Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile – Blame The Parents
JIMMY Savile is the subejct of Dan Davies’s book Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile. The man known in his lifetime as Sir Jimmy has now buried in muck and filth. Savile never was arrested, charged nor tried in his lifetime. He is the alleged paedophile and rapist who operated on the BBC and NHS’s watch.
Rachel Cooke writes:
As I read Davies’s book, the term “light entertainment” suddenly struck me as the greatest joke. What a misnomer. It wasn’t light at all. It was dark and heavy: clodhopping at best, sinister at worst. All the programmes I enjoyed most as a child came with heavy doses of innuendo, low-level violence, sadomasochism. There was Dick Emery, who dressed up as a sexually frustrated spinster – at the time I didn’t know what frottage was, except I sort of did, thanks to her – and as a toothy vicar whose pious exterior made for a sharp contrast with his visits to “naughty” strip clubs. (Davies, I notice, has a picture of this vicar on his Twitter account.) There were the two Ronnies, Barker and Corbett, whose show included peculiar serials such as “The Worm That Turned”, a dystopian fiction starring Diana Dors, in which women ruled the world (mostly in hot pants and jackboots) and men wore women’s clothes and kept house, and “Band of Slaves”, in which an all-girl orchestra was sold into slavery. Rod Hull and his puppet Emu performed a tango of aggression so convincing, you couldn’t help but rub your upper arms as you watched, imagining the bruises on those of their victims. Benny Hill was forbidden in our house – he was on ITV – but I knew the shtick. He chased girls. Round and round and round. (Hill, incidentally, made a shrine of his dead mother’s clothes, just as Savile did with those of his beloved “Duchess”.) Somehow, Ben Elton’s controversial attack on Hill – the comedian’s routine, he suggested, incited rape and other acts of violence against women – doesn’t seem quite so over-the-top now as when he made it in 1987.
The trick is to look at what has been presented as light entertainment since: weeping children on the X Factor standing on their dead grannies (judged by the “Nation’s Sweetheart”, a woman with a criminal record for violence) and dancing along to songs about oral sex on Britain’s Got Talent; Rolf Harris showing kids his puppies on Animal Hospital and painting the Queen; music videos full of ‘hos’ and a pubescent Miley Cyrus fellating a hammer; the country’s most popular website oggling underage girls; children being bombarded with the message that adults – especially parents – must not be trusted and paedophila is ubiquitous; and the moral annihilation of anyone accused of anything to do with children.
Don’t look back. Look at the now. It’s mad.
And then there’s the Royal Family…
Posted: 5th, September 2014 | In: Books, Celebrities Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
