FALL FROM GRACE

We were in the Lake District for the weekend last year when the news broke that this most iconic of figures from our national  consciousness had died. At that time, of course, most (but, as we were to discover recently, not all) of the recent “allegations” and “revelations” had yet to come out and so he was widely and respectfully mourned, and the passing of a “national treasure” and “legend” was dutifully marked by the broadcaster for which he did most of his work, and by the wider media in general, which we should not forget in these troubled and turbulent times. I watched, and I listened, and was duly absorbed by the fascinating but bizarre life of a fascinating but bizarre-seeming character, and he was buried with the usual ceremony, and all of the jolly little tales of golden coffins buried at angles came out in the press, and so many of us all smiled to ourselves and thought that this was “so typical” of the wildly eccentric character that we thought we all knew.

(“Now then, now then”) It’s still hard to think of anyone else who was that big a part of the public consciousness and whose appearance and “catchphrases” were so universally iconic. There are (were?) people who still made a living by impersonating him (“Rattle, rattle! Jewellery, jewellery!”), and I know of at least one person who has had their first novel published (after so many years of trying) only to find that the plot involves just such an impersonator. (“Goodness, gracious...”) All sorts of people used to dress up as him to go to fancy dress parties or sporting occasions, and pretty much everyone could do some kind of an impression of him. (“How’s about that then?”) After all, he’d been around for an awfully long time, and we’d all immediately recognised the character as we gathered around our TV sets even when he was being portrayed by people like Mike Yarwood as far back as the 1970s, and probably even before that. To be honest, by the way, I’ve never been all that fond of impressionism as form of  entertainment...

Anyway, in just over a week, a “national institution” goes from being that to being someone who has a slightly worse reputation than a “Mr Genghis Hitler” might have. It’s like finding out that Santa Claus was also guard in a concentration camp when he was younger, and feels just as distasteful.

I’ll have to admit that I am astonished at how quickly the “fall from grace” has happened. From “much-loved” national treasure to having your gravestone ground into dust in slightly over a week seems an almost astounding and unlikely turn of events, and is a most spectacular fall which seems all the more amazing because it seems to have taken place quite so suddenly. Mind you, just as I can’t really believe how swiftly that reputation has collapsed, icon to landfill in the blink of an eye, nor can I quite believe that something like those dreadful acts which he is said to have committed could go on for fifty years without something being reported... What exactly were those people who knew anything about it thinking when they decided to say nothing...?

So, perhaps we should make the most of our opportunity to see these pictures which are now all that remains of that gaudy monument before they too all disappear. After all, there weren’t all that many opportunities for people to take their snapshots of the wretched monstrosity, and the thing has already been taken away. A “timeless memorial” which was only unveiled a few short weeks ago, and yet which has now already been ground down to dust in the “public interest” (however you choose to define that) or, perhaps, to prevent chunks of it turning up for sale online. After all, the public might now be “reviled” by the man, but they’re not above making a few quid out of selling off chunks of his gravestone if they get the chance…

Now, of course, they might very well be queuing up the urinate upon the very ground in which he was buried, such is the need of some people to show off quite how “outraged” that they personally are.

Interestingly enough, despite the reported £4000 price tag, there was an astonishing typo (which you can see in the picture at the top of this page if you really want to bother to look) on the right hand side of that gaudy monument (in the word “chieftain”) which, rather amazingly, seemed to be the most interesting thing anyone seemed to have to say about the thing right up until those stories really started to break, so maybe the family were going to have it replaced anyway...

Perhaps, if he doesn’t disgust you so much that you can’t bring yourself to even look, you should spare a moment to also take a quick peek at the examples of the deathless poetry of the man himself which adorned the monument, just because I suspect that there will be few more opportunities for you to do so as the images fade so swiftly from history. It speaks volumes about the “great esteem” the man himself thought that he was held in and, because it has the air of being written by the man himself, tells you all that you would ever need to know about his so-called (and utterly ghastly) “sense of humour...”

I imagine that he thought that his “fans” would come from far and wide and smile when they came across this piece of “whimsy” not realising that his legacy and memory would not be quite what he hoped for once he lay there, encased in concrete, and overlooking Scarborough Bay, or even as he lay dying alone in his penthouse flat thinking (I imagine) that he’d spent a life well lived.

Make the most of these moments because I suspect that any reference to the man himself, or any of his TV appearances (of which there were many) are about to disappear from your TV sets forever (apart perhaps from on news reports) and all of those nostalgic trawls through the “Top of the Pops” of yesteryear are suddenly going to have huge gaps in them as we try not to have to come to terms with what this man might have actually been up to. He is going to suddenly and very finally vanish forever from our television screens and not simply because of the fact that he’s actually (and, perhaps, luckily for him) quite dead indeed.

Now, he’s also so toxic that there are some who will now act as if he was never even here, and he will be, as my colleague so eloquently expressed it, “flushed down the glitter…” of history. Of course, he is now likely to be just as expunged from our cultural history as a certain “glam rock” icon has been. Strangely enough, I went to two of that performer’s “Christmas Gang Shows” before his particular fall from grace. Now I remember that one year he was supported by the rock band “Girlschool”, and the notion that name conjures up in that context now fills me horror in so many ways. However, it’s almost impossible now to admit that you might have once even slightly enjoyed his music and it certainly never gets any airplay which does make me ask a few fundamental questions about whether we can ever detach the “art” from the “artist” just because we find out more about what the artist has done in his life. 

In the end, do the actions of the person who created the art still devalue the art itself?

Perhaps that’s something to think about another time…

Meanwhile, one of his records actually slipped through the net and onto TV on some “chart rundown” or other a few weeks ago, whilst I was doing the washing up in the kitchen, and I was so surprised to hear it that I nearly dropped a plate.

The bastard! I wonder if I could sue him for damages if I had dropped it…?

A certain comedian has also come under the spotlight due to all of this speculation even though he is protesting his innocence. Which of course he would, wouldn’t he…? He has to, really, otherwise what he might still consider to be his career will be in tatters, although it is rather difficult to sympathise too much with a man who used to see the “comic potential” of strutting around dressed up as a certain Mr Adolf Hitler, and whose main claim to fame otherwise in the zeitgeist appears to be the consumption of live rodents.

And whilst there’s nothing  more outraged or appalled than the British tabloid-reading public in full “pious” mode, let us not forget that those “jokes” are already out there, if you know where to look, and the distastefulness of those doesn’t quite seem to bother those telling them half as much as perhaps it ought to do. Of course, those same readers, many of whom might very well now be sharing a laugh and a joke about his crimes, have already branded him a “peado” and a “rapist” (as if, just by adding those labels, they can close their own emotional books on the subject) and some of them have then gone off and vandalised the monuments to his name which, naturally and rightly, have since been removed.

Perhaps they thought that they’d better get in there whilst they still had the chance…?

I am reminded of the stories of public revenge and what was done to Oliver Cromwell’s body back in those “less civilised” times and, despite the fact that I’ve read comments from people suggesting that he should be dug up and his head mounted on a spike outside BBC Television Centre, I like to think that we’ve moved on.

Of course I might be alone in that. After all, many of those now shouting the loudest about their sense of outrage are the very same “outraged masses” who made the life of  a “paediatrician” a living nightmare all those years ago because they mistook a childcare professional placing a plaque outside their workplace for the sort of thing that they thought an abuser might actually do. Not that they seemed to realise that any of those devious manipulative bastards would ever be that stupid. Meanwhile, if we are going to split hairs, whilst I am fully aware that the word and all it implies is horrific, I would just like to point out (because I’ve only just found this out myself), that the word “pedophile” is being widely misused in the particular context of this story anyway, because its original reference to pre-pubescence is now being stretched in meaning to include anyone under the age of consent which is not the same thing at all. (In this instance, and if you’re particularly bothered, you’re usually really talking about hebephilia or, possibly, ephebophilia if you want any of your future vandalism to be strictly correct... Look them up. I did - on Wikipedia, not anywhere “dodgy” - and it’s frankly terrifying that they even find that they have to have terms for this kind of thing.)

“Splitting Hairs” does, of course, remind me of an “off colour” joke told about Bill Wyman which used to do the rounds (and which I’m not going to give the dignity of repeating) but which does rather prove my point when it comes to matters of public hypocrisy about these subjects. Perhaps as a society, we justify it to ourselves by saying that laughing about these things is how we come to terms with them and learn to deal with them although, to be perfectly honest, I can’t see all that much to be laughing about.

I am, however, going to do my level best to remind the great tabloid reading public that these outraged “journalists” are the very same people who would allow young girls to be photographed topless and then plaster those images across their pages with the most “titillating” captions. The very same people who once published a “countdown” to when a particular young performer “became legal”, and have been known to publish week-long daily “strip shows” of some of their young topless models working their way to the “big reveal” on the morning of their sixteenth birthday.

I kid you not, so I hardly think any of them are in a position to take the moral high ground, especially as many of them are using this as a stick to beat the BBC with in an era when their own vested self-interest in all matters “media-related” are suspicious at best, and we shouldn’t allow them to get away with pretending that they’re any less morally dubious, even though they’ll try and claim that none of them have done anything quite so bad as the things that these recent news stories are telling us about. This might very well be true, but still can’t justify or condone the things that they do actually do in the name of selling newspapers.

In the end, the obliteration of Mr “So-Vile” (A-Sin) from his place in our national memory is probably rightfully assured, but, in the end, who will it be who most suffers...? Apart from his many victims, perhaps it will also be the many charities which he put his name to and supported, and I hope that they will not ultimately suffer because of the wickedness of one man who, despite everything else he might have done, did a lot to increase many of their profiles and put serious money in their coffers, even if his own reasons for doing so might have been utterly wicked and vile.