Just Don’t Mention Gary Glitter

Artrockers,

Last Thursday Mark Thompson, the big cheese at The Beeb, apologised to Jonathan King for airing a repeat of TOTP from 1976 with his performance removed. King called it 'Stalinist revisionism', and it's hard to disagree. A corporation source went on to say: "The BBC doesn't think it should be rewriting history so will be showing these programmes in their entirety." The BBC is correct in this , it is certainly not their job to edit history.

A couple of days later the BBC proved the consistency of this remark when Pete Townshend presented some sort of daft lecture for 6 music, the content of which appeared to be about two years behind the game. He joked about mistakes he'd made in the past and folks chortled indulgently - this is Pete Townshend after all, and The Who remain important to persons of a certain age and class, unlike Jonathan King who was only ever a 'pop' person, so what do you expect?

But there remains a wall of silence about one of our greatest pop innovators, he has been written out of history and most certainly is NEVER played on BBC radio or television, his name is rarely spoken. The Ministry Of Information has carefully removed any mention of him, cut him out of the photos and denied that he ever actually existed. Stalinist revisionism indeed. And if the BBC are serious about not re-writing history then when can we expect to hear Gary Glitter on the airwaves again? Whatever we might feel about him now the fact remains that Mr Glitter re-wrote the book of pop, made some of the greatest singles of all time and entertained the nation when the nation was in desperate need of it.


So BBC, what are you going to do about Gary, because you've already written him out of history?
Can this be right? Ever?

Tom Artrocker