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Thom Cross
Many years ago (the late 60s) I was a young drama student in London. I would visit the big, all-powerful BBC to complete a course on radio drama production. The iconic Broadcasting House was the venue and seven of us would meet a variety of producers and trainers who would guide us (with much pompous patronising) through production methods. We had been warned – drama students were vulnerable and popular bedroom (dressing room) fodder for the more arrogantly licentious BBC staff.
Indeed our set included three particularly glamorous girls who regularly returned to college after a vigorous weekend of meeting and ‘going out with’ the boys from the BBC. One particular lassie (she had Scottish connections) was passed around within production staff like a parcel in order to meet ‘talent finders’ and so become ‘discovered’. She did find an agent from her BBC connections. (An agent for a drama student was ‘free beer for a year’.)
London in the late 60s was heady, horny and hedonistic in a crude come and get it culture of post-pill sexual liberation. But using student talent for easy sex was hardly unique to the BBC. Casting couches were everywhere, often in the unlikeliest of places. (The rooms of Westminster.)
I was part of a rugby-playing, beer-drinking bunch and was a maturish student having served before the mast with that grand old Edinburgh company Ben Line Steamers with whom I sailed around the bars of Bangkok, Hong Kong and Singapore for four years. My only record of sexual ‘abuse’ was being invited for extra rehearsals at the flat of a mature lady tutor who promised to help me with my projection.
But there was a seedy, sordid, dystopian ‘dirty’ lifestyle around the entertainment business then (and now?). The BBC was so damned dominant and its staff so influential, that no student (child?) dared complain. It was part and parcel of the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t-tell show business low lifestyle.
The BBC was enormously prevailing in the creative (drama) community prior to the onset of the spread of commercial TV and the outsourcing of productions to indies. Getting a foot in the BBC (late 60s) door took talent but it also meant playing BBC games (many comprising sexual obedience).
In my final year we had a new head of college, appointed from within. Married with three children, he performed at weekends around the pubs of the east end doing a drag-act. We only enrolled 25 boys and girls from more than 4,000 applicants (so we were small and intimate).
In his first year (and only year) he accepted a young male Asian student with quite evidently transexual tendencies. This poor kid was bedroom fodder for the head of the college, plus several visiting tutors who were ‘given’ the student as an ‘extra’. Being a small school this activity buzzed around the student community. The year after I left (and left the UK scene) the gross abuse of this young man was put to the board and the head fired. The new student social militancy had its benefits.
But the BBC was not a small intimate organisation with a militant labour force. Near Stalinist in its bureaucratic self-important management culture, with massive layer upon layer of hierarchical staffing levels, dirty sexual activity could be developed free from discretion.
It would have been so easy for a slime like Savile to slither and slide through the corridors of the be bloody careful BBC.
Thom Cross is a writer and playwright
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