A Liddle of what you despise: Rod’s 70s nostalgia reveals (again) The Sunday Times’ grimly reactionary instincts…
“Please welcome, Noncy Sinatra…”
The British nostalgia industry reached its apex in the Britpop era and the culturally confused years that followed it. For hacks and D-list hangers-on of all kinds, the I Love The… series of backwards-looking “Cor! Weren’t Spangles and a complete lack of effective health and safety regulation wicked!” documentaries provided a reliable payday.
The first series — I Love The ‘70s — premiered in 2000 with the opening episode I Love 1970 hosted by Jimmy Saville. Now we know the real and horrifying reasons Saville ‘loved’ 1970 so much the episode has been consigned to the Operation Yewtree-branded memory hole1 along with hundreds of editions of Top of the Pops and many people’s treasured childhood memories.
Luckily for the producers of I Love The ‘70s the rest of the guest presenters have yet to be revealed as the perpetrators of historic crimes, with Kermit the Frog and Roobarb & Custard especially unlikely to be dragged in for interrogation.
The follow-up seasons I Love The ‘80s and I Love The ‘90s were commissioned, compiled and broadcast in 2001. That meant that the final episode I Love 1999 was broadcast just 1 year, 10 months, and 4 days after the year it was so lovingly looking back upon.
In today’s Sunday Times, Fleet Street’s premiere Uncle Disgusting, Rod Liddle — who was on the cusp of turning 10 when the 1970s began and a trainee reporter at the South Wales Echo by the time the decade ended — contributes a column of nasty nostalgia headlined The 1970s had rules, values, Toast Toppers. But it’s Abba that comes back to haunt us.
Putting aside Liddle’s views on pop music — the written equivalent of desperate dad dancing at a wedding — and particularly his cloddishly contrarian assessment of ABBA2 (“…gurning sideburned garden gnomes…”) I want to look at why he’s so fond of the ‘70s. And, for that matter what “rules [and] values” from that period he’d like to see return.
According to Liddle, “the 1970s have a bad rep” because of “revisionism”, rather than, for instance, taking as the result of a close look at what many of the top ‘stars’ were up to during that prime period for polyester-clad predators and the police interview transcripts that confirm it.
Liddle claims his top three choices of things he’d like to bring back from the 70s are Heinz Toast Toppers (only discontinued in 2015 and available in knock-off form from B&M), David Owen (who’s still alive and a member of the House of Lords, aged 83) and Jesus Christ (who neglected to return in the ‘70s too). But looking at his history as a columnist, I think there are less salubrious elements of 70s culture he’d like to see made acceptable again.
Back in the dim and distant mists of… 2012, Liddle wrote a column for The Spectator which still has pride of place on that publication’s website. Reflecting on the story of Jeremy Forres — then a teacher now a convicted sex offender — who had absconded to France with a 15-year-old pupil, Liddle wrote:
I seriously contemplated being a teacher once upon a time, when I was lot younger. It seemed to me an agreeable doss, and one didn’t have to be too bright or too ambitious, or possess any great quantity of knowledge.
I sometimes wondered what sort of teacher I’d prefer to be… [but] I never found out because the one thing stopping me from being a teacher was that I could not remotely conceive of not trying to shag the kids. It seemed to me virtually impossible not to, and I was convinced that I’d be right in there, on day one. We’re talking secondary school level here, by the way — and even then I don’t think I’d have dabbled much below year ten, as it is now called. I just thought we ought to clear that up early on.
At my old comprehensive school a few teachers were known to be schtupping the pupils; one of them, a female teacher who was extremely foxy in a Pot Noodle scuzzy kind of way — she copped off with some fifth-form lad, and another teacher (a man with a guitar and a faux rebellious attitude) gained the affections of an extremely attractive fourth-form girl. As pupils, we didn’t remotely mind about this and both teachers were very popular.
But I knew, when I was considering my career options, that this sort of behaviour was definitely frowned upon by the authorities and that I would not last the week in my new job. Frowned upon, although not much more, I ought to say — certainly not the deranged howling that is kicked up these days, the fury and the righteous anger.
That is Rod Liddle’s real 70s nostalgia: A wistful remembrance of a time when “popular” teachers could groom and abuse children and, while it was “frowned upon” there was no “deranged howling”.
And just 9 years ago, The Spectator thought it was fine to publish a columnist saying he could not have been a teacher because he would certainly have “[tried] to shag the kids”, just not “much below year 10” (i.e. 14-year-olds).
The section of Liddle’s column that I quote above is the most frequently shared part but the conclusion is as bad, if not worse. He wrote:
The word the journalists are using is ‘grooming’, which is the word they always use on occasions such as this. But it is surely not grooming as we have come to understand the term. Or if so, the witless maths teacher was grooming the girl subconsciously; his songs and texts are transparent vessels of doe-eyed affection — I doubt very much he would have sufficient IQ to groom a pony.
It is palpably not the same as stalking some minor on a social networking site while using an alias, nor indeed plying adolescent girls with drugs and then raping them, as we have heard was the modus operandi of semi-savage Asian men in the northern town of Rotherham… I think there are gradations of this sort of transgression, which take account of both the intent of the perpetrator and the level of willing reciprocity (not to mention the age of the groomee, if we can call them that).
But for sure, what Mr Forrest did was wrong. I suspect — and it is only a guess — that thousands of teachers up and down the land conduct sexual relationships with their older charges and that in most cases no harm comes of it. But it is still wrong, and no matter how imbecilic the teacher involved might be, it is still exploitative, even if it is not consciously so.
I just hope Mr Forrest is not so thrown by the hyperbolic furore that he neglects to return to Britain…
It’s hardly surprising that Liddle — with his long history of racist columns for The Spectator and elsewhere — should consider being white a mitigating factor in the grooming and abuse of a child.
Liddle’s blasé assertion that “thousand of teachers up and down the land conduct sexual relationships with their older charges and in most cases no harm comes of it” is grotesque, disturbing and wrong both factually and morally. Last year the girl at the centre of the case wrote a piece for the i newspaper under a pseudonym, in which she concluded:
Do I regret my relationship with Jeremy? I can’t say I do, but I now recognise it for what it was: a dangerous infatuation. One that cost both of us dearly.
That she needs to rationalise what happened to her is understandable. That Liddle, who was 52 when that Spectator column was published, made excuses for a sex offender and professed himself incapable of not committing similar offences if he’d been a teacher is not.
Last year when Liddle’s words were shared again on Twitter, The Spectator’s deputy editor Freddy Gray — imagine a generic Tory MP with a slow puncture — responded to a tweet on the topic from Owen Jones by chuckling:
It’s true — we are constantly trying to stop Rod shagging kids. He’s insatiable. It’s a real problem and I’m grateful to Owen for pointing it out.
Isn’t it curious what The Spectator chooses to find funny and what it thinks is deadly serious? It’s the same moral vacuum that howls at the heart of The Sunday Times which revels in Liddle’s crass jokes and creep antics.
Like a dark mirror of Giles Coren’s mawkish Facebook meme writing on going back to school yesterday, Liddle’s article is nothing more than one of those “remember when the bin men were hard, milk came in glass bottles, and we were allowed to play in abandoned quarries where only one or two of us drowned?” posts so beloved of a particular brand of braindead boomer. He continues:
When people blame fast food for our obesity crisis, point them in the direction of the crap we ate back then. The Toast Toppers, the Findus crispy pancakes, the sponge-based pizzas.
But in those days 1 child in 30 was overweight or obese (and thus bullied), rather than 10 in 30, as is the case today. You never heard about allergies. Kids ate what they were given. How did we get from there to a nation of grizzling, wheezing, ten-year-old lardbuckets? Where did that come from?
The middle class hadn’t discovered dyslexia as an excuse for their offspring’s stupidity, either, nor the working class the medicalised redoubt of ADHD to explain the fact that their son was a menace. Approximately 50 per cent of illnesses we know today didn’t seem to exist.
I’m sure that the many readers of The Sunday Times who have children with ADHD or dyslexia — or indeed have either themselves — will be delighted to read this glib cruelty from Liddle. But it’s too easy to simply blame Liddle. He’s just one of the frontmen for this reactionary rag with pretensions of superiority to its stablemate The Sun and the rest of the red tops.
The rancid Roderick E Liddle is also a Sun columnist and is output there is the same as the stuff he shovels into The Sunday Times. It’s just that readers of the latter think themselves a cut above as if chuckingly at Liddle’s provocations is made better if you quickly move to drooling over bank account emptying fashions in the Style magazine or stroking your chin about a terribly interesting book review in Culture.
As a Times Radio listener out of grim professional necessity rather than as a result of the masochism, psycho-sexual confusion, or rampant brainworms that lead others to tune in, I often have cause to hear Liddle being indulged by Katie Hopkin’s ‘cockroach’ column enabler and Murdoch made man Stig Abell during newspaper reviews. It’s like eavesdropping on a dinner party where staid old Stig is tickled by the ugly outbursts of his reliably racist friend.
But none of it means anything right? It’s fine if Giles Coren — another Times Radio mainstay with his own show — hoots with laughter at the death of a young woman, India Knight pretends we forget she helped her partner get a more lenient sentence for downloading and viewing images of child sexual abuse, and Rod Liddle ‘jokes’ about his deep desire to abuse children.
Get yourself a national newspaper column and you can say or do whatever you like without fear that your colleagues and enabling editors will ever stand up to you. I do not love the 2020s.
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Although it is on YouTube.
This is the man who infamously began a Spectator review of a Billie Eilish album with the lines: “If your 12-year-old daughter’s a bit thick, she probably likes Ariana Grande… If, however, she’s a bit smarter, but also sullen, lazy and probably prone to self-harming, she’ll be a big Billie Eilish fan.