Mary KennyRolf Harris joins a list of shamed names
Oh, no – not Rolf Harris!” The woman’s face was crestfallen with dismay. She had followed Rolf Harris over many years: thought he was a lovely man; loved his song about Two Little Boys; his many talented paintings; his engaging playing of the Australian Aboriginal ‘didgeridoo’; his amiable television personality.
Rolf Harris had been showered with honours; an MBE, an OBE and a CBE (the last a highly-ranked British honour). The much-respected Order of Australia had been bestowed on him and he had been made a Fellow of BAFTA (the British Academy of Film and Theatre Awards). He was selected to paint Queen Elizabeth for her 80th birthday, and his portrait was voted the second most popular ever by the public.
And now, at 84, he has been convicted of 12 charges of indecent sexual assault against four victims, one of whom was only seven years old at the time. He will be stripped of honours, and it is predicted that he will die in jail.
Pantheon
Harris’ name now joins those of other men in the pantheon of the entertainment world who have faced similar convictions: Stuart Hall, Max Clifford, and the egregious Jimmy Savile, who counted among his greatest fans Margaret Thatcher and Charles, Prince of Wales. (It was a British minister of the crown, Edwina Currie, who gave Savile the keys to Broadmoor Prison, so that he had the free run of an institution.)
It’s sometimes said that the Christian Churches – and particularly the Catholic Church – were too forbidding when it came to sexual sins. And sometimes that was true: Puritanism and Jansenism went into overdrive in warnings against “occasions of sin”.
And yet, with this plethora of older men now judged to have sexually exploited children and young people in an odious way – is there not some basis for saying that sexual concupiscence can cause catastrophe?
At one level, I think we have to feel sorry for those who commit such offences. It is surely a terrible affliction even to be tempted to molest a child.
But this sad tale is also about 'occasions of sin': for what links the narratives together of Harris, Hall and Savile is that there was opportunity and occasion to transgress, and transgress most grievously they did.
The fabulous Camino
Conversation with the taxi-driver turned to the holiday season and the cabbie explained that he had just returned from an exceptional type of holiday. “I walked the Camino,” he said. “From St Jean-de-Luz in France, right over to Santiago de Compostela. A fabulous experience.” He was a fit-looking man, possibly in his forties.
He made no advance arrangements: just put a rucksack on his back and took a plane to Biarritz, and then started walking. “I averaged about 30 kilometres a day. It took me 33 days.” He hopes one day to do it again with his daughter.
They say you meet all kinds of people on the Camino, but not everyone does it for spiritual reasons – sometimes it’s for adventure, or health, or companionship, or just because it’s been done for centuries.
“Some people say that at the beginning,” Sean reflected. “But by the time they have walked the Camino, they’ve usually developed a spiritual dimension.”
Sometimes, too, they are embarrassed to admit that they want to go on a pilgrimage.
I admire those who have walked the Camino. One of my as yet unfulfilled aspirations.
Divided on D’Movie
Mrs Brown’s Boys: D’Movie – Brendan O’Carroll’s comic film just released ñ has had some maulings from the film critics. The Daily Telegraph critic reached for the pejorative thesaurus. “[It] isn’t funny. It isn’t even un-funny. It’s something close to anti-funny; I find all the scatological and gynaecological stuff draining – a maudlin and sentimental grind,” wrote Robbie Collin.
There’s a widely held belief, he reported, that the comedy’s fan base must be “clattering morons almost wilfully out of touch with the real world” and the new movie “seems to go out of its way to confirm every negative suspicion about the show”.
Watching it was a penitential exercise for him. “I just about made it through a scene in which an old lady boasted in church of having had sex with a goat, and another where the lovable scamp, Buster Brady, tells a Slavic gangster in imperfect Russian that his mother breastfeeds the family dog.”
Nonetheless, D’Movie of Mrs Brown quickly became a roaring success at the box office. At its opening last weekend, it took €1million in Ireland and seems likely to be the most successful Irish movie of all time.
Does this prove the old adage that (a) “nobody ever went broke by under-estimating public taste”, or (b) it’s just a bit of harmless fun in the tradition of broad slapstick, and the critics are humourless prudes?