A NOSFERATU FOR THE NEW AGE by Harry McAvinchey

nosferatu

My late mother would have called Jimmy Savile “an odd crature”. Even back in the the day when “Wee Mick” and the rest of the Stones would have been on Top of the Pops around 1964/1965. She always loved the excitement we all shared with the craziness of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones social, music and media revolution .There they were adding excitement and glamour  to the daily humdrum of life, changing the way we looked, spoke or thought . It seemed they just churned out great music every week too…..turning everything from black and white and shades of grey of the early 1960s, to blazing colour overnight. She loved  all that but she knew , as we all did , that there was something a little strange about Jimmy Savile back then on  the new, big, rented seventeen inch “Pam” television on the little corner table. We all had no idea how strange, though.

He’s dead now , isn’t he? I suppose if you’d been abroad on holidays and missed his “death”, you’d imagine he’s being held in a cell somewhere while they rake over his past. He hasn’t been out of the media for what seems like years since his “death”.What’s that all about? Maybe  they are preparing to dig him up again and drive a stake through his blackened heart. You can’t be too sure about vampires .We might need a Van Helsing  to deal with him because Savile showed all the vampiric traits apparently.He spent a short time  working underground “pretending” to be a coal miner. There’s footage of him wheeling laundry baskets  in the bowels of hospital basements . Now there’s talk of him fiddling with the dead in mortuaries. Vampirish behaviour. A Nosferatu for the new century. I happened to be in Leeds when his mother died so I saw him on the streets at her funeral back in the early 1970s. It was daylight all right , but he always wore those dark glasses, so you’d never know the vampiric tricks  a  predatory undead hunter  might get up to . Like I said …he mightn’t be dead at all, yet .

Savile has joined a pantheon of “Wrong Uns”  whose private life  and contemporary profile didn’t mirror their public profile. That includes  Charlie Haughey , Gary Glitter, Dirty Den , JFK Kennedy, Princess Grace of Monaco, Michael Jackson,Rock Hudson, Freddy Mercury, Frank Sinatra and so on.There’ll doubtless be more as countless public figures rise up out of the murk of celebrity and media fame.Already National Treasures like Rolf Harris are being chopped down, so it’s only a matter of time before the axes are sharpened for secular saints  like Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page and Bono . All those  thousands of screaming, over-sexed  creaming groupies, wetting themselves with lustful abandon? Offering themselves up as sacrifice to these poster-boy gods and goddesses on their teenage bedroom walls. Some are bound to have broken through the nets and have been fiddled with by all these waiting pop  and film stars ….male and female. That’s what most famous people want to get famous for in the first place….money, fame and sex. Every one of them have that written large on their CV, so there should be no surprise. There are a thousand rock bands waiting in the wings for exposure . Pop stars are crouching behind locked doors awaiting the Press’s knock. Film stars living in fear of their lustful pasts.

Why should an otherwise completely untalented person want to spend their time in a “Big Brother” house and be scrutinised by the public, in public , if not  to be loved and love total strangers?

And then there is Gerry Adams!  Himself and  Peter Robinson, back in the day, before Armani suits and quality haircuts , these two individuals’  true crime was having between them  the worst hairstyles and dress sense that anyone would ever  want to conjure up. Desperate Arthur Scargill or Bobby Charlton  “comb- overs” to a man! No fashion sense worth a damn. They’ve  since been neatly tweaked for the public’s delectation and greedy consumption {Why else?}, in this mad  “celebrity age”. They’re getting on a bit now but at least the stylists have made an effort. To give them their due , I don’t remember any “mullet” haircuts on either of them, but there may be photos somewhere awaiting the Blackmail Wagon. That little bit of titivation mightn’t be enough to make the pair of them palatable though.They’re not out of the woods yet . The media is still hoking away  .They want dirt on Gerry, especially.  Both himself and Peter have some dodgy stuff back in the past that’s bound to be embroidered  on.

 Maybe Peter is secretly gay, which would make some sense in this mad homophobic  “Ulster Says No To Sodomy” scenario .We all know that Gerry loves to hug trees like an old hippy. There’s not a lot wrong with that but maybe he’s a secret “Midnight Toker” too  Maybe he has an acid-drenched past…Weekend tripping and hugging trees. It’s worth a thought.Sting likes to save whole rain forests so you might call him arborally promiscuous, by comparison. Gerry is small beer when you look at it like that, really. Unless he too has teenage revolutionary groupies with a tale to tell, ready to spring out from behind one of those trees..

 What’s all this talk of ordering murders in the past, though? Where does this stuff get traction from ? Who is feeding this stuff into the public consciousness?The way things are going, Gerry’s detractors  will always be hard to satisfy. I have a notion that like Jimmy Savile they’ll be digging him up too when he pops his clogs . The public’s desire for revenge goes beyond mere death. Maggie Thatcher and Ian Paisley have all that to look forward to, too.

Like Savile , they’ll want to drive a stake into Gerry’s  dead, black heart …Death could hardly satisfy his detractors anyway….A silver bullet, a  poisoned dagger to the heart, a silver burning crucifix.

Just to be sure ….to be sure….You never can be totally sure…….How’s about that then?…As it happens…..

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