If everyone else is reporting it as news, the BBC has to as well. They didn’t break the story, but now that it is a major headline they have to keep up with the reporting, especially as some news providers are desperately trying to parlay it into an antiBBC stick. If they weren’t reporting it, that would be news itself.
The news is pretty cynical these days. ITV used to be a pretty respectable news provider (World in Action was excellent, the stuff they did on the Birmingham Six was amazing), as did The Sunday Times but not so much these days. The Times lost a lot of credibility when they closed their investigative unit (Insight) and handed Mordechai Vanunu back to Mossad (all thanks to arch-twat, Andrew Neil).
I heartily recommend reading Nick Davies (he who broke the hacking scandal) book “Flat Earth News”, for how news reporting in the UK is now totally fucked up.
He’s the guy who invented the word “churnalism” to describe the modern practice of so-called journalists who just reprint PR blurbs and press releases without actually giving any thought to the truth or veracity of this so-called “news”.
Have a look at how attitudes and values have changed over the years, not just here but also in the US as well.
Back in the '70’s it was very common to have very cheap joke magazines, printed in black and white on very cheap paper - publications such as ‘funny half hour’ - Every single cartoon within was a ‘joke’ based on sex or sometimes combining with sex and racism, misogyny was also a favourite subject - especially in the form of the mother in law. These ‘comics’ were so bad they were almost a parody of themselves, but they were popular and well within the reach of young teenagers such as myself.
The jokes often featured schoolgirls as sexual objects - you’d never get away with such a publication now.
How about when MASH hit our screens? This was popular, so a paperback book was printed. It’s so long ago that I can’t remember the exact details, but Pierce and Hawkeye had not yet met at the beginning of the book. One of them was already serving in Korea, the other got drafted. The one who got drafted was supposed to be a legend, partly for raping a beauty queen on a train journey - this was seen as funny and awesome in the book and made the rapist seem like an unconventional hero.
You can look at tv shows such as ‘Love they neighbour’ bad joke, racist and just rubbish, but it was popular - I even remember an advert for sunflower margarine that featured scantily clad hotpant girls running around in fields being all ‘natural’ - sex back then was used completely out of context to sell anything - and British society was still emerging from 1950’s prudery.
All this sex, newspapers printing topless girls, a huge rise in the amount of porn at all levels, with lots of nurse and schoolgirl fantasies.
What I’m saying is that views were very different back then, under age sex was not acceptable, but was very much a fantasy and was accepted - remember that the hated kiddy fiddler group PIE was actually a legal organisation (Paedophile Information Exchange)
Its in this sort of world that Savile was working, and no doubt there were plenty of opportunities of young girls throwing themselves at him, and others in the music industry - and yes, it was probably seen as a foible and a bit of a joke. Its not great stretch to imagine that once those thrills were used up, then he would be seeking more.
I’ve heard rumours of very much worse, remember that I worked at the hospital where he spent a good deal of his time and raised significant amounts of money toward equipment there.
How much worse?very much and it really would make you sick - paedophilia is actually among the less sickening stories.Those stories I have only recently garnered from former colleagues there, and these go back to the 1960’s.
Please note, there is worse than this to come, much worse.
I was waiting to see how this thread would go and how the public reaction would swing before adding my comments about his behaviour.
Kids like me whose ears pricked up when the adults lowered their voices knew there was something fishy going on with JS and Stoke Mandeville hospital. That’s coming out now too.
There’s quite a bit about Savile visiting the mortuary at Stoke Madeville to have a little fondle on Twitter at the moment, not new either as I remember someone mentioning that they should check whether he was truly dead or just faking to get let into morgue on the day he died.
Can you not just spill what you know? It’s not like you can libel the dead.
Simple Linctus not so oddly in those circles I’m afraid.
Casdave disgusting as the mortuary aspect is, I do think it much worse to abuse the living than the dead. I’m glad to hear they’ve chucked his headstone in a landfill.
Heh “the worst to come” I was thinking of involves the former Prime Minister Edward Heath, former leader of the liberal party Jeremy Thorpe (who escaped a conspiracy to murder conviction with his reputation in tatters) and other establishment luminaries. Saville is said to have been supplying them with boys from the Haut Garonne children’s home on Jersey and other places. I first found those rumours with idle googling the day Saville died and, with one site even dragging the Profumo affair into the mix, didn’t find them terribly believable. Right now I think I might believe anything.
Believing anything is dangerous of course. However unpleasant goings on at Haut Garonne have already been the subject of investigation. At that time Jimmy Saville denied he was ever was a visitor there but now photographic evidence has emerged of him posing with the children. For all that, you can google it if you want details. I’m not willing to give the rumours the credence of repeating them right now.
Not that he needed them, really. Seems he was - personally - the one who decided who’d be given the job of running the place. Courtesy of a task force set up by the government, no less.
If you liked cakes and you could put whoever you wanted in charge of the bakery, any time you turned up, he’d offer you free cakes, wouldn’t he?
Every time I think that I’ve heard something too diabolically ridiculous to possibly be true, up pops the next thing.