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Glitter: The Popstar Paedophile review - Shocking TV clips that will make you wonder how he got away with it

posted 10 months ago by Satan2016 (26200)
2 replies | jump to latest

ITV, no Imdb listing yet. A few torrents on TPB.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-13342107/gary-glitter-popstar-paedophile-review-tv.html 4/5*

With the benefit of hindsight, it's impossible to watch Gary Glitter and Jimmy Savile together on television without feeling a bit queasy.

'Do young ladies go to great lengths to get next to you,' asked Savile, in a clip shown on Glitter: The Popstar Paedophile.

Just the way Savile says 'young ladies' is enough to make your stomach turn. As it was at the time, to be honest.

'Yeah, thank goodness,' says Glitter. 'I'm having a look round the audience now.'

'We've got some bean bags for you,' says Savile. 'We always line our artists up.' How did we not know? They were so obvious. Or perhaps we did know.

In 1992, Glitter was interviewed by Paula Yates on The Big Breakfast. 'Who do you coach down to your house?' asked Paula.

'I've got a couple of good friends who come down,' said Glitter, looking uneasy and clearly wondering what was coming next.

'Are they very young?' said Paula with a winning smile.

We now know they could be very young indeed. Among other offences, the disgraced king of glam rock was convicted of attempting to rape an eight-year-old girl, who was staying overnight at his home.

Glitter, whose real name is Paul Gadd, was first exposed as a sex offender by the News Of The World in 1993. They reported that he'd sexually abused a 14-year-old girl, but seemed more interested in the fact that he was bald.

Yet a year later, Glitter was the subject of a lavish tribute on the BBC Children In Need programme. In 1997, his songs were sung by the Spice Girls. So much for Girl Power.

He was convicted of child porn offences in 1999, and after a short prison sentence, fled to Cambodia and Vietnam, where he began offending again.

He is currently serving 16 years in the UK for abusing three schoolgirls. That conviction followed Operation Yewtree, which was of course prompted by the revelations about Jimmy Savile.

[–] Satan2016 (26200) 10 months ago

Glitter: The Popstar Paedophile, review: the blind eye turned to Paul Gadd’s crimes is shocking
https://www.msn.com/en-nz/entertainment/tv/glitter-the-popstar-paedophile-review-the-blind-eye-turned-to-paul-gadd-s-crimes-is-shocking/ar-AA1nxeaJ

Did Paula Yates suspect what Gary Glitter was up to? An old clip from The Big Breakfast, aired as part of Glitter: The Popstar Paedophile (ITV1), suggested so. Interviewing him in 1992, she sweetly asked him about his popstar lifestyle. Glitter talked about inviting coach-loads of Playboy bunnies to his house in the 1970s. Then she took him by surprise. “Who do you coach down to your house now? Are they very young? Whenever I think of you, I do imagine you with rather young, nubile girls.” Glitter looked, fleetingly, very uncomfortable.

The astonishing thing, viewed from this side of the MeToo movement, is how little anyone cared when Glitter’s abuse of a teenage girl was first exposed. The documentary functions as a sort of period piece: this is the way things used to work. The News of the World printed a story in 1993 about him abusing a 14-year-old, whom he had met and begun grooming when she was 11. Yet the newspaper treated it as something of a joke, more interested in the fact that the girl had a picture of Glitter without his wig. A year later, Children in Need featured a Gary Glitter tribute performed by Radio 1 DJs, some of whom hailed him as their hero. In 1997, after his arrest, the Spice Girls film still featured one of his songs.

A photographer took pictures of Glitter in the company of young girls at his hotel in Cuba in that same year, alarmed by what he saw. If the star’s behaviour was so obvious to a stranger at the poolside, how could the people who worked with him over the years have failed to notice?

[–] capuchin (3366) 10 months ago

The 'Are they very young?' might seem to suggest she'd heard rumours. The use of the word 'nubile', however, would suggest Yates didn't know quite how young they were. Nubile has two related meanings, originally meaning 'of marriageable age' and coming to mean 'having reached sexual maturity' or 'sexually attractive'. In either sense, it connotes a young adult.