All Our Yesterdays: Reactionaries Cut

Shock!  Horror!  Pass me the smelling salts!  Jimmy Savile was seen in an old edition of Top of the Pops repeated on BBC4! Won't somebody think of the children?  Heads must roll at the BBC for this outrage!  This apparent desire to completely edit Jimmy Savile out of history and popular culture is fast reaching Orwellian proportions.  Yes, I know he was probably an evil sex offender (let's not forget that he was never actually convicted of anything) and generally just a creepy fucker, but whether we like it or not, it is fact, recorded on video tape, that he was, during his lifetime, a popular TV presenter and frequently hosted Top of the Pops.  This insistence that he be, literally, edited out of the programme's history is a disturbing attempt at rewriting history.  Not that the situation is going to get any better: now that Dave Lee Travis has been convicted of being a groper, he'll have to be edited out, too.  It's getting to the stage where future generations will think that Top of the Pops was hostless.   It isn't just Top of the Pops affected, of course.  The BBC has undoubtedly burned every recording it had of Jim'll Fix It, whilst the conviction of Stuart Hall and Rolf Harris for sex offences means that It's a Knockout!, Rolf's Cartoon Time and Rolf's Animal Hospital have joined it on the bonfire.  Not to mention footage of every guest appearance Rolf Harris ever made on other people's programmes.

Huge swathes of our popular culture archives are in danger of being lost simply because a few Daily Mail readers get an attack of the vapours whenever they see the image of a dead alleged sex offender.  Strangely, I didn't see them complaining when the bastard was all over our TV screens whilst he was alive - that's when he gave many of us the creeps.  At least now we can watch him safe in the knowledge he's dead and buried.  The worry is that this hysteria might translate to trying to rewrite history to remove any individual that the mob deems 'offensive'.  Imagine if every piece of World War Two newsreel footage had every mention of Adolf Hitler cut from them?  If Hitler couldn't be represented on stage or screen because of public outrage over his crimes?  An extreme (and probably impractical) example, I know, but it illustrates my point.  We really can't go around editing people out of history just because they've dome things we find offensive.  But sadly, this sort of thing is par for the course these days.  Let's not forget that, when he was Education Secretary, bonkers Tory Chief Whip Michael Gove merrily attempted to use the schools curriculum re-edit history to a British Empire-centric narrative, glorifying the achievements of Britain.  Not to mention his attempts tore-cast World War One as a 'just war' and glorious victory for Britain.  Hell, the Tory party has spent the past few years rewriting recent history to convince people that it was profligate government spending rather than reckless lending by the banks which caused the recession and that, consequently, public spending has to be cut in order to service the private debts run up by the financial sector and its wealthy backers.  Compared to lies on that scale, editing Jimmy Savile out of the popular memory is nothing.,