We journalists can only chase one ambulance at a time

What I really wanted to do for you this week was uncover a totally new story about a racist paedophile banker — a perfect storm of a story which through the sheer magnitude of the mass national hysteria it engendered actually brought about a lethal fracturing of the earth’s crust, volcanic eruptions, rivers of sulphurous lava etc. ‘I was only 14 when he walked into my bedroom with his huge bonus and called me a darkie,’ my ideal interviewee — the whistleblower — would have begun, at least in my foetid and grasping imagination.

It’s how our minds work, we hacks, I suppose. When I first began in the job 32 years ago, as a reporter for the South Wales Echo, my then girlfriend observed that whenever an ambulance went by with its siren blaring I would immediately look up with an expression on my face which she could only describe as ‘pleased’. She left me not long afterwards. Anyway, that’s what I wanted to do; get in on the act somehow, provoke almost every single-issue pressure group in the country to begin their howling and ensure the police were stamping around the country, knocking on everyone’s door. But instead it’s more Savile; Savile redux, and then redux again, one supposes.

But a bit of a corrective, possibly, this time. I would not for a second wish to counter the prevailing opinion that Jimmy Savile was utterly repulsive and undoubtedly behaved in a criminal manner towards some young women. My own view is that Jimmy Savile was, as has been argued, ‘creepy’ long before these allegations saw the light of day. And one might add self-aggrandising and obnoxious: he was not my sort of entertainer.