Who's Bad? The Jimmy Savile Scandal

The philosopher Slavoj Žižek once wondered why we were surprised when Michael Jackson's 'dark side' was first revealed, in the mid 1990s. 'Wasn't this "dark side of Michael Jackson" always here for all of us to see, in the video spots that accompanied his musical releases, which were saturated with ritualized violence and obscene sexualized gestures (blatantly so in the case of Thriller and Bad)?' (Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p.3). 'I'm bad, I'm real real bad', Jackson told us, but we thought he was joking. 'You know I'm bad, I'm bad, really, really bad....'

Zizek's point is that  'The Unconscious is outside, not hidden in any unfathomable depths'. This is surely also evidenced by the clips of Jimmy Savile on his TV shows in the 1970s, a girl on each arm, to which we are subjected now on a daily basis. At least part of our thirst for recrimination, and the programme of systematically bringing to justice every prominent light entertainment TV personality of the 1970s, can be explained by the fact that we were all duped and we need to acknowledge this...

'And the whole world has to answer right now, just to tell you once again, who's bad...'