ART AND THE ARTIST

The So-vile saga, as it continues onwards and upwards, seems to be turning into the “gift that just keeps on giving…” but, whilst there is obviously a massive sense of betrayal and having been betrayed by the public in general, and anyone who enjoyed “family entertainment” programmes on TV in the seventies and eighties, my own thoughts do keep on returning to this idea of whether we can ever separate the “art” from the “artist…”

Do all of those various “Sounds of the era” DVDs now become instantly unplayable because of the presence of “that man” in some of the clips between the pieces of music you bought the DVD to experience…? Do episodes of “Top of the Pops 77” (or whichever year they were up to on the BBC4 reruns) no longer have value as entertainment because the leering face of that creature pops up to make a tit of himself between the performances of the musicians…? Were all of those nostalgic chart rundown shows which I used to listen to on Sunday afternoons, any less enjoyable because of what I know now about the presenter…?

Of course, it would be more than a tad insensitive to be showing them now, which is why any images of the grinning monster have been restricted to the news programmes in recent weeks, but will there ever come a time when it is deemed to be “okay” to screen those shows again…?

And what of  “Jim’ll Fix It”…? Will any reruns of those shows ever be seen again upon our TV screens…? And would anyone really want to watch them, or even be able to ever view them in quite the same way, knowing what we appear to know now about the eponymous presenter…? And yet, for a very long time, that show was a cornerstone of “family entertainment” in this country and “entertained” a lot of us, providing some of the very best “television memories” for a generation, all of which gets lost on this tsunami of loathing, as the baby, the bath water, the bath and even the bathroom all get chucked out in our collective (and maybe just a little bit sanctimonious) erasure of history.

Does that rather lovely film about Peter Cushing having a rose named after his wife now have to be forever tainted because of an association with the television programme it was filmed for…?

Those shows, alongside the music and performances of Gary Glitter, are now likely to be obliterated forever from our screens which brings me once again to this question of “the art” and “the artist” and whether those songs ought never to be heard again, even if there were people out there who might once have admitted to having quite liked them and, let’s be honest here, actually buying them.

After all, somebody put his songs at the top of the hit parade and made the performer a household name, but can you really listen to the songs in quite the same way once you realise the lifestyle of the man singing them, another face, incidentally, that British Rail once thought “user-friendly” enough to front up their “Student Railcard” campaign…

I’m sensing a pattern here…

Nowadays, however, and despite his many years in the “celebrity wilderness” due to his connection with dark deeds and misdemenours, it does now seems “acceptable” to show Michael Barrymore’s quiz shows, at least on some of the more obscure channels, so maybe we are more collectively forgetful or forgiving than we like to imagine we are, so long as we can turn on our TV sets and be “amused” for half an hour.

A Sickert - "Le Lit du Cuivre" (c1906)

Are the paintings of Walter Sickert any less impressive because some people have decided, one hundred years or more after the fact, that he might have been Jack the Ripper...? Then again, Hitler was a painter, but nobody seems in any hurry to be showing regular exhibitions of his work these days, and there’s little in the way of repeats for any Arfur Mullard shows since his daughter’s revelations, so maybe I’m wrong about that...

But still this issue of the art and the artist nags at me, and I suspect that it’s generally about the nature of what they’ve done. The circumstances of Jimi Hendrix’s death are not exactly a good role model for his young fans, but that’s just seen as the tragic consequences of his “sex and drugs and rock and roll” lifestyle and makes his death a “tragic loss” rather being seen as being more like the sad, lonely and pointless demise of any other nameless junkie, and, whilst he did die of the effects of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol, at least he had the good grace to not do so whilst sharing a bed with a six year old (not that I would want to suggest that he would ever have been...)

Music is a strange temptress anyway. I’m not a huge fan of the band “All Saints” but I think “Pure Shores” is a sublime piece of music. Would I like it any less if it had turned out that they were all coke snorting prostitutes, or, perversely, would I like it more for precisely the same reasons...?

Perhaps we expect far too much of our celebrity heroes...? Perhaps we look up to them and put them on pedestals that (some of them, at least) feel they think they’re unworthy of, and set them standards that it’s almost impossible for them to live up to. Sometimes, in the past, those “standards” might not have been all that high (if old men goosing nurses for “comedy effect” in those old “Carry On” films is anything to go by, then the 70s must have been a very odd place to live... another country, in fact...) but nevertheless, we do tend to put a weight of “expectation” upon some of them that they can find to be be a huge level of pressure to try and live up to.

There are, despite the jaunty outgoing personalities they project, lots of depressed comedians. Does the fact that Tony Hancock was a nasty alcoholic, or that Frankie Howerd used to proposition every nice young man that came his way, or that the Krankies were supposedly “swingers” make their comic performances any less funny? (Okay, I’ll admit that perhaps the Krankies is not the best example of this...)

Of course, lots of actors whom people admire for their wit and eloquence (or just the form of their bodies) are actually shy or very dull without a script full of other people’s words to say (or a good, old-fashioned airbrushing...). When interviewed they can come across as taciturn fools if their image is not carefully managed and yet, even when we know this, their films can remain just as popular, and the so-called “dark side” of the “classic” Hollywood period doesn’t seem to make people regard it with any less fondness.

(Talking of the “dark side” by the way, I’ve heard people comparing the persona of that disgraced DJ to that of Senator Palpatine in the “Star Wars” movies, with his popular “public face” hiding the dark secrets within, and it’s not the worst analogy I’ve come across...)

But we kind of accept that comedians and actors can have both a “real” life and “performance” life, and as long as what they do isn’t too extreme, we tend to forgive them any number of shortcomings because of the laughter and entertainment they give us. Perhaps it’s because we know that there’s inevitably a price to be paid for all of that natural talent…

Or something...

After all, up until a month ago, I imagine that there were hundreds of people who had met that vile man, perhaps under very difficult personal circumstances, in hospitals or at fundraising events, and had come away from the meeting feeling okay about it and that they had a “good memory” of meeting him, and might even have spent time in the same pubs as those who were muttering those dark secrets about him, telling everyone how “great” he’d been with them or their kids…

I think the sense of betrayal cuts so deep because of the man’s high profile. After all, this was a man who was deemed to be absolutely the best person to front up campaigns against “Stranger Danger”, or supporting child minders (http://bitly.com/Re4tMt), or promoting road safety (“Clunk, Click Every Trip”), or introducing us the future and “The Age of the Train…” If there was ONE person back then who you might just believe your children would be safe to be left around, I think that a well-known philanthropist children’s television stalwart, who had friends amongst the royal family and at the very top of government, would feel like a pretty “safe” choice…

How wrong we all could be…