Tuesday 1 July 2014

GLASTONBURY, ENTERTAINMENT'S CESSPIT.

Blondie, Dolly Parton, Tom Jones, fuck me, Jesus;
 sooner or later every dodgy, decrepit, has-been Butlins Redcoat in the country will find themselves on the stage at Glastonbury, stooged-for by that stupid, gobby old farmer, worshipped by its zombie singalong audience. This one below, though, this was really, truly fucking special. The grooming, as mrs woar frames it, of a nation.

 Y'know, mates, - an' yer such a great crowd, I just wanted to tell you that, sincerely, from the bottoma m'heart - there was this good bloke,  called Joseph of Aramathea, and he came here, rather like m'self, outa the goodness of his heart, to Glastonbury Tor, only he was on walkabout, from Palestine or somewhere, and he planted  his didgeridoo in the ground and it grew into something truly wonderful,  rather like my story about the two little girls, I mean  two little boys, it just kinda entered the national songbook, that one, Margaret Thatcher loved it, yeah, right, I know she 'ad a kangaroo loose in the top paddock, wasn't quite  bonzer in the brain department, old Maggie, but that song, kinda made me a national treasure it did, with some people.

Artists, connoisseurs, entertainers? 
 One has known for simply ages that they are all creepy fucking bastards.  But what can one do?

And this here  is me and Queen Brenda, we 'ad a kind of a mutual admiration sorta thing going on, even if I do say so m'self. Bit of an illusionist 'erself, is Brenda. Gotta be, really, in her game.

If he doesn't top himself first, which, if he has any sense, he will, he'll be off to one of Brenda's nicks, come Friday, an old man, and he'll never come out.  And for the rest of his days in prison he'll be, at best, mocked and humiliated daily by filth, riff-raff and bullyboys.  The prisoners  won't be nice to him, either.  His Mrs'll be,  I dunno, it doesn't bear thinking about.

What does bear thinking about, though is how sick I - and I presume most normal, decent people - are of hearing how nobody ever suspected, whooda believed it, Rolf Harris, of all people; well, I never;  hindsight is all very well.........

I was saying to mr bungalow bill that until 1968 and dating from the time of Shakespeare, the Lord Chancellor and local Watch Commitees kept a tight rein, mindful of its members' proclivities, on showbusiness; productions, scripts  and activities had to be licensed, kept an eye on. They knew, in the sixteenth century,  that there is no business like showbusiness, an observation from which we are now immeasurably distant.  We are,  rather,  approaching a point where, for many, there is no business but showbusiness.

Be it the national legislature or be it the Jeremy Kyle Show,  the inept narcissist and  the degenerate lout perform for us on a dizzily accelerating carousel of crap.


Consider what passes for comedy.  Consider people like Graham Norton
 

 and Ricky Gervaise; 

physical and social mutants, 
both their acts consist of  them sticking their fingers up their own arses and inviting us to smell them.  Bravo! Comic genius;  celebrity snot-eaters is what they are. Riding, initially, a wave of  nervous audience incredulity - did he really say that? I can't believe he really said that thing,  the thing he said  -  their smut and cruelty is now a necessary fixture in the lives of many whose day is complete only with a visit to Cruelty TeeVee.  That people do actually watch Norton and his cavalcade of publicity-hungry grotesques always takes my breath away, gives me a HasMyHeartStopped? moment; sometimes the horrid little fuck fleetingly occupies the teevee screen during  my  manic, button-jabbing search for something to watch,  a second or two of his arched body, his ludicrous apparel, his distorted, pantomime dame face,  eyebrows raised, mouthing lewdness. A decent Lord Chancellor'd hang him from the city walls.

Humour is, of course, an odd beast, in the ear of the beholder    and little of it works on me.  I sat stone-faced through most of Monty Python and I thought Morecambe and Wise a couple of really successful Northern Jewish businessmen, could always imagine them having diarised script meetings, audience projections, earnest rehearsals,  what I could never imagine was them actually just spontaneously laughing;  same with the equally overrated Big'n'Small Ronnies,  just taking care of business.  But there was no harm in those old acts, they weren't gratuitously, cruelly vile, as is, to huge acclaim, Gervaise and his fawners.

Wee Ronnie, incidentally, usually so focused on old persons' dietary needs, 
 

dropped a bollock when interviewed briefly about his fellow star, Harris; 

 terribly upsetting, he sighed, all luvvie,
 terribly upsetting, his upset clearly  felt for Harris and showbusiness and not for their victims.

And whilst the country has joyously given license to the abhorrent, secret, cruel fingers have prised apart the limbs of innocence, filled her mouth with secret, ancient spit, her moist  places with  secret, ancient  sperm.

Those of us who joined in the destruction of deference,  who cheered John Mortimer's courtroom liberation of Lady Chatterley  have much to comfort us - and much cause for disquiet; freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose and it is the cultural freedom fighters, the faux liberationists who have overseen, particularly at the BBC, the triumph of the nonce.  Two old corporation hags have been gobbing-off, today, about Harris;  the unshutupable, cadaverous Rantzen, yet again
 
Well, like everyone else in showbusiness, I am utterly shocked, I mean, Rolf Harris, who would have thouight it, him so good with children and all.  Did I say showbusiness, I meant, of course, child protection.  And care for the randy elderly. Like myself.

 and  Joan Bakewell; 

amoral both, the former a cheesy, innuendoising consumer champion turned impertinent and dangerous child protection expert;  the latter a jumped-up, ponderous and irrelevant  culture vulture,  the very essence of early BBC Two-ness.  Rantzen, anyway,  rehearsed her clapped-out surprise, shock, horror bollocks and the ghastly old Bakewell tart wittered on about how she used to kick naughty men surreptitiously in the shins,  so, she implied, why didn't these foolish children do the same, strategies is what we developed, she crowed fatuously and in a moment a thousand poncey, meaningless arts shows, a thousand meaningless ishoos and a thousand meaningless articles -  her life's work - dissolved into meaningless goo. I had always loathed Bakewell  and her thinking man's dolly bird schtick,  her response to Harris - turning it to the glory of her own strong-minded independence -  crystallised exactly why.  Strategies, just not strategies for child protection.     What was the point of pseudo womens libbers like these two trollops,  if they couldn't or wouldn't spot an obvious danger to children, like Rolf Harris? Or Jimmy Savile?  Or Stuart Hall?  Or Max Clifford? All of whom they must have at the very least encountered. 
A decent Lord Chancellor'd  cut off their hair and hang Rantzen and Bakewell from the city walls;  traitors and collaborators with Filth.

George Steiner wrote that the Holocaust happened because the Berlin intelligentsia was too busy listening to the quartet in the salon to hear the cry in the street.  It's stretching things a bit to describe either of these two worthless old biddies as members of an intelligentsia but you know what I mean, pampered by a dirty old man directorate at the BBC, cossetted and hosannahed whilst rabidly phoney and diverted by self-serving trivia from ruinous monsterism kicking-down Decency's doors.

And there's all the producers, directors, camermen, make-up artists, all that lot, serving the stars, .must be thousands of them who will,  regarding Harris and Savile and Hall and doubtless many more, have taken the line of least resistance,  Oh, fuck me, dearie, I can't speak-out, think what it would do to my career.

There needs to be a Nuremberg moment for the BBC. Directors General must be jailed , stripped of their pensions, massive over payments to multi-layered parasitism must be clawed back from the shitty likes of Mark Thompson and Fatso Patten,  from Jonafun Woss and the chortling cancer that is Terry Wogan.  The corporation has failed on almost every front, the odd arts or science programme emerges which is often, in itself, worth the  tax but I could forego them happily, if it meant that we no longer enriched the vilest among us and encouraged the gullible to paddle about on the shores of an ocean of filth.

The nonce and the beast,  they need prevention by scrutiny, instead, they receive encouragement by celebration. It would have been so much better for everyone, especially for Harris, himself, if people had refused to be dazzled by his meagre, overblown talents, hit him a swift punch in the gob and fucked him back off to Australia, but the business of show constantly needs new entrants and lots of its shareholders will have earned a fortune from Harris.
That Michael Grade, a decent Lord Chancellor'd hang him from outside the London Palladium.

 I don't suppose that we could live quietly, modestly and respectfully, as do people like the Amish but unless we move some way in that direction, unless we abandon the elevation of wicked and greedy nonentity then none of our children are safe, even from ourselves.  It was we, with our need to be diverted, who created Savile and Hall and Harris and Clifford;  they are as much our creatures as are we theirs.  

Meantime, we can i-watch  the glory that is Glastonbury, we have the THIEFA world cup and PsychoMommasboy Murray may win Wimbledon.  For us, for the fans. The Pistorious Nutter trial continues to enchant  and the feeble-minded popinjay, David Beckham dopeygrins and stammers his way around skymadeupnewsandfilth, doin' good, fer kids, an' fings like that. Maybe, if we're lucky,  there'll be a war for us to watch and punditise upon,  there is no shortage of potential wars.  And even if there's not a war, there's Mr Salmond's Commonwealth Games, in Glasgow, here, in the best part of England

mr sg was talking about George Orwell, the other day, about his description of totalitarianism posing as benevolence and how that could be  applied to whatever it is that today masquerades as the Labour party. Less polemical, more imaginative  than Orwell was Aldous  Huxley; as we consider the number of platforms, portals, whatever they are, 'phones and tablets and Kindles, when we consider the  inescapability of entertainment technology and of the insatiable appetite for its content, when we consider the parallel, digitised, simureality which so many inhabit,  then Orwell's question, Are you going to the Feelies tonight? seems naive;  we are already there. And the Rolf Harris Show is just one more titbit of content, product, manufactured and served-up.  Nobody, I suspect, really gives a fuck. There'll be another nonce along in a minute. Put your hands together and give it up for him.  Or her.

27 comments:

Doug Shoulders said...

Was not Rantzen the pioneer of cruelty TV? I recall pensioners being ridiculed, a half witted working class people exposed for their unguardedness upon the descent on them by camera crew... She and that lot radiating middle-class know it all fuckishness. Smary, elitist and malevolent.
Even at the age I watched that shit…what was it? That’s life? I thought something was wrong about those people. That the producers and what-not had contempt for their audience…turn out I wasn’t wide of the mark.
Gervais reminds me of that bloke from The Office. Scarily slimy. Stand-up he’s as unfunny as fuck.
I do believe that those who do speak out are removed. Leaving in place those with the gutter morals. Simon Dee springs to mind? Didn’t he kick up a storm about something before disappearing off the face of the earth?

Woman on a Raft said...

I wonder, Mr Ishmael. So far it has been home-grown creeps. Savile meant nothing outside our shores but this one is international.

Gary Shannon, a show host, knew about Harris and wanted a victim to make a complaint in 2001, but she would not. Jane Marwick has written about it now. I expect there will be a legal hubub in Australia as to whether they can extradite him and whether he can get a fair trial there now.

Thank you for this post. There is much to think about.

Anonymous said...

I hadn't thought of that mr doug shoulders but yes, maybe That's Life was the dawn of Cruelty TeeVee; her's was a grisly crew of half-men, Cyril Fletcher and Giles Brandreth and some dork called Kieran, smarming their arses off, arch and conceited and yet somehow she morphed into some Yiddisher Momma, saviour of troubled children, ghastly, self-serving old witch.

I would've thought, mrs woar, that Oz would feel well rid of him and have little appetite for a trial and that given his age extradition and trial could be argued away by his lawyers, no useful purpose et cetera. But it is interesting that there is an international view of this, Maxy did boast a roster of US showbiz giant clients, like Mafia boy, Sinatra but I don't suppose that would interest today's Uncle Sam./

I bet the focus will be on defending his reported eleven million pounds fortune against all comers. Anyway you look at it it's all postcard from Hell stuff. Decades ago the News of the World might've been all over this stuff but that was before Rupe and Brooksie and Andy brought journalism to a whole new level.

Dick the Prick said...

Ah, noncing - it's not like it used to be! I think there's a thing about Oz magazine on tonight and whilst before my time, I was led to believe it was a moral fight - us against them, the lower orders against the prurient, staid, censorious establishement all over Rupert Bear's cock. I dunno - in geological time maybe it was arse over tit.

Just as an aside, I was at that Rolf Harris gig at Glastonbury and I reckon it was the largest gig ever held there as it was the last year before they got security and the main stage starts an hour or so before the rest, so everyone fucked off there for breakfast ales. He was shite and the satire or comedy value wained pretty darn quick. Fuck 'im, the cunt.

Anonymous said...

Masochistically, I looked at a few Glastlegsbury clips on the BBC bogsite. Shockingly dire - care-home Karaoke. As your young Polish friend used to say, they are shitting in our faces. Brick - rubdown - well.

verge.//

callmeishmael said...

Somewhere, in here, mr dtp, I have a copy of the infamous Oz schoolkids' issue, the one which led to the prosecution, it was a bit grown up for me, too, at the time and most of the writers turned out to be detestable, Charles Shaar Murray, Mick Farren, Dennis, himself, Caoline Coon was OK, still is, and Richard Neville wrote a good book, Playpower? Poppower? It is around here somewhere, too. I will find it for you, it was counter culture stuff. As for the whole Underground movement, well, think Pink Floyd. It was a bit oppositional but ultimately just about money and sex and influence. Don't follow leaders. Not then, not now.

I watched Dolly Parton Aw-Shucksing on the i-thing, mr verge and I thought of you. I used to rate her musicality and her inspiration, she could. break the heart of a wheelbarrow, bring a tear to a glass eye, but Oh dear, Oh dear, Oh dear that fucking karaoke shit was awful, poison, and a worthy topic for the most profane, obscene and transgressive of summaries; Glastonbury's Hooray Henrys, hillbillies for the day. Phil Everly would fart in his grave.

Bungalow Bill said...

"The chortling cancer that is Terry Wogan". That's why we come here. We should not forget Noel Edmonds, of course, another trailblazer for condescending, lachrymose plebshite.

inmate said...

Just what the fuck is it with the PBC, along with all those you have rightly condemned, there's more;Ex Radio 1 DJ Chris Denning charged with 41 sex offences.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-27525751
To think you will have your arse dragged to court for failing to fund these fuckers.

the noblest prospect said...

You've been on fine form these past few weeks, Mr Smith, but this post is undoubtedly your most profound.

call me ishmael said...

I wrote, a while ago, mr tnp, about Phil Spector taking all our childhoods to prison with him; spoofing one of his hits I said: ...then he asked me to be his bride, always be right by his side, I felt so happy I almost cried, and then he shot me. Popular culture is as important as the other stuff.

I don't know why it is, maybe you do, but the suborning even of open-air music to what mrs woar calls the grooming of the nation makes me despair; there is nowhere, no activity which Ruin hasn't colonised. I am glad the post meant something to you.

If, mr inmate, you google youtube, cliff richard and the house of paedophiles, you will find a box of dark delights, similalry with Leon Brittan and paedophile cover-up. Careful though, it's rough out there.

Anonymous Bungalow Bill said...

"The chortling cancer that is Terry Wogan". That's why we come here.

It's why I come here, too; these phrases just arrive here, only after writing them down do I or somebody else, in this case, you, recognise the poetry in them.

Woman on a Raft said...

The serpent has grown very bold, Mr Ishmael, but he still prefers the quiet, hypnotic attack which looks like a deal. He hates your blog because it gets through his current mask, and that alone is why you should persevere with it.

He got a bloody good bite on somewhere after the Oil Shock, though, by managing to separate most of Britain's citizens from their KJV story hoard. Here, you don't want that old book. You want some DH Lawrence.

I am not suggesting anyone has to believe any of it or accept wicked behaviour by priests. Rather, I hold that the access to the stories about a tribe a couple of thousand years ago and how it ended suddenly has an innoculatory effect. Translating it in to English and insisting that it must be available to all citizens was the saving grace of the messed-up monarch, James I of England, VI of Scotland.

Look at how it gets straight to it by Genesis 3: there is evil and it will approach you, each one of you, personally and directly, no matter how humble or exalted you are. How much easier is it to groom a nation if they do not know even that?

Alphons said...

Could part of the overall problem be that we are governed/ruled/controlled by a system of "Do as I say, not as I do."?
As a child I was always told we had to "look up" to our "elders" and "betters", but having become an octogenarian I have never found an elder that I could "look up to" and as for "betters".... well...where are they?

Anonymous said...

I remember Simon Dee being disappeared, but I can't remember what for...

Doug Shoulders said...

Could never fathom the popularity of the likes of Rantzen, Wogan, etc. They seem to have been on tv for ever..

Zero talent for anything other than self promotion,
They are ugly.

I stopped watching tv when Norton arrived…noisy as fuck with his noisy as fuck audience.. I’m learning new things these days.
I’m amazed at the amount of absolute shite on it…especially the PBC.
That new newsroom that they built and were wanking off about…they’ve reported fuck all about anything since it was built.
Can’t even investigate they’re own mess.
Pity the poor bastard who is tasked with bringing them to boot for their noncing






callmeshmael said...

I sometimes feel that William Tyndale haunts these cyberpages; forty years ago I heard a BBC dramatisation of his life and execution and it has never left me. For those who don't know, Tyndale was a sixteenth century scholar who, translating from Greek and latin, and using the revolutionary printing press, created the first English Bible, feeling that the people, those who could read, should be able to read the Word of God in their own language, the Church had him garotted and his body burnt. His translation was drawn upon by those who, some years later, produced the King James Version, to which mrs woar alludes and which, even to a Godless heathenbastard like me, is a precious text. Uriah Gove, mr spit, at the Dof Ed, in a vanity project, recently reissued the KJV to schools, it remains to be seen if it will be taught, giving, as it does, such great offence to the servants of Ruin. I have mentioned before, that the Psalms are the birth of the Blues, Proverbs the key to understanding ourselves and the Sermon on the Mount a blueprint for our species survival, others will have other favourites.

Before he became a caricature of himself, mr alphons, Mr Bob Dylan sang, If you need somebody you can trust, trust yourself. It is hard to find good men in public life, public service and career should be mutually exclusive terms, yet, in the four yearly festival of competitive promising, we are assured that they are not. We are told, furthermore, that ordinary people can have a career, too, in McDonalds. It is fucking iniquitous and it is no wonder that we feel on our cheeks the hot breath of the Jihad.

Elders, I believe, has more than one meaning, it slanders age as decrepitude, yet it also denotes one of probity and wisdom, not necessarily age-related. The child of the family but no kin to me calls me Mister, we shake hands and bow deeply when we meet and part. He loves it, having his own Mister; I think that's elderism.

Woman on a Raft said...

Re: Simon Dee; it is difficult to tell if he exaggerated his own life or not. The BBC said they sacked him over money, but they've never done that to anyone else. Dee said it was, amongst other things, for his rejection of the EEC and the fear that he might be able to influence a mass audience.

The Tap blog has an interesting 2012 obituary, useful because the writer was in direct contact with him. Amongst other things, Dee did not like the way Savile and Freeman behaved with the children and teenagers, and said so. Although, of course, we only have this statement now and cannot prove what he said at the time. However, as a forthright person it is quite likely that he did speak out and make (more) enemies.

http://the-tap.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/simon-dee-told-bbc-freeman-and-savile.html

Woman on a Raft said...

Apologies for scrappy writing; I did of course mean to credit Wycliffe and Tyndale. To avoid misunderstanding, I'm not advocating people be refused permission to read Lady C (if they are having trouble sleeping) but there has been an estrangement, an alienation, from root literature. When seaweed is cut from its rock, it washes up the beach and rots.

callmeishmael said...

Other Dee obits cite Dee irritating David Frost, then part owner of LWT and Dee's employer; one can imagine the ghastly Frost taking umbrage at Dee's rising star. I actually remember Dee as the first of the vacuous airhead celebrity presenters, the progenitof of the likes of Parkinson, Wogan, Woss and Norton but I was just a kid, then, his obituarists do rank Dee as an independent and relatively decent bloke.

I doubt that there was any misunderstanding, mrs woar, although, me, personally, compelled to study him at Warwick, I found Lawrence unpickupable and would be quite sanguine about him being banned again, this time for good.

callmeishmael said...

That patricular poor bastard, mr doug shoulders will be us, the PBC will not investigate, much less punish and reform itself.

Anonymous said...

I like Janice Joplin, noticed the lyric, Mr Ishmael.

Imagine her at Glasto.

If she could stand long enough to get on stage, obviously.

I see Leon Brittan is in the shit, at last. Beasting, quelle surprise, wonder how much shit will stick, and whether any will end up on Little Willy Hague?

He's not gay, you know!


Vincent

Alphons said...

I feel I have written this before, maybe in slightly different words, but I make no apology for writing it again, because, as I see it, until the situation is altered there is no hope of our becoming a civilised and responsible class of beings.

The problem is that no one, from the top to the bottom of society (irrespective of which end you look at as top or bottom), is ever held totally responsible for the result of their actions.

It matters not whether you have insurance that will pay out (as little as possible) for the result of your driving error, the family of the driver you have just killed will not be able to provide for his family. Yet, despite you being responsible for his death, the monetary responsibility for his family will be carried by others (through insurance co. and welfare state, as miserly as possible.).

It matters not if you are a Prime Minister who starts a war with another country, and looses millions of pounds and thousands of lives, because the responsibility for it will lie with the other country, and they will be responsible for the cost (which will of course be passed down to us the public).

It matters not if, as a minister of state, you foul up the lives of millions, load the public with Billions of pounds worth of PFI (etc.) debt, because that debt will be carried by others.

It matters not if as a councillor or M.P. you push through measures completely at variance with the wishes of Joe Public because all the debt will be carried by others.

If you go and hijack the local corner store will you be required to recompense the shopkeeper for all the damage and loot?

The prisons are full of people who have had their responsibility removed in exchange for a spell at Her Majesty's Pleasure (although she is totally ignorant of it) and society is full of people who know that their responsibility will be waived similarly, should they get caught, and many know they will not get caught because the money needed for this is being dispersed in other conceits.

The state has gradually fostered the idea that the total responsibility for the well being of all people is it's concern, whereas it itself is totally reliant on the people for its own continued existence (most of whom have already become hypnotised by state propaganda).

There should be a way to correct the situation.

callmeisnmael said...

Any discomfort for Leon is welcome, mr vincent but can they throw him to the wolves?
Such a thing would lead, eventually, to the desanctification of Whisky Maggie and her whole crew; I noticed Michael Howard looking a bit crook, just now, on the telly; what would Lord Tebbit say, playing his greatest hits, over there, at the Filth-o-Graph? What about Tarzan, he always hated Leon, was that why? Douggie Hurd, he and Pauline Neville Jones made ten million pounds, working as Slobodan's bankers and should be in jail anyway, how would it be if it emerged that all of Thatcher's crime family were not only thieves - which few would doubt - but were also beasts or beast-minders?

Nah, it'll never happen.

callmeishmael said...

I believe it to be worse, darker, than you paint it, mr alphons, and that the touted remedy, the ballot box, only makes matters even worse; MediaMinster simply will not permit the election of any who might tear it down and although few would disagree with your summary even fewer would relish a revolution.

As for the New People, whose future we here discuss, and who should be agitating and disrupting, they are Smartphoned and Facebooked into quiescence, Fuck 'em, maybe they'll wake up when the Chinks own the entire country, when it's too late.

inmate said...

Thanks for the invite to view cliff richards and leon brittan's preferred sexual depravities, but I think I'll give it a miss.
The once loved Labour party are no less guilty, google Labour 25, a whole shitfest of them from Harman downwards.
It appears that there is no end from Beasting, no matter what colour rossette.

Dick the Prick said...

I know tampering with kids is bad and stuff and it's only about time that perps be prevented and ended but let's be fucking frank - social service departments have been pimping kids in every town for at least 30 years.

All these 'asian take away' paedo rings are because they started selling dodgy crack. I walk past 2 crackdens on the way to work and they've got carpets now - a decent relationship from the Chief Super to the dealer and everyone's happy. Police & Crime Commissioners were an expensive buffer but is paedo action that prevalent?

This Leon Britton thing is a good story though. Nick Clegg used to work for him and apparently Sir Nick Clegg - his daddy (I shit you not, Nick Clegg is named after his daddy!) got him his first job in the European office of.....dun dun dun....yes, you guessed it...Sir Leon Britton?

Anyway, nice that Rebecca's been cleared, eh? Ah, fair play to the girl - she dealt in smut but it comes both ways.

Guido von Fawkes has got a thing going against some Tory MP for beating his then girlfriend and it's kind of sweet. If it's victim politics that's the fore topic then introspection is fine. There is something going on with politics when we have libraries at our fingertips. The War Administration sounds a lot less spectacular when it's Neville pressing print.

Defo have Rolf as the biggest ever Glasto gig - 140,000 i think - and that must send anyone a little bit mental and he went paedo? Kids TeeVee must fuck people up too. UUrrggghh -

banned said...

I Youtubed Dolly at Glastonbury and was duly disappointed but it spurred me onto Johny Cash which made up for it.

As someone pointed out on the radio no-one ever liked Jimmy Saville (or Saville as we must now call him just like the disgraced in the USSR) because he was always a smarmy cunt just like Hall who was only for old people.

Rolf, sorry, HARRIS though was different, I for one liked him and his stuff on 1970's telly.

How is it going for Paul, or is he just Gambaccini now?

call me ishmael said...

Dunno about Gambo, Sir Cliff is the current underground favourite for exposure, but when Gambo first made his announcement that he didn't speak up about Sir James because it would harm his own career I thought he should be carted off to jail, just for that.

Johnny Cash escapes me, I'm afraid, I liked Folsom Prison Blues but that was it. I know lots of people do but I didn't like his voice, didn't like his playing, didn't like his face. Just contrast his dire, dum-diddy-dum-diddy dum-diddy-dum with the country-hillbilly-blues of Solomon Burke, David Rawlings and Gillian Welsh on the current Evensong,. It's a free country here, you don't have to like it but, as sick old men singing goes, this kicks the Man in Black up and down the sidewalk.