Who's next to get dragged out of Pandora's Box?

For those in the know, it came as little surprise; for those who’d suspected it, it still came as a shock; and for those who simply didn’t have a clue, a little slice of childhood evaporated in a fizzing, toxic acid bath as the revelations about Jimmy Savile kept coming, and kept coming, last autumn.

As we now know, Savile’s actions over the course of, possibly, his entire adulthood were beyond abhorrence  A sexual predator of unlimited guile and resource, who applied his own Jedi mind trick to fool the naïve, the compliant and the incompetent, and inventive menace to get what he wanted, when he wanted and where he wanted it.

The Savile revelations – and the subsequent police investigation, Operation Yewtree – have led to British light entertainment’s very own Pandora’s Box being opened up, and its allegedly sordid contents spilling out all over the place.

With alarming regularity, we read of new arrests, names withheld under the laws of sub-judice, but the merest clue as to the identity: "An 83-year-old man from Wilmslow, Cheshire, was arrested today in connection with the ongoing enquiry into sexual abuse by celebrities", is enough to set the Wikipedia-literate off in search of a Wilmslow-dwelling entertainer born in 1929.

That, then, turned out to be Stuart Hall, he of the infectious cackle while hosting It’s A Knockout in the 1970s and, since, one of the best football commentators you will ever hear. This week he admitted 14 charges of indecently assaulting girls – one as young as nine – between 1967 and 1985.

In the same week, Coronation Street actor Bill Roache – its longest-serving and therefore record-breaking star – was arrested and charged with two counts of sexual assault in 1967. Just two weeks ago, we learned that the apparently saintly Rolf Harris had been arrested by police as part of Operation Yewtree. With investigations taking place against DJ Dave Lee Travis, "comic" Jim Davidson and PR man Max Clifford – all involving allegations from the past - you’d be understandably tempted to think that an epidemic of abuse took place in and around the British entertainment industry in the 1960s and 1970s.

Britain isn't alone in the restrospective scandal department. Belgium was torn apart by revelations about its Catholic priests, revelations that inevitably spilled into other parts of the Catholic world. And just yesterday it emerged that the late German actor Horst Tappert - famous in many countries for the playing baggy-eyed detective Derrick - was a member of the SS, serving on the Eastern Front in 1943 as a member of the Totenkopf panzer division. German, Dutch and other national broadcasters have subsequently dropped repeats of Derrick.

Back in Britain, it is highly disconcerting to see stars of childhood teatime television falling like ninepins in the way they have. But without condoning their behavior – as far from my intention as it is possible to be – it does make you wonder how long it will be before Inspector Knacker turns his attention to the music industry.

For there, sexual depravity was not so much near the surface as floating on a dayglo-coloured lilo, drinking a large pink cocktail with an enormous umbrella poking out of it screaming “look at me and what I’m doing to this groupie”.

Read the biographies and autobiographies of Led Zeppelin, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, Eric Clapton – even The Beatles, especially in their Hamburg apprenticeship – and there is enough reported evidence of sexual and narcotic misbehavior to bring an end to the liberty of many of those who survived that era. Remember, Almost Famous wasn't far off being a documentary.

How old was Mandy Smith when Bill Wyman first met her? And how old was Bill Wyman? The answer to the first question is 13, and the second, 48. According to Wyman, the police aren't interested. So, when a rock star deflowers an under-age groupie, it’s high-spirited, rock’n’roll high jinks, but when a household entertainer does much the same, he faces jail sentence for what's left of his natural life.

Inevitably, there has been some misplaced sympathy towards those accused. Historical affection for someone who was, once, a welcome visitor to the living room will do that. Fame and affection shouldn't, however, be the get-out-of-jail card that exonerates. There can be no defence of more innocent times, more liberal times or simply more tolerant times. There is no defence at all.

Well that's another fine mess....

Should anyone be mad enough to turn my rag-and-bone cart of a life into a TV sitcom, prospective writers are welcome to use the following as my onscreen catchphrase: "What a mess...!".

To provide some artistic direction, it should be exclaimed with an exaggerated, exasperated sigh in the manner of Tony Hancock's "Stone me!".

Granted, "What a mess...!" would not be as memorable as Captain Mainwaring's "You stupid boy!" in Dad's Army, "I shall zay zis only once..." from Allo Allo, or Diff'rent Strokes' "Whatchu talkin' about Willis?!" - diamonds in the rough all. But it does at least conform to the basic rule of sitcom catchphrases, that they occur regularly enough to satisfy audience expectation, and, with a suitable pause beforehand, you can see them coming a mile off.

My character's repeated use of "What a mess...!" for comic effect would at least be a faithful example of art imitating life. Because, for the last 12 months, I have been noted to exclaim - on average, twice daily - "What a mess...!" in response to the John Terry-Anton Ferdinand saga.

As this blog has noted regularly in the year since it all began, the story refuses to go away, springing up when least expected like a jack-in-a-box with a faulty clasp. And then, when you think no one could make it any worse (and the original antagonists haven't created enough brouhaha of their own), Ashley Cole - who must have missed out on this year's Nobel peace prize by the thinnest of margins - goes and discovers Twitter. "What a mess...!" indeed.

However, as the story nears its first anniversary, it has been kicked into touch by the British media's voracious pursuit of another story that can easily be characterised by "What a mess...!" - the matter of a now-dead stalwart of Saturday night family entertainment and his allegedly wandering hands.

It would be childish to suggest that Jim posthumously fixed it for Terry, Ferdinand and Cole to disappear from the media for a week or two, but the footballers have much to thank Sir Jimmy Savile for. And it is a mess. A right mess.

What began as one or two women coming forward to claim that, when they were in their teens, Savile acted inappropriately in his Top Of The Pops dressing room, has turned into a paedophile scandal on similar national scale to the lurid tales that have escaped from Belgium and various geographies of the Catholic church.

We're now learning that Savile may have been abusing children as far back as the 1950s when he was a northern nightclub DJ and professional wrestler, long before he joined the BBC, and long before his celebrity created access to what is appearing to be questionable-looking voluntary work at hospitals like Broadmoor and Stoke Mandeville. What a mess. What an absolute mess.

Who knew what? Did people at the BBC turn a blind eye to all this? Did the BBC itself turn a blind eye to this? Were others complicit in his actions? How could such an apparent scale of abuse be perpetrated by one individual who, even if weirdly private, was still one of the most identifiable stars in British entertainment, made more identifiable by his latter choice of gold lamé tracksuits and 10-inch cigars.

The Daily Mail, the newspaper with a habit of fizzing like dentures in Steradent over even the slightest misdemeanour by the BBC, is now feasting on an apparent "culture" of loose morality at the corporation. BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten even handed the Mail the perfect gift by referring to the Savile affair as a "cesspit". Other British newspapers are making claims that other former Radio 1 DJs had a tendency to grope anything in a skirt.

I'm not saying it's not possible, and I'm not saying that it is, but having spent a bit of time in and around showbiz people in my time, especially TV presenters, you can certainly say there was never any shortage of people with a 'tactile' approach to engagement. The issue, then, is at what point does a bit of over-familiar luvviness become a matter of sexual abuse?

However, the Mail stretched its moral high ground a little too far last week when it suggested that the Fleet Street phone hacking scandal was "...utterly deplorable, but a footling matter" when "compared to the molestation and rape of 13-year-old girls." Really? Is there now a points system for rating how far off course a moral compass has taken you? The Mail - indeed any newspaper - would be wise to steer clear of making any comparison between phone hacking and anything, let alone the behaviour of television personalities.

But back to Savile: the BBC's reputation has certainly now been stained by the revelations about him. That he was regarded as a fixture of both the BBC's television and radio 'brand' long before such a phrase was ever applied to it merely makes the allegations worse.

Savile's BBC career took off with Top Of The Pops. He launched the program on New Year's Day, 1964, in which it was broadcast from a chilly Manchester church, of all places. It went on to become a British TV institution, charting the pop explosion of the 60s right through to its cancellation 42 year later.

Although TOTP would draw other presenters from the BBC Radio pool, Savile was, in its heyday at least, the defining host. It will now be impossible to watch an old edition of the show, with Savile or any of the other DJs who presented it, with their arms draped over the shoulders of female audience members without wondering "Oh yeah? What else?".

But then you have to remember that, in the first decade or two of Top Of The Pops, the presenters were rock stars in their own right. And like rock stars, I'm sure they got away with whatever they could get away with. If the bad boys of rock were doing it (and you only have to read the various biographies about Led Zeppelin and their ilk to note that the ages of groupies was never particularly well policed...), then the somewhat naughty boys of pop radio were going to have fun too.

The difference being that these presenters were more likely to be opening your local supermarket, or guesting at your local nightclub, than rock stars, putting them in easy reach of fans, and impressionable fans in easy reach of them.

Savile and his colleagues were big business. And Savile, in particular, seemed biggest of them all, with his "As it 'appens" and "Guys and Gals" catchphrases, and his eccentric tracksuits (which appear now to have a more nefarious purpose than simply running charity marathons...).

By the time I was watching Top Of The Pops as a small child, Thursday nights at 7pm on BBC1 was the only fixture in my life, school and six-monthly dental check-ups not withstanding. Each week Savile and cohorts would be flanked by slightly awkward looking schoolgirls. When I first went to see a Top Of The Pops being recorded for myself (courtesy of my father, who was a BBC cameraman), floor managers would meticulously pick the best looking women to stand alongside the presenter for each link. Again, this doesn't seem so innocent now.

With the launch of Jim'll Fix It, Savile's Saturday teatime show devoted to make kids' dreams happen (though always within the BBC's budget: "Dear Jim, please could you make it possible for me to fly on Concorde" would end up with a visit to Concorde parked at Heathrow...), he became an avuncular children's figure, rather than the slightly weird (i.e. "eccentric") old bloke introducing Kajagoogoo on the "Pops".

Now there has been the inevitable revelation that amongst Savile's alleged victims was a Cub Scout who visited Jim'll Fix It as part of a pack outing. As someone who also, as a Cub, went to at least two recordings of the show, my skin - which had hitherto been mildly irritated - has now started to crawl. And thankfully, I didn't get any closer to Savile than my row of the bleacher seating.

So, with government enquiries, and Prime Ministerial declarations, promises of root-and-branch investigations at the BBC and still more frothing - understandable frothing, I have to say - in the British tabloids, the posthumous disgrace of Sir Jimmy Savile, and the increasing nudges and winks about his Top Of The Pops contemporaries, it's clear this story isn't going to disappear any time soon.

The saddest thing of all is that, while never a personal hero of mine, he was a part of my childhood.  And now we're discovering that he ruined so many other childhoods privately. What a mess.