Jim Fixed It: the Real Savile Scandal

The Jimmy Savile scandal, presently erupting day by day like a volcano, is another story I caught in part when I was abroad.  What, Jimmy Savile, the Jimmy Savile, Sir Jimmy Savile, the great British cultural icon, was a paedophile?  Now then, now then, guys and gals, what next?  Morecambe and Wise were into devil worship, perhaps?

Please forgive the conceit but I was wise before the event.  I never liked the man; I always thought him creepy, not the sort of person I would want in the same room with me.  Paul Merton highlighted this once on Have I Got News For You, the comedy news quiz, when he drew a comparison between Savile and Norman Bates from the movie Psycho.  It was in the context of his unhealthy attitude towards his mother, whom he referred to as ‘the Duchess.’ 

I have a transcript from this show, one which never made it on to the telly screens.  It was recorded some years ago when Angus Deayton was the host.  Savile was the celebrity guest on Paul Merton’s team.  Allow me to give you a small sample from the opening;

During the headline round:

DEAYTON: You used to be a wrestler didn't you?

SAVILLE: I still am.

DEAYTON: Are you?

SAVILLE: I'm feared in every girls' school in the country.

(Audience laugh)

DEAYTON: Yeah, I've heard about that.

SAVILLE: What have you heard?

DEAYTON: I've...

MERTON: Something about a cunt with a rancid, pus-filled cock.

(Huge audience laugh; Awkward pause)

SAVILLE: I advise you to wash your mouth out, my friend...

MERTON: That's what she had to do! (Audience laughs)

Don’t get too excited.  It’s a hoax, dating back to 1999.  But it revealed a truth that dare not speak its name.  It was based on rumours about the man’s sexual conduct, rumours that now appear to have been based on fact.  I say appear because the matter is still sub judice, so to speak, a consideration the popular press has, in the usual style, put to one side. 

I should add, for those not familiar with Savile and all his work, that he began his TV career as a DJ on a chart show called Top of the Pops. Latterly he hosted Jim’ll Fix It, in which he ‘fixed it’ for children to have their dreams come true.  It now seems he made their nightmares come true also.  

There are so many aspects to this evolving story.  It touches on the semi-religious nature of modern celebrity, on the creation of false idols, on the sublimation of suspicions and on the attitude of a major public Corporation.  The Corporation, of course, is the BBC and the creepy Savile was their star.  It comes down, if you like, to a question of priorities.

Savile died last October.  In the usual manner the BBC scheduled a tribute, to be broadcast at Christmas.  Rather inconveniently the right hand did not appear to know what the left hand was doing, the left-hand in this case being Newsnight, a current affairs show.  While the glittering tribute was being assembled, Newsnight gathered the dirt.  As I’m sure you know – who could not know? – senior management allowed the cloying celebration to go ahead while binning the Newsnight exposé. 

It came out.  These things can’t be hidden, and Savile is not around to threaten and silence with super injunctions.  The Great British Public, in true Mark Anthony style, has turned on their hero: they want to bury Savile, not to praise him.  Rather, they want to heap his memory in dead dogs.  But if Savile is a Frankenstein Monster – and of that I have not much personal doubt – he is their creation.  Always beware the passions of the multitude. 

Scapegoats are being sought and the BBC has them aplenty.  Writing recently in the Spectator, John Simpson, the Corporation’s world news editor, says that the organisation made, in his words, a fearful mistake in not broadcasting the Savile exposé at the end of last year. 

No, that’s wrong; the ‘fearful mistake’ was allowing the tribute show to go ahead, knowing full-well that questions were being raised about their star’s past conduct.  This looks to me like the worst kind of opportunism and hypocrisy, qualities that now seem typical of the BBC. 

I return to Savile himself.  The celebrity of this talentless, fumbling and inarticulate poseur is a wonder and a mystery to behold.  I agree with Charles Moore - also writing in the Spectator - that Savile’s popularity was a symptom of a wider cultural sickness, an inability to probe below surfaces.  It’s rather nauseating to see the press in their daily demolition, when it did so much to build up this mediocrity in the first place.  A country that once marvelled to the wit of Oscar Wilde latterly marvelled to the inanities of Jim Fixing It.  Perhaps that’s the real scandal.  

Jamie Oliver – the Nanny Cook

I've discovered that Jamie Oliver, a telly cook who could bore for England, not content with lecturing us on what to eat is now lecturing America in a show called Food Revolution. What follows is my response to this news, posted on a discussion thread. It’s been slightly adapted for use here.

I saw this thread yesterday and decided to hold back, for the simple reason that my first emotion was one of anger at the subliminal message that is being peddled by this ghastly cook, this frightful male Mary Poppins. The reference here is a deliberated one, but let me hold off on this for a bit until I've made some more general points.

So, his preaching from the culinary pulpit is being broadcast in the US as Food Revolution, is it? One should always try to understand revolutions, in politics or in food, by looking at previous examples, by looking at the route they have taken. In this regard America’s present is our past.

The last government here, the government of Tony Blair and latterly Gordon Brown, was one of the worst in our history, chipping away systematically at all sorts of civil liberties, seeking to micro-manage lives, right down to the most intimate and personal levels. Things got so bad that it was even the subject of a book - Philip Johnston’s Bad Laws. In the introduction he made the following points;

Yet despite the claim to represent the British people, New Labour actually felt like an alien interloper in an ancient land, preaching the fetish of modernism and despising tradition. It evinced a predisposition to micromanage individual behaviour and ride roughshod over liberties, both of which are very non-British traits.

I wrote my own gloss on this book, posted on 17 May last year (Bad Law), but for short here is one key passage;

We now have more CCTV cameras than any other nation in the world though there is no evidence at all that they are effective in reducing crime. We are observed even more closely than the citizens of such places as North Korea and Cuba. We are beset by armies of parking enforces and clampers, as well as being pestered by a growing army of health fascists. The smoking ban threatens to destroy the pub, one of the great British institutions. Latterly the nation’s health supremo has alluded to the deleterious effects of ‘passive drinking.’ Even school lunch boxes, an intimate bond between parent and child, can be investigated by the healthy eating brigade.

Yes, that's one dimension of this appalling onslaught - the fascists of the healthy eating brigade. And who do you think they adopted as an avatar, who do you think Tony Blair adopted as the food guru, one who would bring a 'revolution' in eating, focused on school lunches? I don't think I need to say, do I?

Oliver was sold as the food Poppins; well, he wasn't; that's just how I see it - a sanctimonious, hectoring Hector, who was out to 'reform' the nation's eating habits. Up and down the country schools, anxious not to appear out of step, anxious not to be victimised by the snoopers, the government inspectors and the do-gooders, adopted 'healthy lunches'.

People were even empowered, as I have said, to look at the contents of lunch boxes and send lecturing written warnings to parents if they did not like what they saw. Even in the worst days of Soviet tyranny I doubt things ever went that far. What was the result? 'Healthy' options went uneaten; children went hungry; mothers were seen at school gates, handing through emergency 'food aid.'

It really is appalling that this disease has now hit the States, this nannying Jamie-knows-best approach. I see from one recent news report that Chicago has even banned home made lunches. My God, what’s happened to America, what's happened to the Land of the Free, when this sort of state-tyranny is allowed to pass without major protest? How far are people prepared to allow things to go? What’s next: compulsory work camps for the deviant eaters?

Oliver is no more than the populist face of the nanny state, a lisping culinary megalomaniac and school-dinner obsessive, as Brendan O’Neil wrote in last week’s edition of the Spectator. If that's not bad enough he, so far as America is concerned, is a foreigner, a sanctimonious outsider. Actually if the American people like him so much I wish they would adopt him on a permanent basis. The sooner my country is free of this ass the better.

I'm annoyed; it's obvious I'm annoyed, but I do emphasise it's not at those who watch this show - it's at the lie they are being sold, that people can be corralled like sheep into adopting a 'healthy' lifestyle, the kind of lifestyle sanctioned by Oliver and his insufferable kind. For America to be seduced by this condescending and patronising food moralist is just too awful. If the price of freedom is fat kids then let it be.

Capote’s Taylor

Truman Capote was a writer of unique genius, one who could cover so many genres, fiction and non-fiction, the creator of some brilliant literary cameos. I’ve loved his work ever since I read Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which introduced me to Holly Golightly, a free spirit, the one figure in literature that I identify more with than any other, the delightful, effervescent, wonderful Holly, always travelling and never arriving.

A few years ago I saw Capote, an excellent biopic of the author, played with commendable skill by Philip Seymour Hoffman. It follows in Capote’s steps as he, with the aid of Nell Harper Lee, his childhood friend and fellow writer, researches the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, a quest that would end in the publication of In Cold Blood, in so many ways the definitive non-fiction novel, disturbing and horribly compelling at one and the same time.

The recent death of the veteran actress Elizabeth Taylor brought to mind another aspect of Capote’s work – the detailed and memorable little pen-portraits he painted of some of the celebrities he knew, not the kind of superficial tittle-tattle one usually associates with this kind of thing, but revealing, affectionate and intimate. There are several in my A Capote Reader, an anthology which covers various aspects of his work, short stories, novellas, reportage and travel writing as well as his portraits.

My favourite of his pen sketches by far is A Beautiful Child, an account of the day he spent with Marilyn Monroe, but Elizabeth Taylor, published in 1974, is almost as good, not just for the sympathetic way he depicts her but for the obvious empathy between the writer and the actress, which, in so few words, enables him to get well below the surface.

My rereading was well-rewarded. He describes how he once visited her in hospital, where she was recovering from a bout of life-threatening illness. In response to a question of his she replies that she wasn’t afraid, that she was too busy fighting, that she was not ready, as she put it, to “go over that horizon”, not being the type. She clearly had a ‘type’ in mind, as Capote immediately deduced;

“Perhaps not; not like Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland, both of whom had yearned to go over the horizon, some darker rainbow, and before succeeding, had attempted that voyage innumerable times. And yet there was some kind of common thread between these three, Taylor, Monroe, Garland – I knew the last two fairly well and yes, there was something. An emotional extremism, a dangerously greater need to be loved than to love, a hotheaded willingness of an incompetent gambler to throw good money after bad.”

When it came to life and relationships Taylor was certainly a gambler, evidenced by her turbulent relationship with Richard Burton, another movie veteran, a relationship itself with enough drama for a movie; a relationship that, in some ways, did make a movie in the screen version of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, where they played opposite one another in the lead rolls. They were the most celebrated off-screen lovers, as Capote says, since Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson.

The essay concludes several years after this hospital visit. Taylor is in New York with Burton, where he is appearing in a play. After one performance Capote joins them in their hotel suite, where he shares in a late-evening buffet. When Burton leaves the room to fetch some more champagne Taylor describes their relationship:

Oh, we quarrel. But at least he’s worth quarrelling with. He’s really brilliant. He’s read everything and I can talk to him – there’s nothing I can’t talk to him about…But the most important thing is what happens between a man and a woman who love each other. Or any two people who can love each other.

Capote writes, as Taylor draws the curtains against the rain, she looked at him sightlessly, like Galatea surveying some ultimate horizon. “What do you suppose will become of us?,” she asked, but the answer came already supplied – “I guess, when you find what you’ve always wanted, that’s not where the beginning begins, that’s when the end starts.”

I felt sad the first time I read this, even sadder the second. I hope not to find what I’ve always wanted for some time yet, though I can’t help but envy the actress. I think also of the brilliance of past celebrity, the brilliance of Taylor and Burton, both now over that ultimate horizon, compared with the mediocrity of the present.

The regrets of Hanoi Jane

There was an interview with Jane Fonda, the daughter of the late Henry Fonda the actor and herself an actor, in one of the glossy Sunday supplements, introducing itself with a picture of her on the front cover. There she is, a seventy-two year old woman, certainly with a reasonable figure, bending over and reaching out to touch her toes as she turns smiling towards the camera, obviously the result of her endless workout routines, allowing her to retain a high degree of suppleness. Indeed, there she is, just below a text saying, You'd be smiling too if you could do this as 72 (and this is just the warm-up). What does she do for a second act, I wonder? Keep reading; you will find out presently.

There are more pictures of her inside, including one closer to her face. The hair is obviously dyed and she has clearly had as many facelifts as some people have breakfasts. She certainly looks younger than her years but this is not youth; this is a grotesque parody of youth, this unnatural, stiff face, devoid of the signals that give people life, expression and feeling. In a bogus search for something beyond her she has lost all dignity, including the dignity of age, the grace of change. She looks good in the way that a three thousand year old Egyptian mummy looks good. But the same picture also shows her hands, the real give away, the hands of a woman in her seventies. Presumably it's beyond the power of even the most skilled cosmetic surgeon to do anything about this, to alter the true signs of advancing time.

She is just a sad old woman trying so hard not to look like a sad old woman. Oh, what a catty thing to say. I simply can't help myself. I'm not particularly interested in Jane Fonda, or so much of the celebrity ephemera that appears in the supplements. I simply glance through them, usually never reading the articles in question. Fonda, along with so many others of the Hollywood set, can spend as much money as they wish looking for eternal youth. But there was one other picture that made me pause and take this unserious person seriously. It was a picture of her in Hanoi in 1972 during the Vietnam War, a picture of her posing by the side of a manned anti-aircraft gun, sitting, looking as if she is taking part in the action. There she is - Hanoi Jane.

I simply do not comprehend treason, comprehend those who side with foreign powers and foreign ideologies. Fonda thought the Vietnam War was wrong. I do, too; I believe it was a noble cause fought for the wrong reasons, based on a series of mistaken assumptions. If I had been American and alive at the time I might have argued against it, as I argued in my schooldays against the Second Iraq War, but I would never, no matter what, have taken the Baghdad Step, or the Hanoi Step, in the case of Jane. I could never do or say anything that would go against the fundamental interests of my country.

Not so Jane. When she went to Hanoi she denounced the leaders of the United States as 'war criminals.' Then came that infamous pose, looking as if she was helping shoot down American planes. This is no naive youth; she was in her early thirties at the time. She was asked in the interview if she regretted anything in her life. The stock response came immediately;

I regret one thing: I regret sitting on an anti-aircraft gun and I will go to my grave regretting that...I take responsibility for my actions. I wasn't thinking. Going to North Vietnam was no big deal, but being photographed like that changed everything. I will pay for it for the rest of my life and deservedly so because it was a terrible thing. Terrible thing.

I suppose I should commend her for her honesty but I can see only the treason and only the traitor. There are some things that are simply beyond forgiveness. After all these years she has still not been forgiven by some, those who also went to Vietnam, though under less luxurious circumstances. During a recent book tour Fonda was spat upon by one of those people, one of those little people, one of the people presumably whose scars are more than skin deep. I can understand because I have met people in Georgia, men who went to Vietnam as boys, much younger than me now, who were spat upon on their less than glorious return, accused of being 'baby killers'.

But Jane regrets, at least some things she regrets, regrets, I suspect, the negative impact this had on her career. Some things, I say, because she does not regret broadcasting on Radio Hanoi. Tokyo Rose or Hanoi Jane, what’s the difference? Treachery always seems to have the same face, no matter how tight the skin is pulled.

The silliness of celebrity

So you think celebrity is a modern phenomenon, well think again! Celebrity has always been with us to some degree or other. In the Middle Ages the cult of saints was big business, for the monasteries and cathedrals who needed relics to attract cash-bearing pilgrims, and for those freelancers who sold such holy artefacts on the open market, bones, hair, pieces of the true cross, if there was a demand there was a supply.

The ingenuity was really quite impressive. Jesus had ascended whole into heaven, so there was nothing left to turn into relics: no bones, no hair, no nails, no skin - nothing. Ah, but wait, hold there a moment on the question of skin. Jesus was born a Jew, and like all Jewish babies…yes, that’s right; there was a lively trade in Holy Foreskins! Foreskins, in the plural; what, there was more than one? Indeed, because relics, like Biblical loafs and fishes, were liable to multiply.

Then the Enlightenment dawned, the rosy light of the Age of Reason thrown into the dark corners of superstition. Oh, but, like nature, the human imagination abhors a vacuum. New devotional objects had to be found, new forms of secular worship. The cult of the saint is dead; long live the cult of the artist! A lock of Saint Cecilia’s hair may no longer be in much demand, so let’s have that of John Keats’ instead, a new object of sacredly profane devotion.

The November issue of Standpoint had an interesting exchange of views between the historian Tim Blanding and the critic Jonathan Bate on the place of Romanticism in contemporary culture, touching on this question, the question of artistic celebrity, amongst other things. In passing Bate mentioned the replacement of the cult of saints with the cult of the artist; I’m simply adding a little flesh to the skeleton.

It’s important to understand that this is not just about things, about the veneration of objects associated with a particular person, but about life stories, about biography. A great part of western literature before the Enlightenment was made up of devotional literature, particularly accounts of the lives and alleged miracles of the saints. And then there is the early form of autobiography in Saint Augustine’s Confessions or, still later, Saint Teresa’s Life of Herself. The essential message of both of these is not vanity, of course, but the discovery of God.

The break comes with the Enlightenment, with Romanticism in particular, where man, and I do mean man, becomes the measure of all things, not God. With this in comes vanity, immense vanity; in comes Jean Jacques Rousseau, the architect, in so many ways, of a new mode of thought based upon egoism and self-celebration. In place of Saint Augustine’s Confessions we have Rousseau’s Confessions. In place of religious experience comes worldly experience.

I should make it clear that I have a particular contempt for Rousseau as a man and as a thinker, the man who turned Reason into a religion, a shabby prophet, a harbinger of a new Promised Land, Moses to Robespierre’s Aaron. But there is, I suppose, a brutal honesty to his autobiography, the same brutal honesty that Saint Augustine displayed in his, honesty, though, without redemption. Rousseau gave away all five of his illegitimate children (he does not even trouble himself to record their names) to a state orphanage, a virtual death sentence at the time. Never mind that; for the real child he gave us the ideal: he gave us Emile, full of advice on how to rear children in the best manner possible. Never has hypocrisy been more blatantly displayed.

To be fair Rousseau is not the only monster of egoism - Lord George Byron, another celebrity of the Romantic age, was just as bad - but he is the original, the prime example of bad faith. In general I have ambivalent feelings about the whole Romantic movement, fascinated and repelled at one and the same time; fascinated by the nobility of Goethe, repelled by the degeneracy of De Sade. Oh, yes, he’s part of the Romantic Movement and the cult of secular celebrity too. My view here is not a second-hand one, believe me; for I walked in to Justine and 120 Days of Sodom and walked out again just as quickly. I simply don’t have the nose for this sort of thing, and I’ve you’ve read these books, even only glanced at them, you will know exactly what I mean.

And so it has gone on, the cult of celebrity, the celebration of the self, through Romanticism into the modern age, gone on in tighter and tighter, ever diminishing circles, from the ridiculous to the even more ridiculous, from Rousseau to Paris Hilton! Lord, what fools these mortals be!

Stephen Fry gets his rocks off

Let me begin by saying a word to all the men I’ve slept with. Yes, you are disgusting, your physical demands disgust me, your bodies disgust me. I only agreed to have sex as part of my ongoing quest to find a meaningful relationship. Even in that few of you have even come close to scratch. So, I apologise for leading you on.

I’ve just one slight problem. I’m bisexual; I have been for years. Should I also apologise, I wonder, to the women I’ve been to bed with? Did I find them disgusting; did they find me disgusting? Oh, my, how confusing it all is. I know: there is a simple solution: I shall ask Stephen Fry, that guru of sex, of men, of women and of all things in between.

Some of you will have had the misfortune to have heard of this man, the Twitter supreme, who’s close on two million followers hang on every tweet, every mediocre pronouncement. He’s a sort of all round TV person: a sleb, a luvvie, a performer…and a homosexual. Yes, homosexual, that’s the one thing he’s sure about if nothing else, this Oscar Wilde for the age of mediocrity, the one thing he’s forever wittering about, a bon mot here, an aphorism there. He feels sorry for all you heterosexual guys out there; he says so in an interview in the November issue of Attitude. The problem is we girls simply don’t like sex; we merely use it as a currency in the pursuit of romantic love;

If women liked sex as much as men, there would be straight cruising areas. Women would go hang around in churchyards thinking ‘God, I’ve got to get my fucking rocks off’ or they’d go to Hampstead Heath and meet strangers to shag behind a bush. It doesn’t happen. Why? Because the only women you can have sex with like that wish to be paid for it.

Yes, what a delightful prospect, sex behind a bush in a graveyard. Or there is the other possibility, I suppose, the kind of thing that men like Fry used to prefer – sex in public lavatories, a little less salubrious, I suppose, but at least one is out of the open air. It’s called cottaging, I think, the tea room trade, where a couple perform a sex act in one cubicle while a single individual performs a natural act in another (sorry, not that there is anything in the least ‘unnatural’ about Fry and his brothers, but you will understand the difference here). So, yes, on they go, passion against a background symphony of smells and sounds that one finds in such places. Well, maybe the bush in the pale moonlight is better after all.

The subliminal message being delivered here by Friar Fuck has nothing to do with female sexual desire – about which he knows less than nothing - or indeed about male desire. No, it’s about Stephen Fry; it’s about his perception that male lust is animal-like and disgusting; it clearly disgusts him so, by inference, it must disgust other people, especially women. Oh, there is so much Doctor Freud could have made of this, so much he could have read into Fry’s sexual obsessions, his obvious self-loathing, and his inadequacies as a human being. Now in his fifties he’s seemingly in a relationship with one Steven Webb, a twenty-five year old actor. If anybody should be asked to give a view on sex and disgust then surely, surely it has to be him!

Meanwhile, all you poor straight guys, all you guys Fry feels sorry for, you might consider that there is an alternative to a warm bed and a hot female body. Stephen Fry awaits you on Hampstead Heath. Before you know it you will be getting your rocks off behind a bush in some churchyard, all under a crisp November moon. No need to worry about a relationship trap.