’Til the day I die, ’til the day I die

Benny Hill and Sir Jimmy Savile contrasted

Image: left, Alfred Hawthorne (“Benny”) Hill; right, Sir James William Vincent (“Jimmy”) Savile.

When I was researching my post about the Strawbs song Part of the Union, I happened upon a YouTube video of it being played on the British TV show Top of the Pops. That performance was syndicated to other TV stations around Europe, and the version I eventually linked to was one that had been broadcast in the Netherlands.

The host of Top of the Pops on the day Strawbs performed was Jimmy Savile, who, after he died in 2011, was revealed to have been a serial paedophile and thoroughly nasty person, who had nonetheless been tipped the wink at the British Broadcasting Corporation over many decades, had encouraged us all to clunk-click every trip when seatbelts were introduced in cars, and had vaunted British Rail’s age of the train. His Fix It programme was a staple of Saturday night viewing for the kids and, all the while, in hospitals and caravans and broadcasting studios across the length and breadth of the country, Savile was, with the full knowledge of many, having his wicked way with youngsters.

I said in my post about the Strawbs song that I would spare you the toe-curling introduction by Savile to that performance, but now I want to show you it. The reason is that a contributor to another post entirely has just drawn a comparison with another television personality whom I have also written about: Benny Hill. It gave me cause to return to that early post of mine, in which I praise Hill for highlighting the despicable conduct of dirty old men through humour. Humour is often the only way an artist can legitimately draw attention to a social issue without attracting condemnation, because the problem posed by those who practise the vice lies among those in control.

There is an irony to the contrast between Benny Hill and Jimmy Savile. Benny Hill’s television career was based in saucy fun, the idea of an unattractive older man lusting after young flesh. He was reviled by many for his humour: it was crass, it was bawdy and it was lacking in good taste. But, if Epstein has told us anything, it was far closer to the truth than we could have ever suspected, bar in one respect: Hill never once caught the girl. They always escaped. And, when Hill died, in 1992, the press rooted and dug for evidence of Hill’s salacious lifestyle, the bawdiness he had so accurately portrayed in his TV comedy, and they found nothing: not one whit. Hill was gay, but, so far as we will ever be able to tell, he never put a foot wrong in his private life.

Jimmy Savile was the exact opposite. He was a precursor of what we would discover with Epstein. He was revered in his celebrity life, raising money for charity, oozing empathy to the mentally and physically challenged, and cuddling up to kids and teenagers on his television shows, and then imposing himself on them sexually. He was not ridiculed for his humour, he was deified. He was a national treasure. Until the day he died. Then the press didn’t need to dig for the dirt; it came flooding out of the woodwork. An unstoppable deluge of shocking revelations about the man who was so “modest”, he never moved out of his mother’s terraced house in Armley, Leeds.

Do the newspapers ever get something right?

Prepare to cringe.