Picture from Daily Mirror website

I am fully aware of the fact that Dave Lee Travis did something very wrong and this blog isn’t me coming out in support of him, but I can’t help but feel a little uneasy about the way he has been demonised by the press during his trial for sexual assault. It was when names started getting thrown around at the start of Operation Yewtree that I first predicted that he would find his name in the papers, but as I said here I didn’t think he was any more than a lecherous old git. While he was accused of far more serious offences he was found not guilty by a jury on all but two offences for which he was retried. This week a jury has found him guilty of one single count of assault, and it is likely that he won’t be given a custodial sentence.

Whether high profile people should or should not be named in the press remains a grey area; if found not guilty or if the case doesn’t make it to court due to lack of credible evidence the mud has already stuck and the alleged perpetrator will forever be associated with the accusation. On the other hand it has been proven that it does encourage other alleged victims to come forward. The CPS are scared of dropping another Jimmy Savile sized bollock of course, but has this made them a little gung-ho in their approach? In the wake of the ‘revelations’ about Jimmy Savile a great deal of showbiz names have been made public, all bound together by the words ‘Savile investigation’ or ‘Operation Yewtree’. Maybe it’s time for a breakaway branch (no tree/branch pun intended, this isn’t the time or the place) of Yewtree, as we all associate Operation Yewtree with Jimmy Savile’s horrible crimes. Because all of these arrests are seemingly connected, the type of person who reads the tabloids will put two and two together and make a paedophile. These are the same people who smashed windows of a house belonging to a paediatrician. Jimmy Tarbuck, Jim Davidson, and surprisingly Freddie Starr all had investigations against them thrown out due to lack of evidence but that is now the first thing that comes to mind when you hear those names.

Jimmy Savile raped and abused children and vulnerable patients over a sixty year period with blind eyes turned from the BBC, the NHS, the prison service, Thatcher’s government (another chance to do the ‘they are both remembered for fucking minors’ joke) and royalty. Dave Lee Travis grabbed someone’s tits. Once again I am not defending Travis, he deserves to be punished for what he did, but a 69 year old man has been on trial for two years at Crown Court at huge expense all round and spent most of his money defending himself while unable to work. Okay so you should never just randomly grope a woman but in context Jimmy Savile is a bank robber and Travis is a shop lifter. Some kind of behavoural education course while under the scrutiny of the probation service would be more useful than prison given that according to the evidence he went around thinking he was a character in a Carry On film.  What won’t help is the papers printing pictures of him with Savile presenting Top of the Pops together, something they were contractually obliged to do.

Yewtree did a good job in smoking out Stuart Hall, Max Clifford, and Rolf Harris but what about Paul Gambaccini? Guilty or not he deserves to either be given a trial date or have the case dropped. Cliff Richard is another case in point; although we’ve all been waiting for his name to appear from the start regarding historic assault claims, his life is in limbo while this goes on. The silver lining is that we will be spared a Christmas single this year.

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