Rolf Harris
Rolf Harris was an Australian musician, television personality, painter, and actor. He used a variety of instruments in his performances, notably the didgeridoo and the Stylophone, and is credited with the invention of the wobble board. He was convicted in England in 2014 of the sexual assault of four underage girls, which effectively ended his career.
Harris began his entertainment career in 1953, releasing several songs, including "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport", "Sun Arise", "Jake the Peg" and "Two Little Boys", which reached number 1 in the UK. From the 1960s, Harris was a successful television personality in the UK, later presenting shows such as Rolf's Cartoon Club and Animal Hospital. In 1985, he hosted the short educational film Kids Can Say No!, which warned children between ages five and eight how to avoid situations where they might be sexually abused, how to escape such situations and how to get help if they are abused. In 2005, he painted an official portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.
After the Jimmy Savile sexual abuse scandal, Harris was arrested as part of the Operation Yewtree police investigation regarding historical allegations of sexual offences in 2013. Harris denied any wrongdoing and was placed on trial in 2014. In July 2014, Harris was sentenced to five years and nine months in prison after being convicted on twelve counts of indecent assault on four female victims, who were between the ages of eight and nineteen at the time that the offences took place between the 1960s and 1980s. Following his conviction, he was stripped of many of his honours and re-runs of his television programmes were pulled from syndication.
Harris was released on licence in 2017 after serving nearly three years at HM Prison Stafford. The conviction involving an eight-year-old girl in Portsmouth was overturned as unsafe in 2017. He applied for permission to appeal against his convictions concerning the three other girls, but this was refused.
Early life
Harris was born on 30 March 1930 in Bassendean, a suburb of Perth, Western Australia, to Agnes Margaret and Cromwell Harris, who had both emigrated from Cardiff, Wales. He was named after Rolf Boldrewood, the pseudonym of an Australian writer whom his mother admired. After his later fame, Harris was often referred to within Australia as "the boy from Bassendean". As a child he owned a dog called Buster Fleabags, about whom he later wrote a book.Harris attended Bassendean Primary School and Perth Modern School in Subiaco, later gaining a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Western Australia and a Diploma of Education from Claremont Teachers' College. When he was 16, and still a student at Perth Modern School, his self-portrait in oils was one of the 80 works accepted to be hung in the Art Gallery of New South Wales as an entry in the 1947 Archibald Prize. He painted a portrait of the then Lieutenant Governor of Western Australia, Sir James Mitchell, for the 1948 Archibald Prize. He won the 1949 Claude Hotchin prize for oil colours with his landscape "On a May Morning, Guildford".
As an adolescent and young adult Harris was a champion swimmer. In 1946, he was the Australian Junior Backstroke Champion. He was also the Western Australian state champion over a variety of distances and strokes during the period from 1948 to 1952.
Career in television, music, and art
1950s
Harris moved to England in 1952 and became an art student at City and Guilds of London Art School in South London, aged 22. In 1953 he found work in television, at the BBC, performing a regular ten-minute cartoon drawing section in a one-hour children's show called Jigsaw, with a puppet called "Fuzz", made and operated on the show by magician Robert Harbin. He went on to illustrate Paper Magic, Harbin's first book on origami, in 1956. In 1954, Harris was a regular on BBC Television programme Whirligig, which featured a character called "Willoughby", who sprang to life on a drawing board, but was erased at the end of each episode.By this stage, Harris had drifted away from art school as a slightly disillusioned student. He then met his longtime hero, Australian impressionist painter Hayward Veal, who became his mentor, teaching him the rudiments of impressionism and showing him how it could help with his portrait painting. At the time that he was working with Veal, Harris was also entertaining with his piano accordion every Thursday night at a club called the Down Under, frequented by Australians and New Zealanders. At the Down Under venue Harris honed his entertainment skills over several years, eventually writing what later became his theme song, "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport".
Although Harris chiefly appeared on the BBC, he was also on the British ITV network, and when commercial television started in 1955, he was the only entertainer to work with both the BBC and ITV. He performed on the BBC with his own creation, Willoughby, a specially made board on which he drew Willoughby. The character would then come to life to engage in a comedic dialogue with Harris as he drew cartoons of Willoughby's antics. On Associated Rediffusion's Small Time, Harris invented a character called Oliver Polip the Octopus, which he drew on the back of his hand and animated. Harris then illustrated the character's adventures with cartoons on huge sheets of card.
Harris returned to Perth in Australia when television was introduced there in 1959 after he was headhunted. He subsequently produced and starred in five episodes of a half-hour weekly children's show, as well as his own weekly evening variety show. From 1959, he worked on TVW-7's first locally produced show, Spotlight, and during this time he recorded "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" on a single microphone placed above him in the television studio.
The song was sent to EMI in Sydney, and was released shortly afterwards as a record, becoming both his first recording and his first number one single. The song was successful in the UK. Harris offered four local backing musicians to split 10% of the royalties from the song, but they decided to take a recording fee of £7 each, because they did not think the song would be successful. The novelty song was originally titled "Kangalypso" and featured the distinctive sound of the "wobble board".
The fourth verse – "Let me abos go loose, Lou/Let me abos go loose/They're of no further use, Lou/So let me abos go loose" – became increasingly controversial, because of the use of what later became regarded as a racial slur, and was removed in later versions of the song. In 2006, four decades after the song's release, Harris expressed his regret about the original lyric.
1960s to 1980s
At the end of 1960, he toured Australia sponsored by Dulux paints and singing his hit song whilst doing huge paintings on stage with Dulux emulsion paint. While painting on stage, one of his catchphrases was, "Can you tell what it is yet?" After Harris and his wife returned to England, they visited Perth to meet family and for tours of Australia, where he spent around four months travelling with his band.After returning to the UK in 1962, he was introduced to George Martin, who re-recorded all of his songs the following year, including a remake of "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport" which became a huge hit in the US, and "Sun Arise", an Aboriginal-inspired song Harris had written with Perth naturalist Harry Butler. The song reached number two in the UK charts. Harris met and worked with the Beatles after they started recording with Martin, and he compèred their 16-night season of Christmas shows at London's Finsbury Park Astoria Theatre in 1963. Harris sang "Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport", with the Beatles singing backing vocals, for the first edition of the From Us to You BBC radio show in December 1963. Harris changed the original lyrics to create a version that was specially written for the Beatles.
Harris was the presenter of Hi There and Hey Presto it's Rolf in 1964. By the time The Rolf Harris Show was broadcast in 1967, lasting until 1974, on BBC1, he had gained a high profile on British television. He was the commentator for the United Kingdom in the 1967 Eurovision Song Contest.
In March 1967, David Blanasi, an Aboriginal Australian virtuoso player and maker of the didgeridoo, travelled to London with Harris, appearing live on The Rolf Harris Show on Saturday 1 April for the first time. Blanasi taught Harris how to play the didgeridoo while on tour with him, which began an ongoing professional association.
Harris created one of his best known characters in the 1960s, Jake the Peg, but his biggest success in terms of record sales was in 1969, with his rendering of the American Civil War song "Two Little Boys", originally written in 1902. Harris later discovered a personal poignancy to the song, as the story bears such a resemblance to the World War I experiences of his father Crom, and Crom's beloved younger brother Carl, who died aged 19 after being wounded in battle in France two weeks before the Armistice of November 1918. "Two Little Boys" was the Christmas Number One song in the UK charts for six weeks in 1969. It sold over one million copies and was awarded a gold disc.
Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, his BBC TV programmes remained a light-entertainment staple, with the last show, Rolf on Saturday OK?, broadcast on Saturday evenings. On many of his television appearances, Harris painted pictures on large boards in an apparently slapdash manner, with the odd nonsense song thrown in, asking "Can you tell what is it yet?" as he painted. Only at the end of the song would a fully formed picture emerge, sometimes only after the board was turned through 90 or 180 degrees. Such appearances led to several television series based on his artistic ability, such as Rolf's Cartoon Time, broadcast on BBC One from 1979 to 1989, and Rolf's Cartoon Club, on CITV between 1989 and 1993.
In the early 1980s, he starred in his own weekly Australian television series, The Rolf Harris Show, produced by the ABC Television. The series featured numerous guests, including regulars such as Jane Scali. During the show Harris would also paint Australian bush scenes.
Harris was the subject of episodes of This Is Your Life in 1971 and 1995. In 1973, Harris performed the first concert in the Concert Hall of the newly completed Sydney Opera House. In 1974, he released the single "Papillon" on EMI. He played the didgeridoo on two albums by English pop singer Kate Bush, entitled The Dreaming and Aerial ; he also contributed vocals to the songs "An Architect's Dream" and "The Painter's Link" on Aerial.
In 1985, Harris presented a twenty-minute child abuse prevention video called ''Kids Can Say No!''