Questions Arising

[poliphilo]

Jimmy Savile always made my skin crawl, but then so do most light entertainment personalities. Hughie Green, Noel Edmonds, Bruce Forsythe, Jonathan Ross, Michael Barrymore, Piers Morgan: who decides that these pushy, charmless men (they're all men with the exception of Cilla Black) are the faces that are going to hog our screens? Do people really like them? Or do they like them because that's all that's on offer? 

When Jimmy Savile was buried people lined the streets like he was a princess or a gangster. Did they come for the show or were they really in mourning? Soldiers carried the coffin: how on earth did that come about?

Savile's grave is topped by a huge vainglorious lump of marble with pictures of his gurning face etched into its shiny surface and some lines of execrable verse. The cemetery authorities have had to mount a guard on it. How long can they afford to keep that up? How soon before someone with a lump hammer or a JCB gets through?

Comments

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

Add Terry Wogan, Dale Winton, Noel Edmonds, Graham Norton, Paul Daniels... it seems like the main criterion for being a chat show / game show host is creepiness. Apart from Parkie, he's probably ok.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

Ahh, I like Wogan. But that's likely because he's very much like all of my Irish uncles.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I find Wogan smug. His radio show was so self-referential it was hard to understand if you weren't a regular.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I agree, I find Wogan smug rather than creepy. I dislike Jonathan Ross intensely, but that's for being puerile and sexist. He never gives off the creepy vibe that Savile had.

To be honest, the "revelations" have not surprised me. I felt he was creepy back in the sixties and never liked him. I always felt there was something a bit iffy about his charity work too. Self-aggrandising. He did it right from the start because I remember the nuns at our local convent in Manchester being delighted he was coming to open their fete (or something similar). That must have been in the late 60s, possibly earlier because we were still living in the shop in Moston then.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

There are lots of rumours about Savile swirling around. I think the scandal has the potential to get much bigger and encompass many more of "the good and great".

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Apparently so....

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, it's a long list.

Parkie had real skills as an interviewer. The other day I was watching an archive show with Richard Burton as guest. It was riveting.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I don't believe Barrymore has ever explained how that corpse wound up in his swimming pool.

[ingenious76.livejournal.com]

Michael Barrymore is a thoroughly unpleasant and deluded man who has never felt the need to explain anything to anybody. What shocked me about him was his appearance on Celebrity Big Brother a few years ago, when he was cheered as though he were a demi-god. Proof that quite a lot of the public really are stupid.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I found it weird that he felt he was in any position to stage a comeback. There are some things (like having an unexplained death on your cv) that should preclude a career in entertainment.