My dad had the radio on very quietly in the background this afternoon, (it fucks about with my nana's hearing aid so we can't have it on so that we can hear it), and during a news update, I heard mention of a BBC blunder that was sparking complaints. By the next news bulletin, I managed to glean the information that the complaints were being aimed at Cbeebies, and that it involved The Tweenies and Jimmy Savile. That's far too confusing a puzzle when they are your only two jigsaw pieces, so I waited until I got home. Typing the words 'Jimmy Savile Tweenies' into Google is something I never thought I'd do.

As it happens, (sorry) CBeebies had managed to show an episode of The Tweenies from 2001 in which the character of Max dressed up as, and impersonated the BBC's most prolific paedophile, in a spoof edition of Top Of The Pops. From the tiny amount of hysteria created by this error, you would think that Jimmy Savile had risen from the dead and appeared on screen molesting the Tweenies puppets.

I know that these programmes are designed to be watched with your children, although a lot of parents use the television as a temporary babysitter while making breakfast, emptying the dishwasher, or some other little chore that doesn't take too long to do but doesn't hurt the child to wait. CBeebies is aimed at the under-fives, who won't have the first idea who Jimmy Savile was, so as long as they didn't mimic Max's use of the Savile catchphrase "guys an' gals" and that ridiculous yodelling sound he used to make, then this episode will have been erased from their memory banks before Sunday lunch was served. Even in 2001, the CBeebies demographic wouldn't really have a clue who this creepy bejewelled monster was, and would just see Max's impersonation as a nonsense rather than nonce. There were critics demanding that the BBC take the offending tape outside and set fire to it.

This was a simple mistake, crass and clumsy yes, but a simple mistake at the end of the day. Or the beginning of the day as that's when it was broadcast. The likelihood is that the behind the scenes person, probably a work experience who had been left to hold the fort on a Sunday morning, was instructed to put The Tweenies on at a certain time and just put his hand into the pile of videos and pulled one out. I'm sure that the episode won't be shown again, but it doesn't matter because we've all seen it now. The reason we've all seen it is because of the newspapers and their attempts to turn this little bit of BBC whoopsie into a national scandal. Obviously this didn't make the Sundays, but the online newspaper editions were already gnashing their teeth. Every paper had the story, and just in case you didn't see it and didn't know what the fuss is about, they also had the video of the offending clip for you to watch and get angry at. If that wasn't enough to get your gander up, The Sun decided to accompany the story with a photo of Jimmy Savile in which he was posing using the most paedo-ish facial expression he could muster. Well done tabloid press, we had forgotten what he looked like.

Maybe though, just maybe, this story points us towards yet another BBC scandal...

There were people within the BBC, several private hospitals, children's homes, and police forces, that turned a blind eye to Jimmy Savile and his behaviour. At the time of the original transmission of that notorious (not very notorious) episode of The Tweenies, the public didn't know that Jimmy Savile was a paedophile. That is to say we all knew he might be one, and he certainly looked like one, but as far as the public were concerned, he was just a strange old man who ran marathons*.

*There is a rumour that he didn't actually run the complete marathon, and that it was really just a bit of clever PR bullshit to draw attention to the charity. Honestly, the more I hear about that man the less I like him!

So we take away with us the fact that Jimmy Savile was free to do whatever, (and whoever) he wanted at the BBC. How do we know that Max wasn't involved in the behind the scenes sexual depravity? He was left in charge of four little children at Tweenies, (Tweenies was the name of the playgroup, not the characters), and he's kept a pretty low profile since the series ended in 2002. The BBC should be reporting him to the police; why was an old man left in charge of four kids in the first place? This runs deeper than we could have ever imagined. I won't link to the video, it's easy to find. At the end of the video, Milo sings the song 'One Finger One Thumb Keep Moving', and if that isn't a cry for help, then I don't know what is!