- by Peter Farmer
- The Guardian
- Issue #2197
Younger readers picture this. It’s fifteen years from now. The Wiggles are featured on a comedy series everybody likes. They resurface in popular culture. They appear at festivals. The government makes a fuss about them. Your kids like them now, much to your bemusement. Then they’re exposed as sexual predators.
That’s kind of how it felt for people over 40 during Rolf Harris’ downfall, the subject of Prime Time Predator. Harris was a popular children’s entertainer in the 1960s and 70s. He never really went away, but had a second life after an appearance on an ABC comedy/variety show, The Money or the Gun. Andrew Denton had the bright idea of finishing each show with an unlikely cover version of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. One of the most popular ones was Rolf Harris who claimed to have never heard the song before. Harris went from there to a second coming as an ironic rock performer, appearing at the UK’s Glastonbury festival, and performing at Queen Elizabeth’s Jubilee celebrations.
Throughout his career Harris was a sexual predator, often towards underage women. He was protected by his fame, and by a culture that saw assault as flirtatious or normal, a male-run culture that didn’t believe women brave enough to complain. One of the most confronting moments in Prime Time Predator is when a make up artist who had to put up with a day of being groped recounts seeing Harris and the director of the program she was working with joking and chatting about her body. She says “not one man asked him to stop.” It was a Channel Seven production.
This two-part ABC production opens with a lot of commentary from nails-down-the-blackboard celebrity Kathy Lette, being as chucklesome as she can about knowing Harris back in the day, along with other “professional Australians.” It’s a category that includes pretty much all high-profile Australians in the UK where the slightest suggestion of an Australian accent brings up stale jokes about hats with corks on, barbecues, and Land Rovers (which we all drive because this place is a wilderness). Harris definitely leaned into the stereotypes, playing didgeridoo and singing the rather racist Tie Me Kangaroo Down. At his later flourishing, young brits showed up to concerts with toy didgeridoos and hats with corks on.
Prime Time Predator makes it clear that with Harris, as with Savile and Weinstein in the US, everybody sort of knew. There are accounts of women being told not to get in a lift alone with Harris, and when the makeup artist complained, she was told “I thought you knew.”
The show tells us that because of the exposure of UK entertainer Jimmy Savile, who was exposed as a prolific serial rapist only after his death, the police were under pressure and set up ‘Operation Yewtree.’ There’s a lot of Savile on this show, appearing on tv shows with Harris.
The victim testimonies are hard to watch. These women were young and vulnerable at the time, and Harris ruined large parts of their lives. The ones who complained were not taken seriously by police or employers.
Harris’ trial is dealt with fairly briskly, with interviews with one of the prosecuting lawyers. One of the victims recounts being asked if she was wearing anything provocative at the time of the assault. Her answer in court was “I was a child.”
Harris’ former bandmate who remembers telling ‘Rolf’ off for comments about schoolgirls, reads a letter Harris sent from prison, a rambling affair showing no remorse or understanding. There’s a rather silly attempt to make Harris’ imprisonment more significant than it was, with brief shots of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein.
So why watch Prime Time Predator? Some will be seeking understanding of how Harris got away with it for so long, and of why this person who was seen as the embodiment of niceness for so long committed these crimes. It’s definitely an antidote to the false nostalgia promoted by Pauline Hanson and a lot of the right in this country.
The people who need to watch it won’t – like the Channel 7 executives who refused to comment on this show – not even a “we believe women now” from them. The show doesn’t say it, but there’s a long way to go in terms of women being believed and women having power.
