Cricket-Match-Special ... A forum for discussion

Martin Amis, one of the great novelists of the seventies and eighties, has died at 73. Money and Success changed the way I look at the world. Then over the nineties, he seemed to lose his extraordinary narrative voice..

But he still leaves an exceptional and idiosyncratic body of work behind.

Ray Stevenson 58

I haven't seen much of his work, but I did enjoy him as Titus Pullo

58!

The disgraced Rolf Harris 93

Tie me daughter's friend down, sport

A bit tasteless.... sorry

and I mention it not really as an RIP, but more a simple acknowledgement of a death

Apparently died still seeing himself as a victim.

perks of the job, perhaps

Rock and soul legend Tina Turner dies at 83.

A full life.

I hadn't heard. I don't think I realised that she was 83

a force of nature

Two deaths that affect Australia/ns - in vastly different ways.

Harris may have seen himself as a victim, but pretty much every one else is. Most notably all of his victims, of course.

But even for those who did not like him as a performer/artist/tv host would have seen him as something pretty benign. Those who liked him, have been massively betrayed. I imagine it was something similar for Saville for a lot of people, but Saville was not a part of my childhood.

GarlicJam wrote: But even for those who did not like him as a performer/artist/tv host would have seen him as something pretty benign. Those who liked him, have been massively betrayed. I imagine it was something similar for Saville for a lot of people, but Saville was not a part of my childhood.

Maybe for people older than me who lived through more of Saville's golden age, it might have been like that; AC or DFM might be able to give you a better perspective. But when I grew up later, at the twilight and then fade to black moments of his popularity, he cut the image of someone who was sinister, unstable, and not at all very nice. My recollection is that the BBC Theroux documentary really changed people's perceptions of him, as he came across very negatively in it. And moments like where he shows Louis his wardrobe full of his dead mothers clothes were verging on disturbing.

It was no great surprise to me he turned out to be a sexual predator, because it seemed pretty natural with how he was.

I imagine Harris may have had a significant role in the Aussie national psyche in that he became a star outside Australia at a time when that was less common. So he was a kind of ambassador. Now, Aussies are everywhere, but it was less so back then. So maybe there was more shame felt over Harris' fall.

Children's entertainers. Who could possibly know.

Tina Turner on the other hand, is someone still well liked in Aus.

First of all, there is The Nutbush - it is now a multi-generational phenomenon. Most Australians don't line dance, but everyone line dances to The Nutbush. I have even heard of some schools teaching the dance as part of their curriculum. At any social event, you can expect the Nutbush to be played, and it immediately fill the floor, and we get 3 minutes of (semi) synchronised dancing.

Then she provided the theme song for all promotions of Rugby League, starting in the late 80's/early 90's. I think it was What you See is What You Get, but that was soon replaced by Simply The Best - which the NRL bought the rights to in the Southern Hemisphere, before the song had even been recorded. It became a great campaign, and Tina would come out to perform on Grand Final Day, as well as strutting her stuff (as only Tina did) with lots of juicy Rugby League beefcake for the ad campaign. You can imagine the sexy grandma strutting around with hot athletes - a successful campaign for years. The song is synonymous with Rugby League as far as I'm concerned.

Then there was her role in Mad Max.

She sort of seeped her way into Aus modern culture. My wife says she has heard The Nutbush at least four times today on the radio.

Arthur Crabtree wrote:I imagine Harris may have had a significant role in the Aussie national psyche in that he became a star outside Australia at a time when that was less common. So he was a kind of ambassador. Now, Aussies are everywhere, but it was less so back then. So maybe there was more shame felt over Harris' fall.

Very possibly. Along those lines, I have the idea that he was much bigger in Britain than he was in Aus - and a lot of his later fame in Aus stemmed from his popularity in Britain.

Impressions of Savile back in the seventies are distorted by the knowledge of what came after. But I was too young at the time to intuit what now feels sinister about him. Still, I didn't go out of my way to watch him (he was unavoidably on TOTP), as even though I couldn't see what was malevolent behind the idiot facade, I could at least see the idiot facade.

But Savile was known well before the Theroux programme, and by the press. When the media accused the BBC of enabling Savile, that was pure hypocrisy because the press knew for a long time, and they could have exposed him. I had a friend who worked for a national paper who told me in the late eighties/early nineties. Probably Savile was more grotesque by the time of the documentary. Not that the BBC wasn't culpable, and for Harris. Thatcher's government should take some responsibility for Savile too.