CEMETERYGATE

EVEN THOSE WITH A PRURIENT interest in the events behind the scandal that has led to former BBC star and ex-philanthropist and no doubt future-ex-Sir Jimmy Savile (pictured above) will be shocked to the medulla and chilled to the bones on reading or hearing the revelations of Paul Gambaccini, one of the more lucid of the DJs who were hired by BBC radio in the nineteen seventies.

 

WE HAVE UNFORTUNATELY BECOME used to hearing about character X or Y being a paedophile; or film star W or Z having an extra-marital affair, often, as it happens, with someone of a different sex to their legally wedded partner. These press outings have been taking place with such regularity that even “right-thinking folk” – should there be any such individuals besides myself and my good lady wife – are now hardened to such news in the morning papers.

 

OUR LONG, LAZY SUNDAY MORNINGS, forgiving the plug, may often now be filled with over-the-marmalade discussions, once we get beyond the “Pass the economics supplement, sweetness” and “Have you got the Style magazine over there, David?” stage, involving such niceties as “Oh, I see that Lord Jxxxxx Hxxxx (name withheld) has finally been caught with xxxxxxxxxx (fill in, from: boys, animals, his wife’s sister, his own sister, etc.), all of which have now become as much a part of a gentleman’s breakfast as brown toast and burnt bacon.

 

WHAT NO ONE WAS EXPECTING WAS THE NEWS from Mr Gambaccini today. We may not be able to understand what makes a grown man a paedophile when we do not share their mental problems; yet trying to understand what is going on in the mind of a man who volunteers to “help” ambulance crews to bring dead people to the morgue because, as Paul Gambaccini states, Jimmy Savile was a “necrophiliac” (my inverted commas), a claim he made today live on BBC Radio 5, is beyond us.

 

ACCORDING TO SAVILE HIMSELF, he just wanted to be with dead people at the end of their lives. We all might have thought it was innocent back then, but it is one more thing that has lost its innocence in this, the age of perversion. Savile stated about the “quiet time” he liked to spend with people who died in hospital: “One of my jobs is to take away the deceased. You can look after somebody, be alone with somebody, who has lived a whole lifetime, and I’m just saying goodbye and looking after him.”