Jimmy Saville is still alive...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/oct/19/jimmy-savile-met-criminal-investigation

Up to 200 victims, unprecedented scale, says Scotland Yard.

WHY ARE WE ONLY DOING THIS NOW HE'S DEAD?!

He got away with it his whole life.

To clarify, I'm not aainst theis investigation in any way, the victims deserve and need acknowledgement and closure and help if they want it, I just find it frustrating that he wont get punished, and seemed to live his dirty, nasty, exploitative life safe in the knowledge that he never, ever would. How did this happen?

pace HIGNFY, reeeeeeally uncomfortable w/how this story is being used as stick with which to beat the BBC

Suppose it depends on how much anyone at the BBC knew about it at the time. The Newsnight thing doesn't feel like a particularly big issue in itself. There's a lot of hearsay going around at the moment.

haven't really heard anybody blaming the BBC either other than the usual suspects

Anyone who grew up watching Benny Hill or On The Buses must be totally shocked that there was a culture of leery sexpests at the heart of entertainment industry

Does anyone know who John Simpson was referring to when stories about "Uncle Dick" were reported the other day?

The row over Jimmy Savile's four-decade career at the BBC has intensified after it emerged that the veteran journalist John Simpson claimed that top executives knew of sexual abuse by another star presenter in the 1950s and 60s.

Simpson referred to the star in his 1999 autobiography as "Uncle Dick" and said he had been a household name from the 1920s until his death in 1967. He claimed that BBC bosses up to the level of director general were aware of the allegations.

The former BBC News world affairs editor said he was told about sexual abuse by the star when he died and was asked to write an obituary.

"Week after week, children from all over the country could win competitions to visit the BBC and meet Uncle Dick," Simpson wrote in Strange Places, Questionable People.

"He would welcome them, show them around, give them lunch, then take them to the gents and interfere with them. If parents complained, the director general's office would write saying the nation wouldn't understand such an accusation against a much-loved figure."

The BBC refused to comment on the identity of the presenter.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/oct/17/jimmy-savile-abuse-bbc?INTCMP=SRCH

Uncle Dick likely = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_McCulloch

Ah okay!

In 1939 the audience for Children's Hour reached 4 million. His sign-off line "Goodnight children, everywhere", became more poignant after the evacuation of many children from their homes at the start of the Second World War.

^ not sinister at all, in retrospect

Yeah, that was my guess too, Nick(S)

There's an interesting variant in one of his 'signoff' pieces on Jowe Head's album "Pincer Movement"

Something like "these are english songs and no-one can take them away from us" or something like it..

Where I grew up, there was a [prominent member of local community] well-known for putting moves on teenaged boys in his employ from the '60s onward. Boys who told their parents were believed, but there were no consequences for the abuser other than a few punches from dads, gossip or people using a competitor's service instead. People apparently didn't want to rip the man's wife's life apart by informing her about her husband's abuses, but she *had* to know. The neighbourhood omerta on the subject was not unusual for the Midwest in the '70s.

I can't imagine the offices of Associated Newspapers or any workplace associated with Rupert Murdoch being any better/worse an atmosphere than the BBC in the '60s/'70s - this is about a melding of extreme male privilege to a culture in thrall to celebrity. Benny Hill, indeed. The framework has only changed a little in TV Land. Law enforcement and politics are also areas historically full of 'unreconstructed' men so if you're female/feminist, you might be tempted to see all these guys yelling 'there! Look over THERE, not HERE!' about the conduct of contemporaries as some kind of distraction.

I too await the inevitable David Peace trilogy.

DLT, to nobody's surprise

.. especially if you've seen any of his appearances on TOTPs from '76 and '77, currently being rerun (now minus the Savilemonster) on BBC4

Last night's DLT was especially crepe.

Pretty much all of those DJs come across creepy these days - except for Kid Jensen

last night's totp was an argument for bbc4 cancelling the entire run.

agree with tom d, kid is the only one you can trust out of that lot.

nothing much being said abt peel at the moment which is probably just as well; after all, if he gets posthumously "exposed" that's 6Music basically finished innit?

They're not replaying Peel's links are they? 'Just' the music..

Kid was in the unique position, for a 70s BBC DJ, of only being 10 years older than his potential victims as opposed to 20 or 30.

thing about 6music is that peel is their sort of mascot; every five minutes it's peel this, peel that (plus his son is on the station) and iirc the station was created to reflect his musical ethic. take that away and i'm not sure you'd have much left there.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_xL0RCAFo1jQ/ReQZpEATKgI/AAAAAAAAAsU/FnEl47625es/s400/totp_25_lg.jpg

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_xL0RCAFo1jQ/Rd-YCUATJHI/AAAAAAAAAbw/SG1hulo6l6w/s1600/totp_21.jpg

etc

Two of those went to number one, but not those two.

I expect the revelations will start spreading to pop stars fairly shortly, although its difficult to imagine anyone doing anything as uniquely horrible on such a massive scale as Savile.

and iirc the station was created to reflect his musical ethic

this isn't actually true, not least as the station was 'born' a few years before Peel died, when the Beeb was not so much venerating John as trying to hide him in the schedules somewhere.

Law enforcement and politics are also areas historically full of 'unreconstructed' men so if you're female/feminist, you might be tempted to see all these guys yelling 'there! Look over THERE, not HERE!' about the conduct of contemporaries as some kind of distraction.

don't you mean if you're a victim of abuse?

In the event that Peel was outed as some kind of serial nonce, 6 Music would shuffle around nervously for a bit, quietly drop any mention of him and carry on. I can't see a station falling on the sword for someone who didn't even work there.

Plus, Saville didn't have any kind of musical "ethic"

http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/87004/jimmy-savile-admitted-he-was-crooked-interview-his-death

ha, crooked doesn't even begin to cover it

maybe he was just talking about a couple of bank jobs he did in the 80s though

b isn't anywhere near w on the keyboard.

hahaha!

"when I'm gone they'll say, I always thought he was a great guy, but it turned out he brutally molested hundreds of people, literally HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS OF KIDS." Savile said, cryptically.

It is really seeming now that there's just reams and reams of quotes from him, across years and years, where he basically says "I've managed to do absolutely anything I wanted in my life, really, absolutely anything even fucking nasty dark evil motherfucking shit and it's been brilliant and no one stopped me."

"I dare you to ask me what I did, journalist. I dare you." And no one asked.

The music industry has always been rife with the 15-year-old girlfriends and boyfriends of the Peter Pans within it. The fanzine girl dating the press officer; the GCSE students with a band, shagging older guys in bands/writers/PRs; age differences of between 10 and 15 years - I'm sure it's still going on w/just a change in players. A great many of the young women involved with older guys were really smart and precocious about their careers, but eager to swap school discos for the Heavenly Sunday Social.

Creepy all-powerful types who serve up groping and use intimidation and a place in the boys' club to make sure they never have to own up to their actions are a different order altogether - they're evil and should be held to account - but the consensual scenario above is definitely part of a sliding scale of male entitlement/females having to 'go along to get along', even if most of the young women genuinely want to be involved.

Yeah I mean as far as Peel himself goes he's in the former camp but I've not seen any suggestion he's in the latter?

I can only think that Savile in person must have been genuinely threatening in a terrifying way to have managed to keep so many victims silent on such a massive scale, even taking the "no one will believe you" stuff into account.

My impression is that Peel became happily-married family mann in a garage full of records, well away from being all-powerful.

Think it? I believe it!

There was some 'expose' in a Sunday paper decades ago, SMirror, I think. It was all about his 'gangster' days and his "I shag loads" went alongside his "I sorted out things, right?"

Basically, when he started on TOTP and Radio 1, he was already used to using 'muscle'..

There was some minor outcry at the time, but every business was "we have no plans to drop Mr Savile". and so it continued.

i don't think popular ilx meme "sense of entitlement" quite stands up to being a reason for raping people.

It's in the mix of reasons rape happens, although you're entitled to your opinion, R.

MDC: Nor have I. Would be very surprised to discover any untowardness post-1974. xp

I think what we're dealing with in Savile is a full-blown psychopath / sociopath. He's through sense of entitlement and out the other side. he doens't think he's entitled, he thinks he's immune, invulnerable, completely unbeholden to any morality.

Thought. Past tense.

the only thing that stops me asking how nobody came out about these allegations before, is that this seems to be how institutional paedophilia has played out generally. i suppose before any allegation sticks, everyone is just a disparate victim, on their own, but now that they've all emerged a large picture of a man's extensive campaign of rape and abuse emerges very clearly.

Claims in the Mail yesterday about Wilfrid Brambell:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2219401/Steptoe-Sons-Wilfrid-Brambell-latest-BBC-star-accused-child-sex-abuse.html

I can only think that Savile in person must have been genuinely threatening in a terrifying way to have managed to keep so many victims silent on such a massive scale, even taking the "no one will believe you" stuff into account.

see i dunno about this, there are loads of serial paedophiles who never got caught. isn't it just as likely that it will emerge that victims did tell people and nothing was done?

I thought Brambell was common-knowledge?

maybe it is? news to me though