It has been wall-to-wall coverage on BBC radio speech & news programmes, with much angst about the loss of trust in the BBC’s journalistic reputation. In truth I suspect that most of the population do not see this as the main problem, it is not this which has caused the sudden drop in trust reported by the polls. It is the idea that the BBC gave Jimmy Savile a platform for so many years.
Knowingly or not. And I think it boils down to a class issue.
From the BBC’s point of view Jimmy Savile had two valuable characteristics – he attracted a popular audience &, especially in the early days, a youthful one at a time when this was the fastest growing ‘demographic’ & which marked the start of the media’s obsession with ’Youf’. Yes, many regarded him with distaste, but light entertainment was full of characters with a dangerous edge, & Savile played on this, & his northernness.
And so the well educated, culturally refined hierarchy & those who thought that public service broadcasting ought not to offer such fare bowed to the argument that, as licence fee payers, all sectors should be catered for. It was also difficult to be sure, oneself, that one’s distaste was not based on pure prejudice or snobbery.
Over the weekend I have been reading A Short Walk Down Fleet Street by Alan Watkins. Two passages had more resonance than they might on any other weekend, revealing as they are about 1970s attitudes towards paedophilia.
The first, dating to 1973-4 recalls an exchange with Tom Driberg, a noted, though not at the time publicly, homosexual MP:
‘So you have a son?’ Driberg said. ‘Of 15? Do, please, bring him to see me. I have all kinds of books & pictures that might interest him.’ I declined on his behalf, explaining that he was busy with examinations & chiefly interested in cricket. No responsible parent would have done anything else – though curiously I now feel that Driberg really did want to show him his books & pictures, for the old monster had his kindly side.And yet, a few paragraphs earlier. 1972-6:
He would appear in the Colony Room … with a succession of leather-jacketed young men, usually called Terry, whom he would invariably introduce to the assembled company as ‘one of my constituents’. He would then provide Terry with a handful of loose change & direct him to the fruit machine in the corner while he gossiped …While private homosexual acts were not by then illegal, there is no indication that anyone felt any need to enquire about or protect any of the young men who may well have been under 21, the age of consent in those days, & class is clearly a factor in that.
There is also some self hatred in all the fuss about Savile– among all those who allowed children to write to Jim’ll Fix It with their dreams.
*I mistyped the word general; the spell checker offered me ‘director genial’ as one alternative for what I meant to type. Anything but, I told it, at least for today.
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