To understand the Jimmy Savile affair, you had to be there. By ‘there’ I mean the late 1970s.
At the time my school on the Welsh borders had its own very minor provincial sex-pest. I think every school did. Ours was known as ‘the 50p man’. Periodically he would approach a straggler on a cross–country run, or someone taking a walk (i.e. smoke) by the river, and expose himself, announcing, ‘If you touch this, I’ll give you this 50p.’
Even allowing for inflation, 50p was an offer you could easily refuse. So the schoolboy victim would scarper off, usually (perhaps not always) to relate the incident to general hilarity. Every now and then someone might have reported such an event to an adult, but I certainly don’t remember police involvement or any kind of vigilantism. His behaviour was viewed as regrettable but not heinous — as smoking was then and divorce wasn’t (our moral compasses seem to shift).
Among the pupils there may even have been a tacit agreement not to make a fuss. Perhaps it seemed like snitching. Or perhaps, when viewed from the strictly Benthamite perspective of the teenage boy, the 50p man was seen as a net contributor to human happiness.
One interesting side effect of the 50p man may be unique in the annals of economic history. Within the school, in a strange manifestation of Gresham’s Law, the 50p coin became worthless. You had to launder them clandestinely into five 10p pieces at WH Smith. Handing over a 50p for your ten Fruit Salads and a Curly Wurly at the tuck shop was impossible — usually met with finger-pointing and the chant ‘Eeeeuuugh! You touched the 50p man!’
In retrospect the lack of parental action seems surprising. Or was the relaxed response better? The effect on a child of any incident might be affected by how other people react to it.
In any case, back in the 1970s, there were plenty of other outlets for opprobrium other than child abusers, so you could spread your moral sanction wider — upon foreigners, homosexuals, Catholics or, if you lived in Monmouth, people from Gloucestershire. (When the Wests were arrested it created very little stir in Monmouth, whose inhabitants had long assumed incest and child murder were pretty much par for the course once you crossed the Wye; Fred, we thought, was simply the first to get caught.)
I sometimes wonder -whether Opprobrium is an undiscovered chemical element (atomic symbol Ug) of which our brain produces a fixed amount each day. We simply offload it on whatever group seems to offer a convenient home for it. Child-molesters are one of the few groups left.
But another aspect of the 1970s which is difficult to re-envisage is the extreme fame then enjoyed by ‘people on telly’. When Dick Emery passed through town it was like the second coming. A sighting of John Craven was a major event. In the 1970s, 22 million people habitually tuned in to watch a quiz show called 3-2-1, oblivious to the fact that both the format and the questions were incomprehensible. It’s the kind of audience a World Cup Final might get now — fame of a kind we shall never see again.
But the adulation still survives in the incestuous culture of TV programme-making. People in television are generally clever and nice. But they have one peculiar feature: any scepticism or dispassionate judgment vanishes in the presence of ‘talent’. So Newsnight, say, will produce a hard-hitting feature about growing wealth inequality in Britain. But it never occurs to them to question why the person presenting this story on screen earns 20 times more than the researchers who did all the work. He’s on telly, you see, where the rules are different.
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