Monsters...

Not all monsters are big and hairy, some of them have toothy smiles and seem extremely charming, smarmy even.

Look, I don't care if he is 83, charming and a minor national treasure. I don’t care if he is in poor health or that he made millions laugh in the Seventies with his not-very-funny jokes and striped jackets. I don’t care that his fourteen victims are about one percent of Savilles – ‘only’ as his brief is on record as saying. All I care about is that his punishment matches his deeds.

Fifteen months imprisonment for what Stuart Hall did to girls as young as nine is an insult to everybody that isn't a pedophile. In reality he’ll serve half of that, only two weeks for each young girl he fiddled with. What is wrong with that judge, maybe he's nostalgic for It's a Knockout? I’m beginning to worry that our society is starting to accept that TV personalities in the seventies and eighties were ‘up to it’, that it was ‘par for the course’ and that ‘they were all at it’.

Well that makes it all right then doesn’t it.

The fact that for each girl that has come forward several others probably haven’t - not wanting to make their lives messy by raking up the past – isn’t even in that pathetic fifteen month equation. And what of Bill Roach or Tarby or Rolf? If they are found guilty what will they get? Will the courts and the public be so used and bored with it by then that we accept the slap on the wrist that some sympathetic judge hands out.

Meanwhile Ian Brady continues with his life sentence, without even the right to commit suicide for the horrors that he committed and rightly so. Yes, make him sweat out every last minute of his miserable life.

Stuart Hall’s sentence is far too lenient; my God you can get five year for not paying your tax and seven years for habitual shoplifting. Stuart Hall, the king of the funsters, might have been having fun with those girls but they weren’t. He didn’t kill any of them, but he did damage all them. He isn’t Ian Brady but he does deserve to be locked up for his forever. I hope someone sees sense and makes his punishment fit his crime.