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| Jimmy Savile was an emperor with no clothes – and a celebrity cloak | Jimmy Savile was an emperor with no clothes – and a celebrity cloak |
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| It's part of the grooming process to persuade the victim it's wrong to think badly of the abuser. In that respect, Jimmy Savile groomed the nation. Children rarely said the emperor was naked – sometimes all too literally. But even when one did, the cry was never taken up. Adults also kept their suspicions quiet, even when they were strong. It seemed wrong to think badly of Savile, though many secretly did. | It's part of the grooming process to persuade the victim it's wrong to think badly of the abuser. In that respect, Jimmy Savile groomed the nation. Children rarely said the emperor was naked – sometimes all too literally. But even when one did, the cry was never taken up. Adults also kept their suspicions quiet, even when they were strong. It seemed wrong to think badly of Savile, though many secretly did. |
| It's telling, this collective failure to point at Savile and suggest he was just the scary, child-catching creature of nightmare he appeared to be. People tend to believe what's easier to bear. Sadly it's easier for a child to bear the idea that they deserve abuse than it is for them to believe the adult world does not protect the innocent. | It's telling, this collective failure to point at Savile and suggest he was just the scary, child-catching creature of nightmare he appeared to be. People tend to believe what's easier to bear. Sadly it's easier for a child to bear the idea that they deserve abuse than it is for them to believe the adult world does not protect the innocent. |
| It's also easier to bear the idea that Savile's reign of terror was due to some unique historical confluence, that he slipped though the gap that appeared during a time of great cultural upheaval. This narrative is true enough. Savile exploited the chaos created by changing attitudes – to sex, class, youth, culture, entertainment, money, fame, even to public services and charity – that were themselves a response to an industrial age of rapid technological advancement. | It's also easier to bear the idea that Savile's reign of terror was due to some unique historical confluence, that he slipped though the gap that appeared during a time of great cultural upheaval. This narrative is true enough. Savile exploited the chaos created by changing attitudes – to sex, class, youth, culture, entertainment, money, fame, even to public services and charity – that were themselves a response to an industrial age of rapid technological advancement. |
| Recorded sound, recorded pictures, radio, the movies, television – the rate of change in the ways people communicated with each other was and remains astounding. When all that started, even the reality of mass literacy and popular, printed fiction was still pretty new. But some of the ideas and attitudes that assisted Savile in his unchallenged assaults on the vulnerable have been around for as long as humanity. In some ways, ancient folklore told humans more about their condition than the popular mass market manages to now. | Recorded sound, recorded pictures, radio, the movies, television – the rate of change in the ways people communicated with each other was and remains astounding. When all that started, even the reality of mass literacy and popular, printed fiction was still pretty new. But some of the ideas and attitudes that assisted Savile in his unchallenged assaults on the vulnerable have been around for as long as humanity. In some ways, ancient folklore told humans more about their condition than the popular mass market manages to now. |
| Take the story The Emperor's New Clothes itself. The version we all know is Hans Christian Andersen's. But in the traditional folk tale that Andersen used as a source, there is no little boy who speaks out. No one speaks out. The cautionary tale is not about the vanity of leaders, but about general insecurity around paternity: the emperor's new clothes are supposedly invisible only to people who have been duped into accepting the wrong man as their father. Neither the emperor nor any of his subjects admit that they see no garments, because no one – not even the emperor – truly trusts what their mothers have told them about their parentage. | |
| The old tale highlighted an ugly truth about distrust of female sexual testimony, one echoed in last November's devastating "just the women" observation, made by then editor of Newsnight, Peter Rippon, as he canned an investigation into Savile's paedophilia. | The old tale highlighted an ugly truth about distrust of female sexual testimony, one echoed in last November's devastating "just the women" observation, made by then editor of Newsnight, Peter Rippon, as he canned an investigation into Savile's paedophilia. |
| It wasn't until his conventional retelling was at the printers that Andersen decided to change the ending, introducing a child's voice, speaking truth to power, being universally listened to and believed. Andersen's story, with its happy ending, rather than the harsh lesson of the ancient tale, has lodged in the popular imagination. It was, as stated on the cover of the first edition, part of a collection of "Fairy Tales Told for Children". Yet adults believed that soothing nonsense, too – still do. Adults are horrified that no child was heard in criticism of the shell-suited emperor of darkness. Savile is now recognised as a character more suited to a cruel story from the Brothers Grimm than a feel-good tale tickled up by Andersen. | |
| Except that those tales, too, are full of evil acts perpetrated by insufficiently maternal women, their child victims saved by handsome princes. No one is politically incorrect enough to berate the mothers of the "intelligent, emotionally disturbed girls" Savile preyed on at Duncroft Approved School. But that's largely because the contemporary riposte is: what about their fathers? You might even say that if all the blame can't be dumped on women, then the preference is for no blame to be dumped at all. (Equality is not always progress.) | Except that those tales, too, are full of evil acts perpetrated by insufficiently maternal women, their child victims saved by handsome princes. No one is politically incorrect enough to berate the mothers of the "intelligent, emotionally disturbed girls" Savile preyed on at Duncroft Approved School. But that's largely because the contemporary riposte is: what about their fathers? You might even say that if all the blame can't be dumped on women, then the preference is for no blame to be dumped at all. (Equality is not always progress.) |
| Nevertheless, it's easy to understand how a figure as unlikely as Savile could have been mistaken, by those girls, for a handsome prince. He wore the invisible yet dazzling cloak of celebrity, and promised them the tawdry glamour of television exposure. Savile knew better than anyone that TV is better at concealing than exposing, particularly in the light entertainment department. | Nevertheless, it's easy to understand how a figure as unlikely as Savile could have been mistaken, by those girls, for a handsome prince. He wore the invisible yet dazzling cloak of celebrity, and promised them the tawdry glamour of television exposure. Savile knew better than anyone that TV is better at concealing than exposing, particularly in the light entertainment department. |
| The novelist Andrew O'Hagan wrote a sobering essay in the London Review of Books about how the sexual exploitation of children was the worm in the bud of broadcast light entertainment from the start. O'Hagan outlines the careers of several entertainers of children from the 40s and 50s, all suspected paedophiles that the BBC culture protected. | The novelist Andrew O'Hagan wrote a sobering essay in the London Review of Books about how the sexual exploitation of children was the worm in the bud of broadcast light entertainment from the start. O'Hagan outlines the careers of several entertainers of children from the 40s and 50s, all suspected paedophiles that the BBC culture protected. |
| O'Hagan is hard on Savile's audience, suggesting he was "made to the public's specifications". He continues: "Bosses and colleagues who knew what he was doing say he was just being Jimmy. And he was just Jimmy to the public as well. It is the kind of concession a sentimental society makes to its worst deviants." | O'Hagan is hard on Savile's audience, suggesting he was "made to the public's specifications". He continues: "Bosses and colleagues who knew what he was doing say he was just being Jimmy. And he was just Jimmy to the public as well. It is the kind of concession a sentimental society makes to its worst deviants." |
| O'Hagan is hard, but fair. The public approved of what they sentimentally believed Savile was, not what he actually was. Light entertainment, with its bland promises of true love and innocents rewarded, its staged "competitions" for success and its transformations via "expert advice", is enjoyed just because it encourages people not to think. The only demands the public makes of light entertainment is to help us to forget our troubles, or provide distraction in the form of troubles greater than our own. | O'Hagan is hard, but fair. The public approved of what they sentimentally believed Savile was, not what he actually was. Light entertainment, with its bland promises of true love and innocents rewarded, its staged "competitions" for success and its transformations via "expert advice", is enjoyed just because it encourages people not to think. The only demands the public makes of light entertainment is to help us to forget our troubles, or provide distraction in the form of troubles greater than our own. |
| TV and celebrity, now more than ever, are credited with the ability to turn an ugly duckling into a swan. That fantasy is what reality shows and talent contests thrive on. Andersen again: The Ugly Duckling was his own composition, and published in the first collection, from which he later dropped that "for Children" on the cover. He'd realised by then that his "fairytales" were devoured by people of all ages, unlike his novels. | TV and celebrity, now more than ever, are credited with the ability to turn an ugly duckling into a swan. That fantasy is what reality shows and talent contests thrive on. Andersen again: The Ugly Duckling was his own composition, and published in the first collection, from which he later dropped that "for Children" on the cover. He'd realised by then that his "fairytales" were devoured by people of all ages, unlike his novels. |
| The Ugly Duckling is supposedly autobiographical – Andersen is said to have found out he was the illegitimate child of Prince Christian Frederik of Denmark at some point before he conceived the story. Did he know that already when he prompted a child to say what the adults couldn't, the disempowered adults who weren't sure they knew who their fathers were? Who can say? | The Ugly Duckling is supposedly autobiographical – Andersen is said to have found out he was the illegitimate child of Prince Christian Frederik of Denmark at some point before he conceived the story. Did he know that already when he prompted a child to say what the adults couldn't, the disempowered adults who weren't sure they knew who their fathers were? Who can say? |
| One thing's for sure, though. The Ugly Duckling, a mendacious tale, has passed into the vernacular. Ducklings grow up into ducks. Cygnets grow up into swans. Mere sentiment persuades us to believe in magical transformation. People looked at Savile and saw an unattractive man from a modest background, clearly a bit weird, but doing it his way, his passion for the new, the young and the popular having made of him an unlikely celebrity swan. If it could happen to Savile, it could happen to anyone … A fairytale for credulous adults, who opted for The Ugly Duckling over Hansel and Gretel, groomed by their own modest taste in fantasy. | One thing's for sure, though. The Ugly Duckling, a mendacious tale, has passed into the vernacular. Ducklings grow up into ducks. Cygnets grow up into swans. Mere sentiment persuades us to believe in magical transformation. People looked at Savile and saw an unattractive man from a modest background, clearly a bit weird, but doing it his way, his passion for the new, the young and the popular having made of him an unlikely celebrity swan. If it could happen to Savile, it could happen to anyone … A fairytale for credulous adults, who opted for The Ugly Duckling over Hansel and Gretel, groomed by their own modest taste in fantasy. |
| Even serious commentators reach for a simple solution in the wake of Savile's exposure: if only society listened to the children, a vast cultural edifice of self-serving sentimentality could be vanquished and child abuse could end. Another simple solution, too simple to be credible, in which other, better, humans come along to dry the tears and fix the damage. | Even serious commentators reach for a simple solution in the wake of Savile's exposure: if only society listened to the children, a vast cultural edifice of self-serving sentimentality could be vanquished and child abuse could end. Another simple solution, too simple to be credible, in which other, better, humans come along to dry the tears and fix the damage. |
| • This article was amended on 5 November 2012. The original misspelled Hans Christian Andersen's surname as Anderson on two occasions. This has been corrected. |
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