This video has been shared, inevitably, on social media this weekend. It depicts the end credits to Not The Nine O’Clock News and is obviously a joke at the expense of Rolf Harris. Looking at it now post-trial it looks a lot more sinister than it did in 1980, so I’m not sure if it was really banned as is suggested by the person who uploaded it. The cast of NTNOCN were the wave of comedians who came before the ‘alternative’ Comic Strip brigade of Edmondson, Mayall and all, and were that generation’s Python (as I’m sure the media would have labeled them). Rolf Harris was the old guard of entertainers, a novelty pop singer and light entertainment fixture, so was of course ripe for a piss taking from these young upstarts. Let’s not forget that Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones had already stormed the cosy comedy establishment by daring to send up Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett in their sketch The Two Ninnies, the establishment were fair game.

This sketch surely carried on the comedy tradition of poking fun at a fellow performer. Eric Morcambe made derogatory comments at the expense of Des O’Conner’s singing on plenty of occasions but the truth is that they were in fact good friends. Russ Abbott carried on the joke in a cigar advert, (imagine that, a television advert for cigars) by using a Des O’Conner record to scare fish out of a lake. We all remember that advert, but a less remembered advert for Des O’Conner’s latest LP showed Des walking along the lake and pushing in someone we were meant to believe was Russ Abbott, thus getting his revenge. In America they hold ‘comedy roasts’, an excuse to tear strips off colleagues.

The obvious joke that the viewers at home would have laughed at was that a naff entertainer like Harris would need to use these measures to get an audience to sit through his show. Jokes about a captive audience have been around since music hall so it is doubtful that someone watching will have been party to any other suggestions. On the other hand this was the BBC, an institution that kept secrets very well. I’m not suggesting that any of the Not The Nine O’Clock News cast knew about Rolf Harris, but the show employed a few additional writers so one of them could have intended the double meaning to escape the censors.  The term ‘open secret’ has been used rather a lot when reporting on these historic cases, so it might be that plenty of people were aware of Rolf Harris just as they were with Jimmy Savile. Because of his influence it might well have been that Savile himself made sure Harris’s behaviour was kept under the BBC’s hat.

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