionel Shriver accused the scourge of so-called Identity Politics and accompanying disgust with Cultural Appropriation of stifling the creative and the imaginative – which those who propagate such Orwellian control are not. This is the attempted policing of creativity that says writers of fiction can only write from the point of view of their own gender, sexuality and race; and if ‘ethnic’ characters are introduced into their stories, they have to be non-caricatures and inoffensive, officially approved representatives of their individual ethnicity. What a remarkably philistine set of rules and regulations.

Any good novelist researches the background and environment of any character that isn’t based directly upon them or somebody they’ve known – or they simply use their imagination, which is one factor that distinguishes the writer of fiction from the writer of fact. Beatrix Potter couldn’t converse with ducks or mice, so she had to imagine what it would be like to be a duck or a mouse.

I’ve written stories myself that have been set in, say, Georgian London. I was born 200 years too late to have lived in Georgian London and to have known anyone who did. So I research. I get the historical facts right in terms of surroundings, social manners, dress, diet, language et al – in short, making sure my characters and the world they inhabit are as accurate as somebody living in the twenty-first century can possibly portray them. Graft contemporary mores onto the past and you end up with an invented ideal that says more about now than then. Hollywood does it all the time because America doesn’t want to accept that many of its revered Founding Fathers were slave-owners.

The ludicrous ‘outrage’ a couple of weeks ago over a funny line in ‘Coronation Street’ provoked a silly storm in an even sillier teacup, whereby a reference to a character from ‘Roots’ was deemed to be racist. Considering the amount of black and gay characters in Weatherfield, there’s a surprising absence of racism or homophobia from those who fall into neither camp. I would hazard a guess that the majority of those who were sufficiently outraged were white and probably of middle-class descent.

It’s that familiar condescending middle-class white guilt which prompts such people to speak ‘on behalf’ of the perceived persecuted minority, which ironically makes them sound more colonial in their attitudes than those who don’t take offence if a campus ‘Mexican’ night deigns that wearing a sombrero is crucial to the event. They feel compelled to appoint themselves as spokesmen and women, as though the minority in question are incapable of articulating any outrage themselves. A verbal pat on the head which says ‘Don’t worry, poor ignorant little coloured person; we can be your mouthpiece, what with you being denied our privileged education’. It’s laughable.

I’ve cheered myself up of late by watching episodes of ‘The Goodies’. Aside from the nostalgia factor and the surreal madcap humour which still makes me laugh, one element that really struck me was the freedom the trio had to poke fun at anyone and anything. A series that was unfairly regarded at the time as ‘Python-Lite’ today seems incredibly subversive. Indeed, it’s hard to watch it now and not mentally note all the jokes that could no longer be made on television, let alone the piss-taking of celebrities we’re not allowed to mention anymore, such as Rolf Harris, Clement Freud or Jimmy Savile. There’s no what used to be called ‘bad language’ on any episode of ‘The Goodies’ whatsoever, yet whilst one can now swear to one’s heart’s content on TV comedy today, the field has narrowed beyond belief as to targets of jokes.

As regular readers will know, my sideline online identity as a purveyor of satirical and silly videos enables me to get away with things that television would no longer permit. Comments often say ‘You should have your own TV show; you’re funnier than anything currently on telly’, which is immensely flattering, but also misses the point. I’m not on the telly because nobody would dare commission anything of a humorous nature that refuses to acknowledge the boundaries established that define what can and can’t be laughed at. Well, sorry. I’m not prepared to defend myself or my work to people I neither respect nor recognise as creative peers. You either find it funny or you don’t; and if you don’t, I’m not especially bothered; go and watch ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys’.

Any unwritten rules when it comes to any artistic medium stinks of puritanical censorship and the policing of creativity by the non-creative. Sorry if I offend, but you can go f**k yourself. I’m not living under Stalin, the Stasi or the Spanish Inquisition, so your opinion carries no weight and has no authority.

© The Editor

TIME HEALS NO WOUNDS

Timing counts for a lot, even if timing takes time. On the day a verdict was finally reached in the Hillsborough Inquest and the pitiful reputation of the South Yorkshire Police Force was dragged even deeper into the dirt, another law enforcement outfit with a similarly tarnished record, the Metropolitan Police Force, announced it was poised to wind down the investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. It was as far back as April 1989 when 96 football fans lost their lives at Sheffield Wednesday’s ground; it was in 2007 when the four-year-old vanished without a trace from her family’s holiday hotel in Portugal. Neither case shares much other than the amount of headlines they have generated and the fact that both have threatened to challenge ‘The Mousetrap’ for longevity – nine years for Madeleine McCann and a staggering 27 for Hillsborough.

The Taylor Report into Hillsborough appeared as early as January 1990, just nine months after the tragedy. However, whilst instigated to establish the causes of the 96 deaths, it also had a wider remit for English football in general, covering such areas as terracing, the sale of alcohol within grounds, and crush barriers. The Taylor Report’s influence was far-reaching for football in this country, leading to all-seater stadia and the end of fans being fenced in to prevent pitch invasions and contain hooliganism. Its conclusion regarding the deaths was that the prime cause of the disaster was inadequate policing. The actual inquest into the lives lost recorded a verdict of accidental death in 1991 rather than unlawful killing and didn’t recommend charges of manslaughter be brought against the police officers who were pivotal to events, much to the dismay of the families involved.

When 20 years had passed, the dissatisfaction of bereaved families with nobody being held to account for events that day, as well as their awareness that vital documentary evidence had not been released to Lord Justice Taylor in 1989, led to the formation of the Hillsborough Independent Panel; backed by government support, the panel accessed previously-unavailable information and in 2012 concluded that Liverpool supporters were not responsible for the tragedy, contrary to the Sun’s accusations at the time.

Despite the conclusions of the panel eliciting public apologies from the relevant parties, those regarded as guilty remained unpunished and fresh demands for prosecutions of police officers on a variety of charges surfaced in the wake of the 2012 inquiry. Shortly after, the High Court quashed the verdict of the original inquest and obtained permission for a fresh inquest that began two years ago last month; when the jury reached its verdict today, all 96 deaths were found to be unlawful killings. Revelations of doctored statements by the South Yorkshire Police that have emerged in recent years had cast considerable doubt upon the original verdict, though the new verdict isn’t the end of a story that has spanned two-and-a half decades. The next stage surely has to constitute prosecutions against individual officers or even a charge of corporate manslaughter against South Yorkshire Police itself.

As for the sad saga of Madeleine McCann, the future seems less conclusive. If she is still alive, Madeleine will turn 13 in just over a couple of weeks from now; but there remains a large section of the media, both professional and social, convinced she is dead and that her blood is on the hands of her parents, Gerry and Kate. Inconclusive investigations by both Portuguese and British police, as well as private detectives, have thrown up endless speculation and false leads that have failed to establish any truth in what has become one of the twenty-first century’s great mysteries. The absence of evidence as to whether Madeleine is dead or alive, let alone any plausible murder suspects being put forward, is bound to keep the rumour mill in business when even Hillsborough has finally been put to bed.

The McCann case seems to be more a story of our times than Hillsborough, which is essentially a lingering legacy of another era altogether, as was the equally drawn-out Bloody Sunday Inquiry before it. The patent lies that were pedalled by both certain tabloid papers and the South Yorkshire Police in 1989 seem mild in comparison to the hysterical obsession of Fleet Street and Twitter with Madeleine McCann. Again, timing played its part. Following the high-profile kidnapping and murder of eight-year-old Sarah Payne by a convicted child sex-offender in 2000, child abduction with the prospect of a paedophilic element was big news both for an industry desperate to combat plummeting sales and for the newest kid on the media block. Once Jimmy Savile became the Great British Bogeyman in 2012, the dead DJ could be linked to every child abduction or murder case of the past half-century, connecting individual and utterly unrelated stories to a bigger and far more salacious fantasy of institutionalised abuse allegedly stretching back decades.

The fake abduction of nine-year-old Shannon Matthews, staged less than a year after Madeleine McCann’s disappearance by her publicity-desperate mother, was symptomatic of an age in which the narcotic of fifteen-minute fame had polluted the thought processes of even the thickest people in the country and that this craving could encompass any beyond-the-pale stunt. Whereas Kate McCann was endlessly pilloried for not displaying her private grief in public – as has been compulsory ever since weeping Diana groupies besieged the gates of Kensington Palace in 1997– Karen Matthews shed the requisite tears; that hers were of the crocodile variety didn’t appear to alter the consensus that grief is no longer the province of those with a first-hand claim to it but is now something that has to be shared across the entire vicarious spectrum of contemporary communication.

The widespread belief that the public are being lied to by the powerful, whether police or politicians, can be attributed in part to the corruption and ineptitude of those institutions themselves, but it has become more entrenched in the national consciousness courtesy of social media, turning every cock-up or wilful deception into another conspiracy theory to occupy empty lives. Hillsborough may be on the brink of resolution at last, but Madeleine McCann is set to run and run, regardless of the damage done to those whose actual concern it still is.

© The Editor

FANTASY ISLAND

Say the words ‘Grange Hill’ to anyone of a certain age and a flurry of names will enter their head – Tucker Jenkins, Benny Green, Trisha Yates, Gripper Stebson and poor old ‘Row-land’ will probably spring to mind before any others. Plotlines will no doubt be quickly evoked too. There was one particular plotline in the early 80s that perfectly captured the hormonal turmoil of nascent adolescence, when an absence of sexual fact is compensated for by sexual fiction, though the two have a habit of blurring in the imagination. Yes, we might remember Duane having the hots for ‘Sexy Lexy’ and even enrolling in the extracurricular computer course in order to gaze at the object of his pubescent desire for an additional hour; but it was his pal Claire Scott whose unrequited passion for a member of staff landed that oblivious teacher in hot water.

Mr Hopwood – played by the same actor (Brian Capron) who drove Gail Platt and family into the Manchester Ship Canal a couple of decades later on ‘Coronation Street’ – was unaware his doe-eyed pupil had taken her infatuation with him to another level by recounting her fantasies in the pages of her diary. When her mother broke the golden rule by dipping into it whilst cleaning Claire’s bedroom, she reported what she assumed to be evidence of a genuine affair to her husband, prompting an incensed Mr Scott to storm up to the school and grab Mr Hopwood by the shirt collars, accusing him of something that would now lead to instant dismissal on the pretext of guilty till proven innocent.

Poor, humiliated Claire confessed it was all in her head and that Mr Hopwood had never laid a finger on her; but in an age when ‘Jackie’ magazine was still turned to for advice as the only help-line for young teenage girls focusing their embryonic lust on the nearest grownup male figure outside of family, Claire Scott’s predicament was genuine. It had happened for real just ten years earlier, as sensationally exposed in typically crass fashion by the News of the World in an early example of Rupert Murdoch’s grudge match against the BBC. Claiming ‘Top of the Pops’ was a hotbed of vice and debauchery (always the paper’s favourite subjects), the revelation emerged of a teenage member of the dancing studio audience who had written in her diary of a sexual encounter with one of the show’s hosts.

The girl’s mother got her hands on the diary, took it as Gospel, approached the BBC to lodge a formal complaint (without success) and the private document of her daughter’s fantasies then mysteriously fell into the hands of the Digger, who demonstrated his trademark tact and sensitivity by publishing extracts from it. When the ‘confession’ appeared in the News of the World, his breaking of the sordid little story pushed the girl over the edge and she committed suicide; a police investigation at the time (1971) exonerated the BBC, TOTP and the unnamed ‘seducer’ – a sad chapter in the show’s history that said more about the dysfunctional nature of a mother/daughter relationship than any perceived lack of moral fibre on the part of a programme produced under characteristically stringent BBC rules and regulations.

Over forty years later, the long-forgotten mini-scandal was dredged up anew during Dame Janet Smith’s inquiry into Jimmy Savile’s alleged illicit activities on BBC premises; Dame Janet claims she couldn’t fathom why there was precious little evidence of this incident residing in the BBC archives, though a broadcasting institution that routinely wiped copies of its most popular shows in the 60s and 70s was hardly likely to retain every document relating to a brief episode in which every party involved had been cleared of any wrongdoing. Naturally, when a Fleet Street hungry for any Savile story – however dubious and fantastical – heard about this, their ears pricked up, and the wicked rapist of a 15-year-old girl simply had to be Sir Jimmy. Besides, the actual TOTP presenter named by the dead girl as her seducer, Tony Blackburn, couldn’t be ‘outed’ because he had taken the precaution of a super-injunction.

Now that has expired and Mr Blackburn has been named and shamed, how does his employer of many decades respond to the public revelation of something they were well aware of whilst continuing to pay his wages? It sacks him on the spot. Remember, Blackburn was exonerated in 1971 and once again when he was interviewed as part of Dame Janet Smith’s inquiry. So, that means he has twice been found not guilty of the accusation that has now cost him his job. He wasn’t even fired by the men in charge of the station he works for, Radio 2, but the actual Director General of the BBC himself, Tony Hall. The man whose voice opened Radio 1 in September 1967 is rightly furious and the statement he has issued to the press doesn’t see him mince his words. Legal action is threatened and it would seem he has a very strong case for wrongful dismissal.

Tony Blackburn was perhaps a tad too hasty to distance himself from Jimmy Savile when all that broke out at the end of 2012 and Paul Gambaccini was equally quick to point the finger at a dead man, regarding his reputation as a respected broadcaster and prominent media gay as a sure-fire safeguard against any accusations. He paid the price for his superiority complex and now one of the lowbrow broadcasters who personified the cheery cheese of Radio 1 when Gambaccini joined the station in 1973 has also been hung out to dry by a spineless, weak-kneed BBC as it bends over backwards to ensure its charter is renewed in the face of renewed hostility from a government on Murdoch’s payroll.

What this latest headline says about the BBC, the Metropolitan Police Force, the legal system, and the state of this country in 2016 seems pretty clear. There doesn’t seem much point in spelling it out.

© The Editor