At 83 I'm guessing he expects to get better care in a prison than a care home.

Operation Yewtree - and related investigations - are catching up with a lot of crime that the perpetrators must have thought had been long buried. I see Coronation Street 'actor' Bill Roache is accused of assaulting a 15 year old girl forty six years ago. Unless people like him confess, I wonder what sort of proof there is after so long.

Can imaging the questioning in the police station:
Police: What where you doing on the evening of May 15th 1967?
Suspect: How the [LIFTED] should I know. It was over 45 years ago.

I wonder how peoples memories have change over the years due to their imagination? It's like chinese whispers. A tiny tiny change each time you thing about it. Eventually it changes beyond all recognistion.

That's something I'm familiar with as I got older. There are things I used to remember, which now I only remember remembering. I can't actually picture them in my head - I just remember that I used to be able to. Things from when I was very young.

I could not tell you about yesterday, but then most of my days are pretty dull and if it is important it goes in the diary. Though on one occasion I was discussing anal sex with a girlfriend when she mentioned that one of her friends did not know if she had done anal before. I said "I have amnesia and I know I have not had anal sex", she laughed at that. So did all her friends when she told them. While my memory is bad for recent events I can remember things from years ago better than yesterday. So I would know what I would not do certain things especially violent. Committing an indecent assault is not something that you would forget.

Though memories can be rewritten to erase bad things in cognitive behavioural therapy, and possibly as a way of justifying what they may have done.

I'm probably going to get slaughtered for failing to properly articulate my thoughts on this, but here goes...

How many of these indecent assaults were actually accepted "slap and tickle" incidents? We look back on that era now our skin crawls at what was considered acceptable behaviour then, but it WAS acceptable. Benny Hill leering at scantily clad girls was prime time entertainment a few decades ago too. No, I'm not talking about feeling up a 9 year old girl, and I'm not referring to Stuart Hall's case specifically, but I don't believe the british entertainment industry was one massive sex-pest social club.

I do believe there are opportunists cashing in on the publicity, and I do believe there are genuine victims here, but I honestly cannot begin to imagine how you can achieve a safe conviction based on largely hearsay from 30 or more years hence. These people, rightly or wrongly, are being tried in the court of public opinion. How in hell's name do you gather an impartial jury for a court case when the defendant has spent the last six months on and off the cover of The Sun?

Actually I think that was quite eloquent.

I agree.

Without speculating on specific cases of which I have no knowledge beyond the hearsay, I have nothing further to add.

Many of these cases are during the sixties and seventies and attitudes were immensely different then. People openly used the term Nig-nog and Paki openly, even comics, and before Jim Davidson. It was post the Pill and women were celeb crazy, no killer disease like Aids then either. Girls from my school at 15 got to appear on Top of the Pops even though it was a 18 plus event. Few of the boys got in, as they did not look old enough (I never tried). So I will accept that what took place in many situations then, would not be viewed so well today. In terms of underage sex, many of the men would not necessarily know the age of the person as the person was consenting.

True but, in the eyes of the law, I didn't know is not a credible defence.

However, I doubt the defendants will even remember the individual encounters. A dolled up fifteen year old girl gets drunk at an after-show party and ends up in bed with a drunk guy who probably shared a bed with a different girl at the previous week's after-show party. He won't remember her face, let alone her name or whether she actually looked old enough to drink alcohol or consent to sex.

What does he say in court? "did I have casual sex three decades ago with random girls/women?", "yes". "Did I have sex three decades ago with that particular girl?", "how the hell should I know?".

Also Top of the Pops was supposed to be for over 18s as well, so if he met her there he could reasonably assume that she was 18. Though the age of consent for a long time was 16 so even if the girl was consenting and 16 it would not be illegal. Though I do know from personal experience that some girls look older than they actually are. I worked in a nightclub (for over 21's) when 21 and one of my female friends would come in with a girlfriend so though nothing of it. Then one day discovered that her friend was actually 14. Fortunately nothing ever happened between us so nothing to worry about but it could have been similar to what these celebrities are accused of.

An episode of Only Fools and Horses had the like “going down the paki’s for a magazine” - the racial epithet was in the line, and like it or not, reflected the lingo of the time.

Exactly. It did not matter if the shop owner was Sihk or Indian they were still called Paki. It was not completely offensive, it was meant to describe the shop. There was also Al Garnet and that was offensive but the point was that he was out of touch. Look at all the arguments that he had with his daughter, played by Una Stubbs over racism. It was the humour of that era.

I tried searching for that line and ended up in a white nationalist website. They have some messed up ideas in there with the belief that the Jews are out to get them, that multiculturalism is a way of taking the world over etc.

They are wrong about everything. They seem to have an over sensitive paranoia complex.