When I was a kid growing up in Scotland, there was a seemingly insatiable hunger for Australian children’s TV. This included the trippy adventures of Round the Twist and the soapy duo of Minogue sister-featuring Home & Away and Neighbours. Perhaps more inexplicable, looking back, was the hold that wobble-boarding weirdo Rolf Harris had over the cultural landscape.
Sure, hindsight is everything. But to rewatch BBC footage of the now-dead subject of New York-based Australian director Nick Sweeney’s devastating new ABC documentary series, Rolf Harris: Primetime Predator, is sobering.
How on earth did someone quite so overtly creepy, right down to the trench-coated Jake the Peg with his to his third ‘leg’, ever pass as someone safe to be left alone with kids?
Of course, the more pertinent question is why he continued to abuse so freely, alongside lascivious fellow predator Jimmy Saville, even when execs were openly warning young women on staff not to be alone with him?
Different times, you may say, but this was long after kids down coalmines. The many youngsters that this pair of jackals assaulted deserved our utmost protection.
Rolf Harris Primetime Predator – quick links
In full view
The shivers kept coming, watching Sweeney’s impeccably researched work, observing just how overtly lecherous he was on camera.
Why didn’t I see that as a kid? Naivety, yes, but I’m going to guess terrible, verging on non-existent, sex education at a Catholic school also played its role. But why were the adults with the actual power only ringing alarm bells behind closed doors?
Turning the other way allowed his reign of terror to ensnare young victims for decades. He only grew stronger. There’s Harris, lapping up the adulation of adults who grew up with him on their telly as he takes to the stage at Glastonbury, like a rockstar, bumbling along to ‘Tie me kangaroo down, sport,’ to riotous applause.
‘It was really good fun until it wasn’t,’ says Chris Brosnan, Harris’ sometime didgeridoo player, who says that the mask fell the longer he worked alongside the so-called kids’ entertainer. Brosnan eventually quit in disgust, but Harris’ popularity only grew, even hosting part of the Queen’s jubilee celebration in a tacky Union Jack suit.
How did a boy from Bassendean grow too big to bring down until it was far too late?
Watch the trailer
How did it happen?
Puberty Blues author Kathy Lette recalls this was a time when Australian big thinkers were cementing their toehold on the London scene, alongside folks like Clive James, Barry Humphries and Germaine Greer. ‘I used to call them the gum leaf mafia,’ she says.
Harris’ found his inroads via children’s TV, where his sing-song whimsy was in high demand during the 80s but began to fizzle out by the 90s. He still enjoyed rebounding fame as the now-grown-up kids who trusted him, despite his weird uncle energy, came to view him as a nostalgic oddity, driving the seemingly inexplicable chart success that led to Glastonbury.
Yet all the time Harris was assaulting kids who did not understand the heinous breach of trust occurring. It beggars belief that, as he was attacking young girls repeatedly in the 80s, Harris also had the unimaginable gall to front a public safety advertising campaign warning children against predatory sexual abusers.
As Ben Markham, an investigative detective with the Metropolitan Police, says of that ad. ‘He’s probably written that, and it’s disgusting. It imitates real life.’
Much like the #MeToo revelations that erupted in the wake of Harvey Weinstein’s exposure, Harris was also groping make-up artists and other young women just trying to do their job. They found little support from management and the boys’ club on the studio floor.
Silenced
All power to the women who stood up, determined to be counted, with their testimonies ultimately leading the Harris’ headline-grabbing court case and subsequent jail time in the UK. They include brave women like Tonya Lee, who was assaulted while on a theatre tour at 14 years old, for whom the result brought some sort of closure despite the pain.
Harris’s villainy knew no bounds or shame. The mighty lawyer Sasha Wass says she thought she had no chance in a he-said-she-said battle with Harris. That the Australian’s own testimony was so damning speaks to the impunity his celebrity brought him.
At one stage, he agreed with Wass that his daughter’s best friend, then 13, was sexually attractive in her bikini. ‘You could hear a pin drop,’ Wass says.
Startlingly, that isn’t the worst he freely admitted. Not even close. But then Harris was so sure of his inalienable right to abuse girls. He was found guilty on all 12 counts brought in the UK. But as was noted in Selina Miles’ Sydney Film Festival opener, Silenced, coming forward can be traumatic, and the clapback terrifying.
Australia has far more severe defamation laws than the UK, a fact often manipulated by the accused. Despite several Australian claimants coming forward, no charges were ever laid in Harris’ home country.
Even in the UK, where the charges were successful, his prison stint was a mere three years. He died at home in his luxury riverside mansion in 2023, aged 93, having never expressed one shred of remorse publicly.
The horror that remains in his wake, for the women who came forward and for those who fairly decided it wasn’t possible or worth it. Rewatching that footage of him leering at young girls so brazenly while going live to the nation, the true scope of his treacherous assault on all our childhoods rumbles on like a thunderclap.
