ALL STARS AND THE LONELY DEAD

This is the cover of my “TV All-Stars” Annual (although I say “my” - it might once possibly have actually been a Christmas present given to my sister) which dates back to 1969 when it was published and the whole “world of telly” was a very different place, and where “stars” and “celebrities” (however minor) were private and distant individuals who might occasionally appear in publications like this, but generally lived in a world somewhere in orbit around ours into which few of the rest of us ever ventured unless we were contestants on something or other.

I was going to write a piece about this book for my other “strand” known as “Light Under A Bushel” which seems to be where I choose to talk about the tat I’ve accumulated, but recent events have now made the content slightly more “toxic” than it once was, which I’ll come to later on.

This particular publication with its pink-toned cover and publicity shots of the “stars” of the time (Cilla Black, Des O’Connor, Roger Moore and Stratford Johns…!) seems to be aimed very squarely at a particular segment of the market and, because it is an “annual” I would like to suggest that that market might, on the whole, have been the fourteen year old schoolgirl, more about which we shall return to in a minute.

In amongst the usual fun and games of any “annual” (like crosswords and the like), can also be found surprisingly frank and comprehensive articles from the days when the content of such books was actually “written” as opposed to being a load of pictures with captions. Articles like “Even without the Halo, Roger Moore is one of most exciting TV Personalities” or “Relaxing with Andy Williams” or “The ‘So Natural’ Val Doonican” or “The Man with the Gob-stopper Eyes – Marty Feldman” or “From ‘Down Under’ to the Top – That’s Rolf Harris” all feature, which probably says a lot about what the adults producing the annual thought that those fourteen year old girls were interested in.

There are also interviews under the banner of “Meet…” which include Eric and Ern, Jack Douglas, Freddie Davies (“A Boost to Budgie Sales”) and articles about the (mostly ITV) stars of the time such as Cilla Black, Ken Dodd, Tommy Cooper, Harry Worth, Hughie Green, Des O’Connor (who, we are told, “had to laugh to survive”), Tom Jones, Simon Dee, The Beatles, Lulu, Mike Yarwood, Johnny Morris and Mike and Bernie Winters and it is rather astonishing to think just how long some (but not all) of those entertainers’ careers and legacies have lasted.

There are also pages showing pictures from “new” shows like “Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)”, “Strange Report” and “Honey Lane” and other articles like “Stars of Today – Yesterday” and “Stars at Play” where the publicity pictures come out in force, as well as behind the scenes articles on “Match of the Day” and “Top of the Pops” and photopages of “TV’s Singing Stars” which include The Bachelors, Dusty Springfield, Kenneth McKellar, Andee Silver and Edmund Hockridge…

Precisely…

This was all coming from an era when information like this was like gold dust, and not just available at the click of a mouse, and the whole publication is kicked off with a foreword by Ken Dodd and a huge picture of Engelbert Humperdinck, which should tell us far more about the popular culture of the late 1960s than any number of talking heads on TV documentaries about the time could.

There’s also a page where you could match your birth date to that of certain TV stars of the time. The one I matched with dimmed into obscurity at around the same time as this book was published, and I’ve always wondered whether it was my fault that this happened to the poor guy…

Alongside all of those other features, the like of which would probably also have been seen in the various “teen” comics of the time is an article entitled “One of TV’s Characters” about a certain Mr Jimmy Savile, then still years ahead of becoming TV’s “Mr Fix-It” and the legendary “much-loved” TV personality who was mourned so publicly around a year ago but whose reputation (such as it was) now lies (perhaps rightly, but who really knows…?) in tatters thanks to recent revelations in the media.

I don’t know whether Sir Jimmy Savile was a serial child molester or not, although it does now seem that the evidence is pointing more and more in that direction. I’d go as far as to say that - up until a few days ago anyway - I didn’t really care all that much about whether he was, presuming (probably naively but instinctively) at first that, as he’s been dead a year and, even if he was such a monster, he couldn’t really do any more harm to his alleged “victims” any more…

But, then again, I ought to have cared more. After all, a lot of other people seem to be going out of their way to care about it all very much indeed. Initially however, I genuinely thought “Who am I to question the rights and wrongs of such things?” even if they failed to come out during the man’s (admittedly bizarre) lifetime. Such things, if true, are pretty monstrous however, and the damage lingers far beyond the deeds themselves, and don’t become any less monstrous simply because there’s a “celebrity” involved. In fact, they perhaps become more so because of the betrayal of trust involved and the possibilities of cover-ups to protect that once much-respected “reputation…”

Of course, we’ll never really know. Stories will be stuck to, believed or not, and time will flow on and perhaps all that Jimmy Savile will now ever be remembered for are those lurid headlines published a year after his death. Not that it makes any real difference to the wickedness of the crimes, but we know that the social culture of the time with regards to male/female relationships were very different back in the 1970s, just as we know that some young people back then were inclined to make themselves appear “older” to get close to rock stars and other players in the music business. I can’t imagine that many of the musicians being “pestered” by so-called “groupies” in those days stopped to check many of their birth certificates, so maybe other stories from those times will also now come out as and when that generation of performers are safely dead and gone (or perhaps earlier, given the current climate), leaving only their fortunes to pick over. After all, regret over past indiscretions combined with the chance of a quick payday can make certain people rethink their own actions with the benefit of hindsight.

I’m not saying that any of it was right, let me make that quite clear. It’s just that, in matters of an intimate nature, there are always many (as the current literary cliché might have it) shades of grey, and my current concern is more to do with what those various members of the modern press pack could still do to those alleged victims as the media consume and digest their stories only to spit them out later. However, well… that’s a completely different sort of “abuse” isn’t it…?

But I shouldn’t really be discussing this anyway. I don’t really understand enough about it at all, and other people are in far better positions to decide the rights and wrongs of such things. I do know that it is so difficult to know what other eras were really like if you never lived in them, just as I know that our own world will seem very strange to those living fifty years from now. However, it’s not unreasonable to look upon these things and say that they were wrong, even if, at the time they might have just seemed to be the perks of a celebrity lifestyle, or whatever other justification was given to it. Even so, unless any of us were in the room at the time, it’s really hard to know how any of these incidents actually unfolded.

Nevertheless, maybe I’m selfish, but I do also actually object to this growing tendency to piss on people’s lives once they’ve gone and once someone feels that it’s “safe” (or profitable) to do so. Of course, if he was this “monster” then people do have every right to come forward and say so, but I do – on some very selfish level I admit - resent the disappointment of finding out that my childhood heroes were not the paragons of virtue that I once thought they were, but, after all, just flawed human beings.

Mind you, it does seem that people are more willing to believe that there’s something “dodgy” about someone who might be considered “eccentric” in the sense that people are more likely to believe a story about, say, a lovably eccentric (but a little bit odd) comedian being “up to something” than perhaps a well-known footballing family man (who is therefore far above reproach) to pick two random (and, as far as I know squeaky clean in that regard) celebrity examples from the big bag of famously un-named names.

“He always struck me as being a little strange...” seems to give people carte blanche to make up what the hell they like and be believed, because people who are not considered to be “normal” are then obviously “suspicious” even though the vast majority of abusers live perfectly “normal” seeming lives, but (strangely) don’t have a vast fortune to be picked over once they’re no longer around to defend themselves against their accusers.

They say that you can’t libel the dead. Recently I happened to observe an online conversation about “Arfur” Mullard which referred to him as a “monstrous man” and I was intrigued enough to go and find out why some people considered him so. The story is quite dreadful when you find out about it, but the interesting thing to me is that until I spotted that exchange on Twitter, I had heard absolutely nothing about it and, right up until that very day, I remembered him merely as having been a comic actor of limited range who had a surprisingly successful career back in the day.

I don’t know. Perhaps I don’t read the “right” types of newspapers, but it certainly it was never the kind of thing that turned up in the pages of publications like that TV All Stars Annual…

More innocent times, I guess, although they can’t have been all that innocent if all that kind of thing was going on…