Bill Stickers is Innocent

– or at least, Bill Roache is.  Yes, the Corrie actor was cleared of all charges and I was quite pleased.  Obviously I don’t know anything about the cases but something just didn’t sit right.  I have no problem believing that DLT thought it perfectly acceptable and an extension of his ‘cuddliness’ to shove his hand down a girl’s pants on Top of the Pops: when the horrific Savile story spilt its guts all over the press I thought, this is awful but he did always seem creepy and weird – but whether it was the length of time that had elapsed in the Roache case, or whether it was his response to the charges, or just some indefinable aura around the story, I didn’t buy it.

Argh, now the post has done that weird italic thing and I don’t know how to undo it.  There seems to be a secret button on here which, when pressed inadvertently, activates the instruction ‘turn everything into italics and never turn it back again for some obscure reason that we can’t explain’.  So we’ll just have to live with it I’m afraid.  Where was I?  Oh yes.

These stories are not mere trivia.  Apart from the fact that if girls are raped by soap stars it’s a serious abuse of power, it undermines trust in the famous, and that affects all of us.  Every time someone in the public eye abuses that power, whether they’re a politician or a policeman or a sports’ presenter or whatever, it affects our perception of ourselves, and our perception of who we can trust.  It chips away another bit of our faith in ourselves.  And if it happens too often we all start to think that there’s no-one we can trust because everyone behaves like a materialistic, sexually predatory, unprincipled git.

 

I’ve been reading Marcus Aurelius recently – he’s a good antidote to all this.

Check out some of his inspirational quotes here:

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/marcus_aurelius.html

 

Incidentally, I was impressed by Roache’s words on his acquittal.  Most people would condemn their accusers and thank the jury; he just said ‘there are no winners’ and that we ‘should all be much kinder to ourselves’.

Good advice, I think.

Kirk out