There are two ways to ensure you will get away with murder.
The first is to display some sort of outstanding creative talent. It doesn’t matter what, just something that gets you talked about in the papers and in the pub, and endears you to the Great British public.
Take Roman Polanski, the director convicted 30 years ago for having sex with a 13-year-old. He fled the US before he was sentenced. It was only a couple of weeks ago that he was finally arrested in Switzerland, on a US arrest warrant. Amazingly since his conviction, rather than being an international pariah, he’s been hailed as one of the world’s greatest directors, and worked with everyone from Ewan McGregor to Johnny Depp. He even won an Academy Award which he couldn’t collect to avoid being arrested should he set foot on US soil.
The second way to be forgiven for a crime is to die. Preferably of a horrific illness, or unexpectedly. Harsh as it may sound, most people have a strange idea that once a person is deceased, they are also automatically up for canonisation. They might have been the most garrulous bastard you ever came across, but once they’re buried, so are their faults. So once Jade Goody, bless ‘er ‘eart, died earlier this year, I, along with everyone else, cried like a baby at the footage of her funeral – forgetting of course, that just a couple of years ago I was incandecsent with rage when she was blatantly racist to Shilpa Shetty on Celebrity Big Brother.
Keith Floyd, who we lost less than a month ago (see, look how I’m making it sound like I knew him personally), used to drive me bananas with re-runs of his show Saturday Kitchen with his drunken slurring, dragging the poor cameraman from one hazardous vat of boiling water to another. The second I heard he’d had a heart attack I was on the phone to my housemate, talking him up like he was a favourite uncle. On the same day, Patrick Swayze finally lost his battle with pancreatic cancer. Now I’ll be fair, Swayze didn’t really do anything wrong, but I never did like Dirty Dancing – until he died. I’ve watched that bloody film six times in the past month.
Of course, Michael Jackson is the best example of our selective memory. Combining his undoubted talent, with the fact that he has finally (probably) been buried, means even those who were repelled by the accusations of child molestation, have dug out their old LPs and bought tickets for the memorial concert. When I reminded my mum of the strange activities at his big fairground, and calling his child Blanket, I got the biggest telling off since I was 12, ending with: “and you DON’T speak ill of the dead.”
Now, I know that he’s still alive and only famous in that ghastly ‘campus celeb’ sense, but in a similar way, ex-YUSU President Tom Scott, having left us for better things, has become a venerated figure in my mind. A real swashbuckling hero of a man, who went against the grain, standing up for what he believed in and overhauled the university’s political system. A Che Guavara in a tricorn hat. What? He was just a computer science student who pretended to be a pirate, you say? It was all a big joke? The parrot was actually a toy duck? Rubbish. I distinctly remember him making Brian Cantor walk the plank.