Part 2 (1/2)

(There must be some technical reason maybe it's the film stock they use that accounts for why British TV is no longer capable of rendering any sense of a lived-in world. No matter what is filmed, everything always looks as if it has been thickly, slickly painted in gloss, like it's all a corporate video. That remains my problem with the new Dr Who as it happens: the contemporary British scenes look like a theme park, a very stagey stage-set, too well lit.) 'Look Out There's a Thief About' public information films on black and white TV, Open University lecturers with preposterous moustaches and voluminous collars, the test card...Everything is so iconic, and the thing with icons, after all, is that they evoke nothing. The icon is the very opposite of the Madeleine, Chris Marker's name rhyming Hitchc.o.c.k and Proust for those totemic triggers that suddenly abduct you into the past. The point being that the Madeleine can only manage this time-s.n.a.t.c.hing function because it has avoided museumification and memorialisation, stayed out of the photographs, been forgotten in a corner. Hearing T-Rex now doesn't remind you of 73, it reminds you of nostalgia programmes about 1973.

And isn't part of our problem that every cultural object from 1963 on has been so thoroughly, forensically, mulled over that nothing can any longer transport us back? (A problem of digital memory: Baudrillard observes somewhere that computers don't really remember because they lack the ability to forget.) k-punk post, April 13, 2007 In the end, the science fiction elements of Life On Mars consisted solely in an ontological hesitation: is this real or not? As such, Life On Mars fell squarely into Todorov's definition of the Fantastic as that which hesitates between the Uncanny (that which can ultimately be explained naturalistically) and the Marvellous (that which can only be accounted for in supernatural terms). The predicament that Life On Mars explored was: is Sam Tyler in a coma, and the whole 1970s world in which he is lost some kind of unconscious confabulation? Or has he, by some means not yet understood, been transported back into the real 1973? The show maintained the equivocation until the end (the final episode was ambivalent to the point of being cryptic).

Simm has wryly observed that the show's central conceit lets the production off the hook. If Tyler was in a coma, then any of Life On Mars's historical inaccuracies could be explained away as gaps in the character's recollections of the period. No doubt the enjoyment of Life On Mars derived from its imperfect recollection, not of 1973 itself, but of the television of the 1970s. The programme was mitigated nostalgia, I Love 1973 as a cop show. I say cop show, because it is clear that the SF elements of Life On Mars were little more than pretexts; the show was a meta-cop show rather than meta-SF. The time travel conceit permitted the showing of representations which would otherwise be unacceptable, and beneath the framing ontological question (is this real or not?), there was a question about desire and politics: do we want this to be real?

As the avatar of the present, Sam Tyler became the bad conscience of the 70s cop show, whose discontent with the past permitted us to enjoy it again. Simm, as the modern, enlightened 'good cop', was less the anti-type of antediluvian 'bad cop' Gene Hunt than the postmodern disavowal which made possible our enjoyment of Hunt's invective and violence. Hunt, played by Philip Glenister, became the show's real star, beloved of the tabloids who adored quoting his streams of abuse, carefully constructed by the writers so that they could come across as comic rather than inflammatory. Hunt's 'no-nonsense policing' was presented with enough 'grit' to make us wince, but never so much violence that it would invoke disgust. (In this respect, the programme was the cultural equivalent of a blow to a suspect that would not show up under later medical examination.) Undoubtedly, although perhaps unintentionally, the show's ultimate message was reactionary; in the end, rather than Tyler educating Hunt, it was he would come to an accommodation with Hunt's methods. When, in the final episode, Tyler is faced with a choice between betraying Hunt or staying loyal (at this point in the narrative, it appears that Tyler's betrayal of Hunt is the requisite price Tyler must pay in order to return to 2007), this also became a choice between 1973 and the present day that amounted to a decision, not about collar lengths or other cultural preferences, but about policing styles. Audience sympathy is managed such that, however much we disapprove of Hunt, we are never supposed to lose faith in him, so that Tyler's betrayal seemed far worse than any of Hunt's many misdemeanours. Tyler's (apparent) return to 2007 underscores this by presenting the modern environment as sterile, drearily worthy, ultimately far less real than the rough justice of Hunt's era. Modern wisdom ('how can you maintain the law by breaking the law?') is set against Hunt's renegade-heroic identification of himself with the law ('I am the law, so how can I break it?') The deep libidinal appeal of Hunt derives from his impossible duality as upholder of the Law and he who enjoys unlimited jouissance. The two faces of the Father, the stern lawgiver and Pere Jouissance, resolved: the perfect figure of reactionary longing, a charismatic embodiment of everything allegedly forbidden to us by 'political correctness'.

'Can The World Be as Sad as It Seems?':.

David Peace and his Adapters.

David Peace's four Red Riding novels were acts of exorcism and excavation of the near-past, a b.l.o.o.d.y riposte to I Love The 1970s clipshow nostalgia. They stalk the West Yorks.h.i.+re that Peace grew up in, transforming real events the framing and intimidation of Stefan Kisco; the incompetent police operation to catch the Yorks.h.i.+re Ripper into background for brutal and unrelenting fictions that possess an apocalyptic lyricism.

Peace has always been dogged by comparisons with James Ellroy. There's no doubt that encountering Ellroy liberated something in Peace, but in the end Peace is the better writer. Peace has called the experience of reading Ellroy's White Jazz his 's.e.x Pistols moment'. But Peace builds upon what Ellroy achieved much in the way that the postpunk groups leapt into the s.p.a.ce that the Pistols had blown open. Peace extrapolates a pulp modernist poetics from Ellroy's experiments in telegraphic compression, and while Ellroy's pugilistic prose has a pump-action amphetamine drive, Peace's writing is hypnotic and oneiric; its incantatory repet.i.tions delaying and veiling plot revelations rather than rus.h.i.+ng headlong towards resolution. Despite presenting seemingly similar worlds in which the police are routinely corrupt, journalists are venal and co-optable, and the wealthy are vampiric exploiters their political orientations are very different. Ellroy is a Hobbesian conservative, who evinces a macho pragmatism that accepts violence, exploitation and betrayal as inevitable. The same phenomena are oppressively omnipresent in Peace's world, but there is no sense of acceptance: instead, his novels read like howls of agony and calls for retribution, divine or otherwise.

Peace, who has said that he aimed to produce a Crime fiction which is no longer entertainment, has written Crime works that are hauntological in a triple sense. The Crime genre is of course well suited to explore the (moral, existential, theological) problems posed by what Quentin Meilla.s.soux called 'odious deaths': the deaths 'of those who have met their end prematurely, whose death is not the proper conclusion of a life but its violent curtailment'; and as they moved away from the uneasy combination of fanciful genre trappings, period signifiers, Angry Young Man homage and brutality that characterised 1974, the novels of the Red Riding Quartet were simultaneously drawn towards actuality and theology, as if the proximity of the one entailed the other. Readers are put into the position of spectral mourners by the voices of those who have died odiously, the Ripper's victims, heard in the visionary 'Transmissions' which preface each of the chapters in 1980, sections which combine the actual (gleaned from reportage and biography) with the spectral.

The novels are hauntological in another sense, a sense that is closer to the way in which we have used it in relation to music, but not quite the same. Peace is not at all interested in the problems of degraded memory which preoccupy The Caretaker, Burial or Basinski. His is a past without crackle, rendered in the first person and in a tense that is very nearly present. The occlusions in the narrative are due, not to faulty recording devices or memory disorders (cultural or personal) but to the self-blindings of his characters, who see themselves (and the events of which they are a part) only through a gla.s.s darkly. In the end, everything narrative, intelligibility succ.u.mbs to total murk; as the characters begin to disa.s.sociate, it becomes difficult to know what is happening, or what has happened; at a certain point, it is unclear as to whether we have crossed over into the land of the dead.

Hunter, the senior Manchester detective a.s.signed to investigate the West Yorks.h.i.+re police force in 1980, finds himself caught in a world in which things don't add up; they don't fit together. It's a Gnostic terrain. The Gnostics thought that the world was made of a corrupt matter characterised by heavy weight and impenetrable opacity: a murky, muddy mire in which fallen angels one of the persistent images in the Red Riding books are trapped. There is no question of Hunter, or solicitor John Piggott in 1983 or even Peace being able to completely illuminate what has happened. This is a world in which, as Tony Grisoni, the screenwriter who adapted the novels for Channel 4, puts it, 'narratives disappear into the dark'.

The libidinal orientation towards the past is also markedly different in the case of Peace and sonic hauntology: whereas hauntological music has emphasised the unexplored potentials prematurely curtailed in the periods it invokes, Peace's novels are driven by the unexpiated suffering of Yorks.h.i.+re at the end of the 70s. And Peace's writing is also hauntological in its intuition that particular places are stained by particular occurrences (and vice versa). As he has insisted in many interviews, it is no accident that Sutcliffe was the Yorks.h.i.+re Ripper. Peace's books are avowedly anti-nostalgic, the anti-Life On Mars, with its ambivalence towards police brutality (and its media representation). There is no such vindication in Peace's novels, no suppressed yearning for a time in which coppers could beat suspects with impunity. After all, it is corruption, rather than criminality per se, that is the focus of the Red Riding Quartet.

Music in Peace's books functions as a hauntological trigger. He's remarked that he uses music, including music he doesn't like, to take him back to the feel, the grain, of a period. Musical references are embedded in the text either diegetically, as background sound, or more esoterically, as cryptic-epigraphic ciphers and repeated incantations: a portal effect that gratifyingly echoes (in reverse) the way in which music of the 1970s, especially postpunk, would direct listeners to fiction. 1980 is haunted in particular by Throbbing Gristle, especially the phrase that they took from another killer, Charles Manson: 'can the world be as sad as it seems?' In Peace's hands, this question becomes an urgent theological enquiry, the very relentlessness of the sadness and misery he recounts calling forth an absent G.o.d, a G.o.d who is experienced as absence, the great light eclipsed by the world's unending tears. The world, the sad, desolated world, is full of angels whose wings have either been shorn off, reduced to stubble, or which have grown into gigantic, dirty monstrosities...addict angels hooked on alcohol, casual but incessant l.u.s.ts, and the trash of the consumer society that is struggling to be born out of the wreckage of the social democratic consensus...angels whose ultimate response to the world is puking (everyone pukes in Peace's books), throwing up the whiskies and the undercooked crispy pancakes, but never being able to purge any of it, never being able to take flight.

The religious elements in the books become increasingly foregrounded as the Quartet develops, until the deeply ambiguous, hallucinatory ending of 1983 becomes a quasi-Gnostic treatise on evil and suffering. The final section of the novel, 'Total Eclipse Of The Heart' (that transfiguration of pop cultural reference into epigraph being one of Peace's signature techniques), explicitly posits the idea that, far from undermining the existence of G.o.d, evil and suffering entail that G.o.d must exist. Eclipse implies something that is eclipsed, a hidden source of light that produces all this shadow. In the philosophy of religion, the problem of evil maintains that suffering, particularly suffering visited upon the innocent, means that the theistic G.o.d could not exist, since a benevolent, omnipotent and omniscient being would not countenance undeserved suffering. With his inventory of wretched child abuse cases, Dostoyevsky's Ivan Karamazov makes the most famous, and most pa.s.sionate, statement of this position. Yet if there is no G.o.d, the suffering remains, only now there is no possibility of its expiation; if there can be no justice to come, the universe is permanently blighted, irrevocably scarred by atrocity, abuse and torture.

The Red Riding novels inspired Channel 4 into making the kind of television dramas that some of us had long since ceased hoping could ever be made in Britain again. The three films, broadcast in 2009, were the most striking British dramas of the first decade of the 21st century, towering above all the facile costume epics, routine police procedurals and emotional p.o.r.nography which clogged the schedules. Moreover, in their use of setting and landscape, in the epiphanic power of their images, the Red Riding films attained a visual poetry and an expressionist naturalism that exceeded practically anything British cinema has achieved in the past 30 years.

As Nick James observed in his preview of the Red Riding films for Sight & Sound, nothing in the previous career of the Red Riding's three directors Julian Jarrold for 1974, James Marsh for 1980, and Anand Tucker for 1983 gave any hints that they could produce work of this quality. In many ways, it is as if the auteur of these films was Peace himself, and the three directors succeed so consummately because they allowed themselves to be channels of his infernal vision. It was inevitable that some compression occurred in the transition from page to screen; indeed, one whole novel from Peace's Red Riding sequence 1977 was never filmed, but Tony Grisoni deserves immense credit for the way that he weaved the three films into a symphonic coherence that nevertheless refused easy closure and intelligibility.

Peace's equivalent of Ellroy's anti-hero Dudley Smith, the corrupt detective who justifies his own running of drugs and vice operations as 'containment', is Maurice Jobson, the whey-faced policeman who features in all three of the films. Where Smith (as masterfully played by James Cromwell in the best Ellroy adaptation to date, LA Confidential [1997]) is charming, charismatic and flamboyantly loquacious, Jobson (as played by David Morrissey in the C4 adaptations) is taciturn, abstracted, immobile, blank, in a semi-fugue state of disa.s.sociation from the atrocities he partic.i.p.ates in. Morrissey's is one of many excellent performances in the trilogy: all of them masterpieces of measure and controlled power, proper television/ film acting, far from the braying thespery that the British theatrical tradition often turns out. Rebecca Hall is damaged and dangerous as Paula Garland, Maxine Peake, angular yet vulnerable as Helen Marshall. Sean Harris manages to make Robert Craven plausibly loathsome without tripping over into grand guignol grotesquerie; while Paddy Considine brings a flinty resolution to the role of Peter Hunter, one of the few lightbringers in the Red Riding's North, an inverted world in which evil enjoys carnivalesque licence and the police and the powerful are free to 'do what they want'.

The film adaptation of Peace's extraordinary novel The d.a.m.ned Utd lived down to expectations to just about the same extent that the Channel 4 films exceeded them. The team tasked with adapting the novel looked unpromising. Before The d.a.m.ned Utd, Director Tom Hooper (drafted in after Stephen Frears left the project) had a background in fairly unremarkable television (he would later go on to make The King's Speech), while the shtick of screenwriter Peter Morgan and lead actor Michael Sheen as established in The Queen and Frost/ Nixon didn't have any obvious fit with Peace's fractured and abrasive modernism. In the end, Hooper and Morgan didn't adapt Peace; they eliminated him. Hooper's film returns us to the found object-narrative Brian Clough's bitter 44-day stint as manager of Leeds United in 1974 that Peace used as the raw material for his 'fiction based on a fact'. What's missing is everything that Peace brought to the facts: the bite of a Real that will always elude (bourgeois) realism; and the shaping power of a Gnostic mythography, in which the most malign ent.i.ty is the cursed land of Yorks.h.i.+re itself.

It can be tiresome to criticise a film adaptation simply for the ways it differs from its source novel. In this case, however, a close comparison of the two versions of The d.a.m.ned Utd is instructive, for two reasons. First, because, in erasing Peace's signature, the film in effect competes with his rendition of the Clough/ Leeds story; and second, because Peace's pulp modernism precisely offers British culture an escape from the kind of good humoured, well balanced, middle of the road, middlebrow realism that Hooper and Morgan trade in.

At the press screening, Morgan said that when he read The d.a.m.ned Utd, it brought a nostalgia rush 'like eating Farley's rusks'. Yet surely even the most guileless of the readers of Peace's novel could see that it tastes not of the warm mush of baby food but of bile, scotch and refluxed stomach acid. In Hooper and Morgan's hands, Clough's story is reduced to all of the givens, all the off-the-shelf narrative and thematic pegs: he was a 'misunder-stood genius', struggling against an establishment represented by puffed-up provincial patriarchs like the Derby County chairman, Sam Longson (well played by Jim Broadbent); he was self-destructive, and he needed his partner Peter Taylor (Timothy Spall) to curb his excesses; he was locked into an oedipal struggle with the man he replaced at Leeds, Don Revie. Even this is told more than it is shown, and throughout, the audience treated as if it is witless: dialogue is too often used for clumsy plot exposition or to crudely telegraph Themes. Not only do Hooper and Morgan fail to evoke Peace's existential terrain, his blighted vision of Yorks.h.i.+re, they also convey little of his intense sense of territoriality. In the novel, Leeds's Elland Road ground is the site of a struggle over s.p.a.ce in which Clough is up against both the spectre of Don Revie and the animal aggression of the players he has left behind. (A striking image from the novel of Clough chopping up and burning Revie's desk in an attempt to exorcise the absent father's ghost inexplicably never made it to screen.) The film also misses the purgatorial rhythm of sport which Peace caught so acutely. As every sports fan never mind about coach knows, the jouissance of sport is essentially m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic. 'The d.a.m.ned Utd shows what Clough's tragedy was,' Chris Pet.i.t put in his review of the novel, 'deep down, he knew that winning was only loss deferred.' The intense fear that colours everything in Peace's novel is dissolved in a tone that is frequently jaunty.

Then there is Michael Sheen. The problem with Sheen's now well established approach to historical characters is that it deprives the film's world of any autonomous reality everything is indexed to a reality external to the film, judged only by how well it matches our already existing image of the character, whether that be Clough, Kenneth Williams, Blair or Frost. (And there are bizarre bleed-throughs between the characters at one point, it felt as if Sheen's campy Clough had morphed into Kenneth Williams.) Certainly, Peace has an advantage over the film-makers here: written fiction can move beyond received television images of figures from recent history far more quickly than film can but an actor with more courage and presence than Sheen might have reached beyond physical appearances to reach a truth of Clough not accessible via the TV footage. Instead, Sheen offers his usual tracing of mannerisms and verbal tics, competent enough as far as it goes, but devoid of any of the tortured inner life that Peace gave to his Clough. Even if the acting were uniformly superb, it would have needed far more than Hooper provides in order to summon the dread and misery of Peace's world; but the indifferent photography and the often appalling soundtrack make Hooper's The d.a.m.ned Utd feel more like a dramatisation of actual events than a film of Peace's novel.

Now Then, Now Then: Jimmy Savile and 'the 70s On Trial'.

July 2013.

The turn that events took had all the look of some kind of ritual a.s.sa.s.sination. The killing not of a body the body was already dead but of a name. It was as if some kind of deal had been struck you'll get to live out your life with your reputation intact (or as intact as it could be), but a year after your death, it will all be destroyed. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will survive. Your headstone will be dismantled. The penthouse in which you lived will be demolished. Your name will become synonymous with evil.

September 2012, and it all starts to come up. Like a build-up of effluent that could no longer be contained, first seeping, then surging out. Jimmy Savile, the nation's favourite grotesque, the former DJ and children's entertainer, is exposed as a serial s.e.x abuser and paedophile. You can't say it comes as a surprise, and that's one of the most unsettling aspects of the whole affair. How out in the open it all was...We all read the text purporting to be the transcript of an unbroadcast scene from the BBC's satirical programme, Have I Got News For You, in which Savile is openly accused of being a child s.e.x abuser, and took it at face value (it seems now that the transcript was a fake, but it was an astonis.h.i.+ngly convincing simulation...The rhythm of the interaction between the panellists...The way the verbal sparring escalates into aggression...The name of the supposed victim, Sarah Cornley...it all had a ring of authenticity the signature of a Real, perhaps, that could not at then be recognised except in fiction...) Yes, in a certain way, it was all out in the open we all knew, or felt that we knew but it mattered that the abuse was never acknowledged in his lifetime. For while the story remained unofficial Savile would not only go unpunished, he could continue to comport himself as a celebrated entertainer, a knight of the realm, stalwart charity fundraiser. No doubt Savile took a sociopathic delight in being able to get away with it in plain sight. In his 1974 autobiography, As It Happens, Savile had boasted about having s.e.x with an underage runaway. The police wouldn't dare touch him, he taunted. Neither, it seemed, would the media. Occasionally, a journalist would attempt to breach his defences. Louis Theroux did his trademark gentle probing of Savile about the paedophilia allegations in 2000 BBC doc.u.mentary, but of course there was no question of the old man cracking.

By the end of 2012, the 70s was returning, no longer as some bittersweet nostalgia trip, but as a trauma. The phrase it's like something out of David Peace has become something of a commonplace in the past few years. Strangely for fiction that is about the past, Peace's work has actually gained in prophetic power since its publication. Peace wasn't predicting the future how could he be, when he was writing about the 70s and the 80s? so much as he had fixated on those parts of the past which were about to resurface. The Fritzl case had echoes of the underground lair in which children are kept prisoner in the Red Riding novels. And everything that came to light about conspiracies amongst the English power elite all the murk and tangle of Murdoch and Hillsborough seemed to throw us back into Peace's labyrinths of corruption and cover-up. Murdoch, Hillsborough, Savile...Pull on one thread and it all started to connect, and, wherever you looked, there was the same grim troika police, politicians, media...Watching each other's backs (partly for fear that they will be stabbed in their own back)...Having the goods on each other, the best kind of insurance policy, the ruling cla.s.s model of solidarity...

After his death, Savile increasingly started to look like something Peace had dreamt up. We were drawn to a certain kind of fiction because consensual reality, the commonsense world that we like to think we live in, wasn't adequate to a figure like Savile. At the same time, it became clear that the elements in Peace's writing that previously seemed most melodramatically excessive were those which ended up rhyming with the new revelations. It's as if melodramatic excess is built into the Real itself, and the sheer implausibility of corruption and abuse itself forms a kind of cloak for the abuser: surely this can't be happening?

Savile's stomping ground was right in the heart of Peace's territory...in Leeds...where the entrepreneur-DJ started to build his empire, and where, knowing that abuse is easier to get away with when it comes disguised as care, he volunteered as a hospital porter... A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down...Incredibly, Savile was for a time a suspect in the Yorks.h.i.+re Ripper investigation members of the public had named Savile, and the body of one of the Ripper's victims, Irene Richardson, had been found very near to his flat. Then there was the infamous photograph of Savile, Peter Sutcliffe and Frank Bruno at Broadmoor in 1991 Savile, toting his signature cigar, brokering a meeting between a serial killer and a troubled former celebrity boxer. The grinning Sutcliffe looks like he's wearing one of Savile's sh.e.l.l-suits. The insanity of a society and of an era all their occult complicities between celebrity, psychosis and criminality is screamingly exposed here. Ritual inversion: light (entertainment) transforming into the darkest horror. By the end of 2012, Savile's name was so irretrievably sullied that his old friend Peter Sutcliffe felt the need to speak up for him.

Savile was the kind of figure who came to dominate popular culture without inspiring much affection. You couldn't say he was ever loved. Someone writing in to the London Review of Books dug up the BBC's audience research reports on Savile's first appearances on Top of the Pops. '10 December 1964. Jimmy Savile, who introduced the programme on this occasion, was obviously disliked by a large number of the sample audience. Many indicated their aversion to this artist by remarking that anything they had to say about him would be ”quite unprintable”, whilst comment by those who freely expressed their feelings was liberally larded with such terms as ”this nutcase”; ”this obnoxious 'thing'”; and ”this revolting spectacle”.' You don't have to be loved, or even liked, to be a popular figure. Savile didn't even have the love-to-hate appeal of a national pantomime villain such as Simon Cowell. His ticket to fame was his grotesquerie itself (and this grotesquerie meant that one of the most initially unnerving things about the revelations was being forced to think of Savile as any kind of s.e.xual being). As Andrew O'Hagan argued in his piece on Savile for the London Review of Books, what mattered in the new world of television light entertainment was not likeability, or talent, but a certain larger-than-life aura call it eccentricity, or call it derangement which Savile easily possessed as his birthright. Even those who found Savile creepy could accept that he 'belonged' on television. After all, where else could he possibly belong? The problem was that, after the 60s, if you belonged on television, there was nowhere that wasn't open to you. We now know that Savile was given keys to the Broadmoor hospital for the criminally insane, so that he could wander around the inst.i.tution just one example of the freedoms that Savile's celebrity and power would acquire for him. We hear that Savile molested paraplegic patients in their hospital beds, and I'm reminded of Dennis Potter's 1976 television play, Brimstone and Treacle, in which the lead character, the unctuous Martin, rapes a severely brain-damaged young woman while pretending to care for her. The BBC withdrew the play just before it was due to be broadcast presumably at around the same time that Savile was appearing on Sat.u.r.day night kids' TV while raping helpless patients in private.

As Savile's reputation descended into the mire, it pulled others' with it. The police investigation prompted by the scandal, Operation Yewtree, went after a whole slew of former household names with (surely) more to come. Someone, I don't remember who, says it's like the 70s have gone on trial. Yes, but it's a very particular strand of the 70s that is under investigation not the officially debauched rock 'n' roll 70s, not Zeppelin or Sabbath, but the family entertainment 70s.

As the stories mounted up, Savile came to seem more and more unbelievable. Taken together, even facts that were already known about Savile before his death came to look as if they couldn't possibly be true. Could it really be the case, for instance, that Savile had taken part in negotiations between the Israeli and the Egyptian governments in the 70s? That he had mediated between Prince Charles and Princess Diana as their marriage started to fail? (And how mad, how desperate, would you have to be to take Jimmy Savile's advice on your marriage?) That he had spent Christmas after Christmas with Margaret Thatcher? (Thatcher had tried four times to enn.o.ble Savile, but was repeatedly rebuffed by her advisers, and only succeeded in knighting him at the f.a.g-end of her period as Prime Minister.) Murdoch and the Daily Mail wasted no time in pus.h.i.+ng the idea that the abuse was an inst.i.tutional pathology it was the BBC, and, more broadly, the paternalistic media culture of the 60s and 70s, which had incubated Savile's corruption. The BBC, now in a permanent state of confusion about its role in a neoliberal world, duly went into a neurotic, narcissistic collapse. Its judgement was shot; it had failed to broadcast a report about Savile's abuse, and the crisis over Savile would push it into moving too hastily when, a few months later, a Tory peer was wrongly named in another abuse scandal. Murdoch and the Mail crowed on about how the Savile revelations demonstrated the importance of press freedom but the question that they neatly evaded was, where were their brave hacks? Why didn't they expose Savile when it mattered, when he was alive?

When the question started to be asked about how he'd got away with it, we already knew the answer. He had connections at the very top. The very top. And he took care to make friends with those in power and authority at lower levels, too. Police officers regularly attended Savile's now notorious Friday Morning Club meetings at his home in Leeds.

Savile's ascent to his unlikely position of power and influence required immense amounts of hard work. One thing you could never accuse him of was slacking. A forensically researched post on the Sump Plug blog details how infernally busy Savile was in the early days of his career: The Plaza [Ballroom in Manchester] was just one of many dance halls and clubs that Savile oversaw, managed, diskjockeyed at, wielded shadowy control over or had some kind of undeclared stake in, not only in Manchester but also on the other side of the Pennines -in Bradford, in Wakefield, in Halifax, over on the coast in Scarborough and Whitby, and especially in Leeds. In his hometown the joints he presided over included the Cat's Whiskers and the Locarno Ballroom in the County Arcade, known by locals simply as 'the Mecca' (later rebranded as the Spinning Disc). That's where, in 1958, his predilection for underage girls first came to the attention of the police. The matter was swiftly resolved by peeling a few hundred quid off the big roll of twenties that he always carried, right up until he died.

Meanwhile, in Manchester on any given night in the late 50s and early 60s, if you couldn't find Savile at the Plaza at lunchtime, he'd surely be at the Ritz later on. Or, if not, try the Three Coins in Fountain Street. He didn't even rest on Sundays; that was when he span the platters for upwards of two thousand jivers and twisters at his Top Ten Club at Belle Vue.

The man was everywhere -at practically every major dance hall and nightclub in the North's heaving conurbations, as much of a fixture as the rotating mirror ball.

Savile's empire quickly spread down south too, down to the Ilford Palais, and to Decca Records, who would pay him to play their latest releases. Up North, Savile's rackets were protected by a gang of bodybuilders, boxers, and wrestlers, including improbably for those of us who came to know him as the comically fat wrestler Big Daddy, cuddly mainstay of Sat.u.r.day afternoon television s.h.i.+rley Crabtree. The roots of 70s television were here, in these ballrooms and dancehalls, their seediness waiting to be transubstantiated into light entertainment.

But, a year after Savile's death, the transubstantiation would go into extreme reverse. Now then, now then one of Savile's catchphrases started to a.s.sume an ominous significance. Only a few months previously, the BBC had broadcast a number of programmes celebrating his life and work. Now, condemnation is not enough: all traces of his existence must be removed. Not only is the headstone taken away, but we hear can this possibly be true? It's impossible to tell in the fevered atmosphere that the family of a child buried near to Savile had requested that Savile's remains be disinterred as if he were some medieval devil, a noxious cloud of malignancy that can corrupt even the dead. More farcically, CBeebies, one of the BBC's children's channels, was censured because it broadcasted a repeat of an episode of the programme the Tweenies, in which one of the characters impersonated Savile.

Now then, now then...

At the time when Savile was abusing, the victims were faced, not with Jimmy Savile the monster, Jimmy Savile the prolific abuser of children, but with Jimmy Savile OBE Sir Jimmy Savile Jimmy Savile, Knight Commander of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of Saint Gregory the Great. When we ask how Savile got away with it all, we must remember this. Naturally, fear played a part in keeping Savile's victims quiet. Who's going to believe your word against the word of a television entertainer, someone who has raised millions for charity? But we also need to take seriously the way that power can warp the experience of reality itself. Abuse by the powerful induces a cognitive dissonance in the vulnerable this can't possibly be happening. What has happened can be pieced together only in retrospect. The powerful trade on the idea that abuse and corruption used to happen, but not any more. Abuse and coverup can be admitted, but only on condition that they are confined to the past. That was then, things are different now...

02: HAUNTOLOGY.

London After the Rave: Burial.

k-punk post April 14, 2006.