In last Friday's blog
I broke the story that Jimmy Savile might have cheated on his Marathons and with my tongue somewhat in my cheek asked why the newspapers were not following up this shameful rumour. Unbelievably today
the Evening Standard did so. A couple of people contacted me to ask if I had a comment about this, claiming that I was the source for the story, but I see no evidence of that in the piece, which includes different information (stating that Marathon officials helped in the evil scheme, something that I had never said or indeed heard before - I assumed his accomplices, if they even existed, were not from the Marathon organisations). In any case the main point of my blog had been to lightly mock the press hysteria and the fact that it's now open season to print any rumour about this man, when before he died no one dared to even suggest any hint of the dark stories that were floating around about him, partly because some of them were unbelievable and partly because he would have sued.
I say that, but the boys from SOTCAA tweeted this link to an episode of TMWRNJ which begins with me and Stew dressed as Savile (I have no memory of this at all)
and making a fairly blatant reference to the rumour of Savile's mortuary based antics. It would be hard to claim that no one at the BBC knew of these stories when one of their TV shows was (somehow) being allowed to allude to them. But then again no one at the BBC really watched our show, as becomes clear if you watch the rest of the episode and see the kind of stuff we were getting away with at lunchtime on a Sunday: jokes about sex with animals, a dark sketch about a father hoping his son was dead, me punching an effigy of -accidentally the wrong- Baroness Young in the face, suggesting that Baroness Young wants to watch 16 year old boys having sex, joking about a woman having the surname "Muff" and then accidentally making a double-entendre about it being something you put your hands in, Jesus enjoying having his feet cleaned by a woman.... it's pretty full on. Even I found it a bit close to the bone watching it back, though was mainly upset by how muted the audience reaction was to most of it.
People certainly did know about the rumours of Savile spending the night in the mortuary, but dismissed them as nonsense and almost certainly correctly. Because even if the rumours are true there is no way that anyone could really know they were. It is by its very nature a crime without witnesses, though hopefully the police will be getting in touch with Psychic Sally to see if anyone on the other side is complaining of a sore bottom.
Let's see if the Standard runs with either the Pyschic Sally or This Morning revelation next week and then we'll know that this blog is informing rather than mocking the newspapers.
