“National Treasure National Disgrace” — Reviewed

Although this hour and a half documentary is called a Channel 5 original, it is a rehash of half-truths and lies intermixed with some genuine outrages. More important than what it says is what it omits.

It concerns allegations against first and foremost Jimmy Savile, then Rolf Harris, Stuart Hall and Gary Glitter. The feminist narrative is overbearing – believe women. Yeah, right.

The viewer is told these men were so powerful, power is stressed throughout. What are the facts? First, let’s get Gary Glitter out of the way. Although it is suggested he was brought to book as a result of Operation Yewtree, it could hardly be omitted, and wasn’t, that he had been in deep trouble twice before. In November 1997, he was arrested after a computer technician in Bristol discovered images of extreme child pornography on his broken laptop. We are not given a breakdown, but there were around four thousand images in total.

Although the Internet existed in 1997, it cannot be likened to the Internet of today, and even now images of extreme child pornography cannot be found on the regular Internet, so Mr Gadd must have gone to equally extreme lengths to obtain them. He was also accused of having sex with a 14 year old girl but was cleared of that charge.

Although he was convicted in 2015 and given a sixteen year sentence, he was almost certainly innocent of those charges, which included the attempted rape of an eight year old girl three decades and more previously, but no one should feel sorry for him and nobody does because if he didn’t rape an eight year old in Vietnam ten years earlier, he was certainly doing things with underage girls that no man should, and he was lucky he was able to buy his way out of a potentially life-threatening situation.

The only real new predator exposed in this documentary was Stuart Hall, and even he was cleared of all the major charges. Regarding Rolf Harris, the reality is that his alleged principal victim was indeed a close friend of his daughter, and his mistress. This affair went on for years, but in 1997 she told her parents about their relationship, and she did this only because she found out Harris had a second mistress whom he had as good as moved into the family home! This woman died in 1999. If Harris had been the heartless predator he has since been made out to be, he would simply have denied the allegation, instead he wrote an honest, apologetic letter to her parents in which he said the relationship had started when she was above the age of consent. In the United States, Bill Cosby could have avoided the deluge of false allegations made against him by lying about his sexual encounter with Andrea Constand; like Harris he chose honesty over duplicity, and ended up in the same place.

After the launch of Operation Yewtree, Harris’s young mistress, by now not so young, decided to exact revenge on him. And to ensure the success of the prosecution, the authorities trawled the world looking for more victims. They found several, including a woman who appears herein, whose evidence has been embellished since his trial, and two women in particular who were not named here. One of these was Wendy Wild/Wendy Rosher, who died three years ago. She claimed Harris had sexually assaulted her at a community centre in the West Country, one he had clearly never visited. The jury convicted him of that historical sexual assault and of assaulting an Australian girl in a South London public house, but after the retrial of the falsely accused Dave Lee Travis, Harris was put in touch with private investigator William Merritt who carried out an extensive investigation which resulted in the Wild conviction being quashed.

The Court Of Appeal should have quashed the other conviction too, but had it  done so, a retrial would have  to have been ordered. Two female fans of Harris who did their own research uncovered some astounding exculpatory evidence. Instead of a retrial, the authorities tried to keep Harris in prison until he died by bringing yet more spurious charges. They succeeded in doing that with Max Clifford, but Rolf is still here and over ninety.

All this brings us to Jimmy Savile, and we can concentrate on Meirion Jones, who makes two important claims. One is that Savile had been the subject of rumours for decades. And? This is par for the course for celebrities of both sexes, for business people, politicians, and royalty. And always has been, long before the advent of social media. For example, in 1923, Lord Alfred Douglas found himself on the wrong end of a criminal libel charge and ended up with a six month sentence for defaming Winston Churchill. Savile was both an eccentric and an attention seeker; the fact that he never married led initially to the claim that he had no sexual interest in women….complete the sentence yourself.

Now this is where the utter dishonesty of Jones shines through. He says he heard of a blog in which a woman accused a celebrity – obviously Savile – of sexually abusing her as a teen. What he doesn’t say is that this girl was a pupil/inmate of Duncroft School in the 1970s, and that Duncroft was run by his aunt!

The allegations made by this woman and others, decades down the line, were actually put to Savile by Surrey Police two years before his death, and he refuted them. After he died, they were simply recycled, and a forged letter was circulated, one on Surrey Police headed notepaper, that claimed he hadn’t been prosecuted because of his age.

Dame Janet Smith was given the task of investigating allegations against Savile. Although she is an impressive intellect, she allowed herself to be duped by the sheer volume of them. Savile has been accused of participating in the Satanic mass, violating corpses, and recruiting boys for  former Prime Minister Edward Heath to murder on his yacht. In short, no calumny is too vile to heap upon this one dead man.

We hear from alleged Savile victim Sylvia Edwards who claims her life was ruined by him groping her on Top Of The Pops. This incident happened, we can be sure of that because it was captured on film.  Body language aficionado Mandy O’Brien has analysed this alleged assault. Take a long, slow look and make up your own mind.

A lot more could be written about this documentary, including the people who appeared in it and those who didn’t, but the penny should have dropped by now.