Thursday 11th October 2012

Every now and again, something happens to shatter your illusions.

Take Jimmy Saville: No go on, you take him.

for many years he was a 'star' Radio 1 DJ, celebrity, TV host and hard-working charity fundraiser. Lets be honest, he was always a little odd, but that is OK to be a little eccentric, isn't it?

Well, no as it turns out. Last Tuesday, ITV were due to screen a documentary about how Sir Jim liked little girls, and molested them, and used his celebrity to keep his activities quiet. At first it was thought this was muckraking, but as the transmission date approached, more stories began to emerge.

Now it seems he did the charity stuff to hide his activities; at times attacked the most vulnerable of children; those who were sick or in care. And yet to the outside world he was the guy who made kid's dreams come true on TV in Jim'll Fix It.

The Daily Mail is using it as an excuse to bash the BBC, saying that the corporation hid his activities. In part that may be true, someone must have suspected or known. Stories now abound of young girls in TV centre for recordings of Top of the Pops being taken into his dressing room.

Yesterday, the police called his a predatory paedophile and his recently erected grand gravestone was taken down and is to be crushed. It seems people have made up their minds already.

A few years back, Louis Theroux did a show where he lived with Saville for a week or so. Jim was a little odd and wore lamé track suits. and last week in a show about radio stars, filmed before these revelations, fellow DJs said he was a private man, did not mix, but put it down to him being of an older generation.

In another story, cyclist Lance Armstrong was revealed to be a hard-nosed drug cheat after all, and not the superhuman man we had been lead to believe. In truth he was both, but he has now been stripped of his 7 Tour de France wins after 11 of his former team mates turned evidence against him.

That Lance has repeatedly denied the allegations, and indeed was never tested positive for anything in his long career, it seems he was lying to us and himself all along.

back in 1992, I worked with a keep cyclist, and I remember chatting to him about drugs and Le Tour, and his reply was that do you think that anyone could compete in the three weeks of the race and NOT be on drugs? 150km a day, up and down mountains and everything else.

But, if we are to believe the sport is mostly clean now, and cyclist are shown to be human after all, and cannot attack for a week straight in the mountains, and drugs don't now help recovery, that means we are helping sportspeople from themselves. And we get a clean sport.

That Armstrong got millions of people to buy in and buy his Lifestrong bracelets, when now it should say on them, Lifewrong instead.

The blog will be back to normal tomorrow, with just more light-hearted stuff, with added flu of course.

Until then.......