Thursday, July 10, 2014

David Hare on Jimmy Savile: biography of the man who 'groomed a nation'

Dan Davies's In Plain Sight is a revealing life of a celebrity who understood his own depravity

English DJ and television presenter Jimmy Savile making himself a pot of tea in his motor home, 31 D
'There is no end of uses to a motor caravan' … Jimmy Savile making himself a pot of tea. Photograph: Mccarthy/Getty Images

In the United States, no gun is fired and no bird falls to the ground without the incident at once being appropriated by both sides as ammunition in a culture war. Democratic politics having been finally wrestled to the ground by big business and big finance, the most bitter field of controversy has shifted from how we're governed to how we behave. The smallest incident, it seems, is proof of an existing argument, one way or another. Up till now in the United Kingdom we've been spared a great deal of this mindless back and forth, but the recent revelation of Jimmy Savile's vile character has brought signs that things are heading the same way. Traders in opinion have had an orgy throwing Savile against the wall to see what sticks.
    To entrenched analysts on one side, Savile is represented as the embodiment of deep cultural misogyny. Throughout his life he referred to the women he violated as "it". In the view of the left, he is a Conservative con man who dined yearly at Chequers, a shameless Tartuffe to the royal family, and, disgracefully, a celebrity all too ready to blackmail individual members of the Prison Officers' Association to prevent strikes, after his appointment to the Broadmoor task force was approved by Edwina Currie at the Department of Health.
     "Attaboy!" wrote Currie in her diary, when Savile told her of his plans for the hospital. "Jimmy is truly a great Briton," added Mrs Thatcher, "a stunning example of opportunity Britain, a dynamic example of enterprise Britain, and an inspiring example of responsible Britain." 
    But to kneejerk polemicists on the right, looking for satisfying corroboration of what they already believe, Savile is, to the contrary, shocking proof of the moral downside of the new freedoms of the 1960s, and an indictment of two handy ideological targets, which may therefore, they hope, be tarnished by association: the National Health Service and the BBC. A hapless medical expert who argued in this newspaper that Savile wasn't evil but more likely a victim of bad parenting was immediately torn to pieces in the correspondence columns by the readers.
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    1 comment:

    Geoff Churchman said...

    how far away is the book on Rolf Harris?