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What strikes me about this case is that the 1960s and 1970s saw popular public broadcasting increasingly wishing to integrate broadcasters as contemporary entertainers themselves. Throughout the 1960s the driving forces of popular music (men) were people perceived as challenging public mores of sobriety and decency. The 1960s took forward a liberal agenda whether that be the swinging 60s, free love, the Rolling Stones or 1968. However the broadcasting authorities within the BBC were doubtless shy of employing anybody who might actually be challenging any of those mores. And to people who appeared to be doing so. Men older themselves than both the target audience and the entertainers capturing their attention were employed. People who carried enough of the symbolic accoutrements of this particular aspect of modernity were favoured over those who might embody them in a more unsettling and, in the imaginary of the broadcasting world, threatening way. Jimmy Saville is the case in point. They took someone who only looked as if he was a modern man but really, duplicitous, remained safe. However that duplicity was far deeper than one which simply served the purpose of broadcasting as we have discovered.

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