Rolf Harris Obituary | television and radio

For more than half a century until he was jailed as a sex offender in 2014, rolf-harris, who died aged 93 after suffering from cervical cancer, was one of the most celebrated television entertainers in Britain and his native Australia. He was a musician, singer, artist, comedian, a man who, as one journalist put it, had “a professional life that jumped disciplines with the agility of a kangaroo.”

He sold millions of records with songs like Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport (which reached number 3 in the UK charts in 1960), Sun Arise (number 3 in 1961), Two Little Boys (number 1 in 1969) and an unlikely reworking of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven (No. 7 in 1993). He introduced the public to the delights of musical instruments such as the Stylophone, the didgeridoo and the wobble board, the latter of his own invention.

Between 1953, when the BBC hired him to play a puppet named Fuzz in the children’s television series Jigsaw, and 2012, when he was honored with a Bafta scholarship, he was rarely off the UK screen, in shows like Hey Presto. It’s Rolf! (1966), The Rolf Harris Show (1967-72), Rolf on Saturday, OK? (1977-80), Rolf’s Cartoon Club (1989-93), Animal Hospital (1994-2004) and Rolf on Art (2001-04). He was one of the handful of artists who often identified himself professionally only by his first name.

Deeply honored for his contribution to the entertainment industry, he was appointed an MBE in 1968, rising to OBE in 1977 and CBE in 2006. Still in 2012, the year before his appointment. arrested during Scotland Yard’s sex crimes investigation, Operation Yewtree, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia.

“I came to the UK on a ship in 1952 at the age of 22, with nothing but a lot of self-confidence,” he wrote in his 2001 autobiography, Can You Know What Is Still?

“As a musician, singer and songwriter, I’ve had No. 1 hits and swept pop festivals; As a TV presenter, I have been awarded the MBE and voted TV Personality of the Year; and as an artist I have had paintings exhibited by the Royal Academy. People who are now parents and grandparents grew up watching me on TV singing Jake the Peg, drawing big pictures with a thick felt-tip pen, blowing on the didgeridoo, and wobbling on a piece of plywood. Kids today know me as the man who cares about cats with broken legs and ferrets with flu at the BBC Animal Hospital. Touching the lives of so many people has been a great emotion”.

The widespread fondness for Harris was summed up in a profile of the artist in The Independent in 1998. “He remains, even after all these years, so brilliantly innocent… That’s why we still hold him in such great and genuine affection.” . He’s approaching 70, he’s been in business pretty much forever, but he’s still spectacularly nice and good.” The author of the piece was not the only one among the profile writers to tend towards the hagiographic tone. “There must be a Mr. Nasty somewhere inside that Mr. Nice. There simply must be. But as hard as I tried, I couldn’t find it,” said The Guardian in 2000.

That line he used to title his memoirs, “Can you tell what it is yet?”, was the catchphrase he used while speed painting huge canvases on stage or on TV shows. But very few people could tell what Rolf Harris was. In 1985, for example, he made a warning film about sexual abuse, called Kids Can Say No (1985), which was released on video. In it, he managed to include a sung element: “My body is not the body of the body but mine / You take care of your body / I take care of mine”.

The last of the crimes for which Harris was convicted and jailed at Southwark crown court in 2014 was not committed until 1986. criminologists later argued that Harris introduced Kids Can Say No out of fault for what he was doing at the time, and also to hide in plain sight.

He was born in Bassendean, a suburb of Perth, Western Australia, the son of Agnes (née Robbins) and Cromwell Harris, Welsh immigrants. “My life has never been conventional,” he wrote. “Our family lived in a house built by my father, a power plant worker, with second-hand materials and recycled nails. He added rooms as he could afford them. My brother Bruce and I slept on the terrace our entire childhood, with the rain splashing through the blinds and on our noses and foreheads.

At 16, Rolf became Australia’s junior backstroke champion. The following year, his oil self-portrait was accepted to hang at the Art Gallery of New South Wales as an entry for the 1947 Archibald Prize. He inherited his artistic skills from his father, a frustrated portrait painter.

“When I showed talent, he got me the best role, the best paintings, even though we didn’t have a lot of money.” His mother was an analytical chemist until she had children. “Without my mother,” Harris told an interviewer, “my career would not have happened. She always said, ‘Do this, go there, try that.’”

So in 1952 Harris traveled to London to go to art school. His BBC television debut in Jigsaw was followed by Whirligig, in which Willoughby’s character was brought to life on a drawing board. He was also developing his musical skills by playing a piano accordion at a London club for antipodean expats called Down Under and writing songs, one of which was Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport. This calypso tune about an Australian cattle farmer on his deathbed became a No. 1 hit in Australia and reached the British Top 10 in 1960. Three years later, a cover of the song produced by Jorge Martin went to number 3 on the US Billboard chart.

In 1958 Harris married Alwen Hughes, a Welsh sculptor and jeweller, whom she had met when they both had paintings at the Royal Academy in London. They had a daughter, Bindi, who became an artist.

The key influence on Harris in those early years was the Australian impressionist painter Hayward Veal. “Veal was the one who put me on the right track to do all these huge paintings that I did on television,” Harris recalled. “He was just using a simplified version of his impressionist painting.”

Harris became famous for the speed with which he painted on live television. In his first Saturday night adult television series, The Rolf Harris Show, accompanied by the dance troupe Young Generation, he would draw huge landscapes on 12-by-10-foot canvases, having previously practiced creating paintings against a timer. to be able to produce them live. He became so famous for his painting that in one survey he was ranked Britain’s best-known artist: 38% of those polled knew of his work, while only 23% knew of Constable.

In 2005 he was commissioned to paint an official portrait of the Queen. “The queen certainly deserves better,” argued the Guardian critic. jonathan jones of the resulting image, “than to be vacuously flattered by a painting with all the emotional and intellectual insight of, well, Rolf on Art.”

In 1993, his version of Stairway to Heaven made him famous among a younger generation of fans. In 2010, aged 80, he made his fifth Glastonbury festival appearance, performing on the Pyramid Stage to a crowd of 30,000.

Three years later, in March 2013, Harris was arrested on allegations of sex crimes. He was jailed in 2014 for five years and nine months on 12 counts of indecent assault that took place between 1968 and 1986 against four female victims, including one 13 year old school friend of his daughter. His predatory behavior was like his paintings, the prosecutor argued. “Each trace can be a little vague or unclear, but together you can identify what’s going on,” he said. He showed “Mr. Hyde hidden behind Rolf Harris’ Dr. Jekyll, which was the public profile of him” of him.

In February 2016, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that Harris would face seven other counts of indecent assault concerning events that allegedly took place between 1971 and 2004, in which complainants between the ages of 12 and 42 were involved. pleaded not guilty: In February 2017, he was acquitted on three of the charges and the jury failed to reach a verdict on the other four.

He was released on license in May of that year and, by the end of the month, faced a new trial on three of the four unsolved charges from February plus one new charge. Once again, the jury was unable to reach verdicts and there was no further trial. One of the 2014 convictions was vacated in November 2017 for being unsafe, but Harris was denied leave to appeal against the other 11.

Last week, a two-part ITV documentary, Rolf Harris: Hiding in Plain Sight, examined how his celebrity status exploded and how his behavior went unchallenged for so long.

He had been stripped of his CBE and AO honors in 2015.

In Australia, two pavement plaques were unearthed in honor of the disgraced artist, one in Bassendean and the other in Perth. His artwork was removed from Perth Modern, his former school, and from the walls of council chambers, and his status as a freeman of the city of Perth was revoked. He became one of only two people to lose the Australian Living Treasure title, which had been conferred on him in 1997.

His wife and daughter survive him.