WHAT’S HOT TO WATCH TODAY
HOW’S a guy meant to conduct himself as a pop star when he’s 78 years old?
It’s one of the questions you can’t help but ask if you watch tonight’s ITV documentary SIR CLIFF RICHARD: 60 YEARS IN PUBLIC AND IN PRIVATE (9pm).
For Sir Cliff, it seems, the answer is to dress and perform as if he’s half that age, and to hell with what people say. In one respect you can’t help but admire him for that, but I’m not convinced it does him a whole load of favours. Even Sir Tom Jones, who’s the same age, quit dying his hair some years back, and figured out a way to evolve into a more measured version of his old self, without sacrificing his essential Sir Tomness. If anything, Sir Tom has become even cooler.
Cliff, it appears, won’t be changing for anyone, even after six decades in the music business.
“I like what I am,” he tells the programme, “I like where I am, I like what I do, I like who I am.”
It’s a stubbornly defiant quality which I’m sure has been a particular help to him over the past four years, his nightmare having begun one Thursday in August 2014 when police raided his Berkshire home, following up a sexual abuse allegation that ultimately went no further. Cliff, who was away at his place in Portugal at the time, was particularly incensed that the BBC had broadcast this raid on live TV. He successfully sued them, winning more than £200,000 in damages when the case came to the High Court earlier this year.
He uses the programme to explain just how much anguish he’s suffered. Well, that and to remind us he has a new album.