Paul Simon, with his Nikon camera in tow, once sang about how “Kodachrome gives us the nice bright colours, the greens of summer and makes all the world a sunny day”.
While fellow photographers enjoyed the somewhat super-real effect of Kodak's famous slide film stock, the collected memories of those colours have long ago faded, to be replaced by digital enhancement, photo-shopping, filters and fakery. In a recent review of a biography of George Orwell's wife, The Telegraph opted for a clickbait headline:- George Orwell was ‘sadistic, misogynistic, homophobic and sometimes violent’.
I'm sure that did the job of attracting readers, but it falls into the all too common trap of playing to the ever insistent desire to divide the world of public figures into the goodies and the baddies. The book, by the perhaps aptly named, Anna Funder, actually said that Orwell was a brilliant writer but a complicated man whose personal life was at odds with the “decency” of his writing.
And there is my point. We won't be grabbed by a headline that says, “It's complicated” we seek out the savage total destruction of our heroes. It isn't so much a new thing, but an ever increasing phenomenon, as our dominant Western cultures seek to play ever more heavily on sensationalism and the public image of the famous. I can clearly remember when Maggie Thatcher entertained Jimmy Savile multiple times at her Christmas time home, and when Rolf Harris painted his portrait of the Queen.
For most of my life those two sat among the celeb lists as clearly good people, whiter than white. How else could the Queen and the Prime Minister have rated them that highly? And, yet, we are all familiar with how, when “feet of clay” are revealed, somehow, everything that those once lauded folk ever did, from music, paintings, poetry to works of community benefit, has to be diminished, locked away or hidden from sight, never to be talked about. Many of the people I mixed with about a decade ago were all quite keen on the idea that there was a paedophile ring in the upper echelons of government, and former Prime Minister, Ted Heath, was one of a group who sexually abused and murdered young boys. The police investigated it, after all, with more than a touch of the witch hunt mentality as fuelled by people like Bea Campbell, Judith Jones and Sabine McNeill whose vehemently pushed, and utterly false, ideas of Satanic child abuse caused untold misery to hundreds of innocents. Harvey Proctor, one of the major figures persecuted by the police on the basis of their belief in the now disgraced and imprisoned fraudster, Carl Beech, suffered massive losses in status, money, and every other imaginable way. If all those lies the police believed had been true we would have seen him and several other very senior citizens wrongly imprisoned for crimes that were originally the fantasy of one feeble minded man, made into a horror story by the amplification and credibility of police detectives and a couple of disgraceful yet unapologetic MPs. The belief in personified evil has never really gone away, paedophiles are the new witches, – but instead of folklore, we now have real life examples of pederasts who fill any decent observer with disgust. “Yuk, Lock him up, castrate him, imprison him for eternity,” are the calls. And, however much we can all feel justified in hating every part of people like Richard Huckle, the mood of that kind of hatred and disgust is incredibly likely to blind us to potentially nuanced reality in other cases where someone, (like Bea Campbell perhaps), has raised a tiki torch as well as the alarm. How many sprang to Harvey Proctor's defence when the Operation Midlands accusations became public? And, how many believed that the police must be right and there can be no smoke without fire? At the time I was as opposed to Harvey Proctor's political beliefs as the next Guardian reader, but I did stop short of believing the witch hunt based cries of extreme crimes that he, Lord Brammal, Leon Brittan and others were supposed to have committed. When Rolf Harris and Jonathan King were found guilty of sex crimes I assumed that they were guilty and noted that, along with Jimmy Savile and Gary Glitter, they were never to be mentioned in any other way than as disgusting sex criminals. My judgement of the Guardian newspaper changed dramatically for the worse when I found myself accused, arrested and sent for trial, on the basis of a fantasy as equally insane and unbelievable as that of Carl Beech. Then, I found that it was The Times and the Daily Mail that were much more interested in the plague of false allegations, unlike the Guardian, which had an editorial policy of believing “the crazy Feminist gang” (satanic witch inventor, Bea Campbell had written for them). I could hardly suddenly hate the Guardian so much that I stopped reading it altogether, but the paper my Uncle had worked for, I believe for 40 years, was no longer paid for in our house, and a sceptical third eye grew in the middle of my forehead, meaning that very many other opinions and public statements led to doubt rather than blinkered acceptance. And, I started to see, that people like Rolf Harris were dismissed as bad – quite simply, irretrievably, black and white, “The Sun says”, - never to be redeemed.
Despite feeling that this may be the way it really went down, his appeal being successful on the first charge that was heard by the jury, showed that a great deal of what people had said, and given in evidence, was far from the whole truth and nothing but. From what I can tell, it is very likely that he was innocent of most, if not all, of those 11 charges that the police carefully fished for and obtained. Does this make him an Angel, done down? Or, is he still an irredeemable devil because he was convicted? Having died soon after he was released from prison, he is in no position to appeal, as Jonathan King continues to do.
I know Jonathan a little, and I know he can be “extravagant” with what he tells as truth whilst being quite open that he was guilty of several crimes, just not any of the ones of which he was convicted.
The truth might seem to be that he is a Kodachrome character, “complicated”, but he is just a colourful version of you or I and it was his fame and nature that led to enemies who have determinedly complicated his life in malicious and ridiculous ways.
He is, however, complicated in the same sense that we all are. He has written and produced a host of tunes that you will remember all your life (whether you want to or not), he has helped many people, and yet, I am sure he has had many experiences he would rather no one reminded him about. But in the eyes of many I spoke to shortly after my own experience of false police action, Jonathan is one of “the irredeemables” - (a much hated branch of “the Expendables?). I was told by a couple of people in a certain falsely accused forum, never to name him positively in any work I did championing the falsely accused. While I can see the nuance that exists in Jonathan King, Rolf Harris, Max Clifford and even Jimmy Savile, there are hundreds of Tiki-Torch bearers out there who would likely react entirely the same way towards me if I managed to get this “unpopular opinion” into mass readership....and unlike Kevin Spacey and Johnny Depp, I doubt anyone would be interested in discovering the nuanced nature of my personality, what things I have actually done wrong in life and the more frequent greater good that I might want to push to the fore. Because, for the hundreds of thousands of the falsely accused whose lives have been to varying degrees, spoiled, wrecked, or ended, we don't get the chance to be the heroes, we are just the henchmen. The baddies who everyone enjoys seeing violently disposed of in the first or second reel. The old black and white movies would have had us die wearing black hats while white-hatted Jimmy Stewart, gets home to his loving family and hugs them in his cosy ranch house to a swelling orchestral tune.
In the eyes of the Feminist trained torch-bearers we are indeed the irredeemable expendables – but we have grown in number, formed a bigger gang than can fit in a hole in the wall, must, and will, shake off these monochrome brushstrokes by whatever means necessary. Never black and white, we are as colourful as a Kodachrome carousel slide show.
By Patrick Graham
Patrick directed the film, "We believe you". It is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDBPppVVPGU
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