They tried to warn us with "The Boat That Rocked". When I first saw the film I got quite cross thinking that it treated sexism and attempted rape in a jocular manner (
Check out the blog here). But now I see that Richard Curtis was actually putting together a serious expose of the Neanderthal attitudes of the sixties and seventies where harassment was seen as a cheeky jape. If you laughed along then you were the one being satirised. Luckily hardly anyone did laugh along. But nor did we heed the warnings.
The man who bought Jimmy Savile's car at a charity auction
is gutted that his investment will now presumably have gone tits up. But if he leaves it for a few years I am sure he can sell it to the London Dungeon or Madame Tussauds Chamber of Horrors.
It's astonishing how quickly (though much too late) this story has rocketed from rumour to accusation to acknowledged fact. As compelling and horrifying as the evidence is I seem to be alone in worrying about a man being tried and convicted by an ITV documentary and the newspapers (that failed to break the story when he was alive and many of which pedalled saucy stories and pictures involving under age girls). But given that so much evidence has come out one of the real questions has to be why didn't this happen when he was alive? Taking away his knighthood and his gravestone aren't any kind of punishment to a dead man.
Although everyone is now saying there were stories and rumours about Savile all along, not many of them really alluded to this subject. There are stories about lots of celebrities, many of which are clearly urban myths involving pumped stomachs full of semen or photographs of someone having sex with a dog or high-backed armchairs and like most people I assumed the rumours that I had heard about Savile were in the realms of the fantastical. I commented when he died that someone should check he wasn't faking it in the hope that he would get a night in the mortuary, to the anger of at least one man on Twitter (who may not be so keen to defend Savile now). But were those seemingly ludicrous stories also true? Or do they explain why people didn't raise too much of a fuss at the time? Because they would assume that anything they heard was another stupid and impossible urban myth. Is it just too horrific to investigate? If you do your dirty deeds in the mortuary then it's unlikely there will be many witnesses. Though maybe Derek Acorah can get on the case for us.
It seems likely some other names are going to be coming out soon, but ultimately I think the police are going to just have to arrest the 1970s.
