BBC-Savile Affair: Heads Will Have To Roll.

Beyond fixing: Jimmy Savile, the BBC icon.

Jim will not be able to fix this, and rather probably the BBC will fail, too.

Every day brings new accusations, anecdotes, episodes, some of them shocking, some of them “too graphic to be printed in a family newspaper”, as the generally rather “uninhibited”  Sun writes.

In all this, the BBC looks and more like an Anglican bishop caught groping the valet, and they have today releases a very embarrassed statement  blabbering about helping the police who is knocking at their door anyway, and being oh so solicitous in launching an internal investigation now that the entire country knows.

Sadly, it appears their own team of Newsnight had investigated rather well, but had been silenced for reasons the BBC still has to explain, and which will probably revolve around “we do not care to say that Jesus had a wife without a shred of evidence, but if one of ours is tought to be a paedophile we’ll only talk when others have proved it beyond reasonable doubt”.

Also please think what the oh so concerned people at the BBC would have said if a Bishop had told of one of his priests that the diocese will collaborate with the police… after the police is investigating him and there’s no real alternative to collaboration.

The situation is now surreal: the BBC (Buggers Broadcasting Communism, I am told it means) now claims there is “no record of complaints”. Really? What have they done with them, then? Or were they unable to write?

Today there was also a dramatic change in the tone used: “horrified” if the word used at the moment; which is a marked, police-induced improvement already. The claims of “no records” also lasted (thinking logically) just a few hours, as it is now openly admitted allegations were there from the Seventies.

Ah, all baseless rumours, must our heroes at the Beeb have thought. “Where will it end” – they must have said to each other –  “if we start doing something serious after only ten or twenty years of allegations”. And they accuse of cover-up… the Church, with the Vatican hierarchy often sitting thousands of km away?

Yes,  “horrified” is truly the word; but referred to the BBC, too.

What the Daily Mail calls an humiliating U-Turn looks with the hours more and more like a rout. The simple fact is that the BBC was caught with their pants down just in the matter by which they most love to pretend they have caught the Church with theirs. Most worryingly, it seems that this was not the action of one or two isolated friend of Savile making some cover-up for him, but something many had to know. How the BBC can even think of pretending they are not involved up to their chin is beyond me.  

At 23.10 tonight, ITV will broadcast an investigation with the shocking and graphic revelations.  Whatever it is, it is difficult to believe the BBC did not have a vast hint, if not a detailed knowledge, of what had been happening for decades within their own walls; that is, before ITV first went on the scent.  I think it is now very appropriate to ask that the silenced Newsnight report be also broadcast in full and without censorship. We could see if the product was so unsubstantiated and below the BBC “professional” standards, as it is more or less vaguely hinted at.

It appears the BBC were if not the accomplices, at least the willing enablers of Savile’s perversion not for one year or two, but for decades, and I am really curious to hear how they will really explain how is it that nothing serious was ever done.

I do hope the name f the BBC will in future not be mentioned in any other TV or newspaper without mentioning the name of Jimmy Savile, and that a lot of mud will deservedly stick. Is this not what they have done with the Church (the entire one: the Church as an institution) for too long?

If you want to know whether they knew, just read Savile’s BBC Obituary: (emphasis mine)

His eccentric personality, unconventional lifestyle and irrepressible self-belief all defied convention, invited personal speculation, and bemused many an interviewer over the years.

Some questioned the motivation of the man behind such a singular public persona, but his energy and ability were beyond doubt.

What a very British way to say a lot of people inside the Beeb knew, and pretty much everyone was afraid of being the first to talk.

If I were a BBC journalist, I’d now suggest they introduce BBC employees’ celibacy as I would see in it the root of their  scandalous involvement in decade-long child abuse and/or child rape.

Mundabor