Such a crude carnival of vengeance
With more arrests in the UK this week, the world of light entertainment itself is being turned upside down by a raucous mob, writes Hannah Betts.
ANOTHER DAY, another star from the light entertainment firmament loses his glister. This week, the former It’s a Knockout presenter Stuart Hall was charged with three counts of indecent assault dating back to the 1970s, against girls aged eight to 17.
The allegations are understood not to be part of Operation Yewtree, the investigation into deceased BBC television presenter Jimmy Savile and others.
British publicist Max Clifford was then arrested as part of this inquiry. Both men vehemently deny the allegations. Clifford is the fifth person to be arrested since the Yewtree inquiry began. The singer Gary Glitter, comedian Freddie Starr and DJ Dave Lee Travis are three of those previously arrested, together with a former BBC producer. An unnamed octogenarian was also interviewed under caution.
Last month, Clifford criticised the operation, claiming that a host of former stars had contacted him with anxieties about being dragged into the scandal because they had appeared on British music chart programme Top of the Pops or Savile’s flagship BBC children’s show Jim’ll Fix It. ‘‘It is a situation that could easily turn into a witchhunt. A lot of big stars are frightened,’’ the celebrity Svengali told broadcaster ITV. ‘‘Where is it going to end?’’ Where, indeed?
Our collective sympathy for the victims is obviously a given. And yet the quest to unearth celebrity sex offenders has become a form of crude cultural entertainment – but it is less witch-hunt, more carnival, in the sense proposed by critic Mikhail Bakhtin. Here social hierarchies are profaned and subverted by normally suppressed voices. Thus, the marginalised become the focus, princes become paupers, and opposites combine (high and low, fact and fantasy, heaven and hell).
This circus is conducted with a grotesque, ‘‘world-upside-down’’ energy and black humour, in which charivari – ritual chastising and humiliation, not least of sexual transgressions – is accompanied by raucous collective mirth. Ultimately, order is restored, but not before authority figures have taken a beating.
And so we witness the toppling of the powerful by a righteous mob, as men of a certain age and cultural authority – backed by a degree of establishment collusion – are brought low with a barely contained collective thrill. Sometimes it feels as if all the icons of our childhood have been outed as sexual deviants – revenge for every night of bad television endured during the 1970s.
Celebrity – of a famous-forbeing-on-the-goggle-box sort – would itself appear to be on trial, and in the most festive of pantomime manners: ‘‘Oh, no, he didn’t!’’ ‘‘Oh, yes, he did!’’
Where television’s original presenters were required to do something – lecture, perhaps, or perform – so Savile and his ilk were the first broadcasters paid to be ‘‘personalities’’, hyperbolised versions of themselves.
They were asked to create characters who embodied our ideals of people ‘‘just like us’’, who, nevertheless, were a million miles away in terms of wealth, glamour and, as it turns out, sexual mores.
This sort of celebrity selfcreation has reached its apotheosis in the juggernaut that is Clifford’s client Simon Cowell’s The X-Factor (the singing competition to find new stars). Together with fellow talent show competition Britain’s Got Talent, The X-Factor ensures that spanking new personalities are coined each year. Via producer, Cowell, the world of light entertainment operates a sort of apostolic succession in which His blessing is passed to some boy band – who, in turn, reflect it back on Him – before He shines His light on the next big thing. And so the coruscating world of slebdom sparkles on.
If one discerns a certain grubbiness here, it has every evidence of being intrinsic. It is often said of Savile: ‘‘One only had to look at him’’. But there is no less a sense in which one only had to look at the world of light entertainment. We can pass over Top of the Pops and Jim’ll Fix It – both of which now seem little more than televised grooming. There has been a good deal of equally curious fare featured under the mantle of ‘‘family fun’’ besides these stalwarts.
Variety performances and those interminable Saturday night lineups reveal a disconcerting conflation of infantile slapstick and lewd suggestion. Arguably, adults and children should not find the same things amusing: such entertainment infantilises the former, while imposing adult expectations upon the latter. As in pantomime, there is something uneasy in the laughter.
Still, there’s no business like showbusiness, and an industry grew out of the need to nurture the desires of ‘‘the talent’’, however questionable those desires might be. An individual with ratings magic became untouchable. They were backed by ferocious agents and publicists, who could withdraw access to not just one celebrity, but legions, and enjoyed back-scratching relations with the tabloid press.
Recently, I tried to re-watch Brass Eye, the UK television series of satirical spoof documentaries, and its notorious 2001 satire, Paedophilia, which introduced the fake charity Nonce Sense to unwitting celebrities, who delivered their vociferous support. I got as far as a parody in which glam rockers pouted Playground Bang-a-Round, and had to switch off.
In the end, truth was stranger than – and not so very far away from – fiction.