Rik Mayall is dead and Rolf Harris is a predatory paedophile. June 2014 will be remembered for the death of our childhoods. Imagine being six years old in school assembly and your favourite teacher telling the whole room that Santa Claus wasn’t real, that’s the level of destruction we’re dealing with.

I have said before that it is a fixed point in our history that we used to watch Jim’ll Fix It and want to be on it. We can’t rewrite the past; Saturday teatime was Jim’ll Fix It time with the whole family. Your letter was only the start of it indeed; as we now know that a souvenir medallion wasn’t the only thing those poor kids took away with them. A lot of them took an experience away that they will never get over, especially (one can now imagine) on those ‘fix-its’ that involved Gary Glitter or as we now know, Rolf Harris. As we grew older our suspicions about Savile developed, we might not have immediately thought of him as a paedophile, but we definitely found him a bit creepy. Especially when it became public knowledge that we liked to shag dead bodies in the morgue of hospitals he had free reign on. It came as no surprise when the ‘revelations’ first came to the surface, we all kind of knew by the time he died. The only regrettable thing is that he was able to get away with it for so long thanks to a combination of money, power, fame, police on the payroll, friends in high places (Margaret Thatcher, another one known for fucking minors, see what I did there? I know, different spelling but out loud that's a clever line) and charitable endeavours.

That’s the difference, we might have watched his programme but we didn’t feel any affection towards Savile. He wasn’t a loveable character like Rolf, who had been a part of children’s entertainment for as long as we can remember. My memory of him started with the BBC programme Cartoon Time, which saw Harris in a white walled studio with an easel and marker pens as his only props, used to draw a cartoon character before showing us a clip. I can remember videoing the show and with heavy use of the pause button managing to draw my own character.

Harris took his cartoon drawing skills to ITV and rebooted the format as Rolf’s Cartoon Club (you can join today) entering the computer age and now joined in the studio – ohdear – by a team of school children. He gained a new generation of fans from the music world as he somehow transformed himself from a novelty peddler of whimsical ditty to Glastonbury acceptance, first in the Sunday afternoon irony slot and then as a serious fixture on the festival circuit. Rolf-ed reworkings of ‘Stairway To Heaven’ and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ came along, and he placed his feet firmly under the daytime television table as the presenter of Animal Hospital on BBC1 and later Animal Clinic on Channel Five (yes, it still exists). His talents with a paintbrush also helped him to find work on serious arts programmes, and a commission to paint the Queen’s portrait. Do you remember how annoyed you were when Lenny Henry cut short his rendition of ‘Two Little Boys’ at the Jubilee concert? How dare he treat dear old national treasure Rolf in such a disrespectful manner!

Rolf Harris’s trial is the one I’ve been keeping an eye on with the most interest. Nobody wanted to believe it at first, but the longer the trial went on the worse it seemed to be looking from his point of view. The fact that all of the allegations came from unconnected women was the first sign that things were about to take a downward turn. Once it was his turn to take the stand, it looked for a moment that it could be starting to work in his favour. Asked by his defence barrister to briefly outline his career, it looked from the outside like he could have won over the jury by reverting back to his recognisable showbiz self; funny noises, an explanation of how he invented the wobble board (an instrument that by connotation might never be heard again in the same way unless someone is brave enough to try and claim it back for music) and a brief burst of one of his popular hit records. A trial by jury isn’t a fool proof way to go about things; it is essentially a popularity contest between prosecution and defence, with defence saying he didn’t do it and prosecution saying he did. I’ve sat through a lot of trials and I’m usually right in my guessing. The longer this trial went on the more I became convinced of his guilt.

The police issued a picture of his ‘mug shot’, without the glasses and cheeky smile the truest picture of Rolf Harris was displayed for the world to see; a disgusting old pervert with a history of sexual assaults against young women, girls in fact, one as young as seven. Now that the trial is over we are allowed to know the things that weren’t allowed to be reported on and the floodgates have burst open. Inevitably perhaps, we learned that he was friendly with Jimmy Savile and used to join him on noncey trips to Broadmoor. More stories will no doubt follow but it hardly matters because the damage has been done. The public can now speculate on who will be next to receive the knock on the door from Operation Yewtree, the guessing game has replaced the New Year’s Day death sweep-stake.

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