(posted 7829 days ago)The Telegraph
Dumbed up
(Filed: 17/11/2002)Profile: Rolf Harris
When the British public votes you the world's greatest artist - greater not only than Rembrant, El Greco and Raphael, but than the kind of talents who did the Chinese lady with the green face, and that one of the stag in the heather - the only way to go is up. "I was humbled," said Rolf Harris, and he wasn't the only one.Fair dinkum: Rolf has never claimed to be the new Vermeer, but up-up-up he has gone regardless. He is currently presenting the second series of the most watched "fine arts" programme in British television history, Rolf on Art (BBC1), and a selection of his paintings - or, strictly speaking, his spirited knock-offs of other people's paintings - is showing in the National Gallery. Next month an exhibition of his work is to open at a private gallery in London.
Is he a renaissance man or a public menace? Despite the record audiences, there's a feeling around that his show is to art what Blind Date is to romance. Melvyn Bragg labelled its very existence proof of the BBC's "dereliction of duty" towards serious cultural programming, while The Daily Telegraph's art critic, Richard Dorment, emptied a king-size can of emulsion over Harris's head last week, accusing the presenter of being "a grotesque self-publicist burbling a stream of inanities".
The dissidents surely have a point. In last week's programme, for example, Rolf informed us that Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec "was most famous for being short". You wouldn't have heard Lord Clark of Civilisation say that. But then you wouldn't have heard Lord Clark accompanying himself on the didgeridoo for a rendition of Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport. Civilisation, so to speak, is over and instead we have Rolf.
It could be worse. His programme pulls them in - up to seven million a week - because it chooses to treat art as familiar and friendly territory rather than a distant and hostile land. Rolf, 72, plods gamely through the hazy Provenal sunflower fields, whips out his palette and attempts to emulate Van Gogh. The eyesore that results is all part of the fun. In failing so completely to capture what Vincent could do he illustrates the singular wonder of the original; but in trying at all he makes the point that whatever else it may be, great art is nothing to be frightened of.
Not that the carping will worry him. If anyone knows how to ride out the wrath of purists, Rolf Harris does. He has been doing it for most of his career. Nine years ago he was talked into recording his own version of the classic Led Zeppelin hit Stairway to Heaven. Dismissing suggestions that he should first hear the original, he gave the number the full Rolf treatment with wobbleboards and an "all-together-now" chorus. The band's fans questioned whether the blasphemy laws might apply, but the track was a huge hit, and it made him a campus cult figure who, later that year, played to delirious acclaim at Glastonbury. Some time afterwards, when he finally heard Led Zep's version, Rolf fell to his knees, groaning: "My God, what have I done?"
He was born in Bassendean, a suburb of Perth, Western Australia, on March 30, 1930, the son of Crom and Marge Harris, who had emigrated from Wales, but continued to think of the UK as their true home.
Rolf's memories of childhood are overwhelmingly happy. He and his older brother Bruce (now his manager) grew up in the ramshackle suburban house his handyman father built out of the best materials he could scrounge. For most of his early years, Rolf remembers, he slept outdoors on the veranda. He grew into a sporting prodigy, becoming, in his mid-teens, Australia's junior backstroke champion. Sadly, for Rolf, the same talent did not extend to his painting, but it was what he most liked to do. At the age of 22, he arrived in London to study at an art college in Kennington.
It was there that he happened upon a mildly eccentric fellow student, Alwen Hughes. "Every day," recalls Rolf, "I'd poke my head around her easel and say: 'How's it going?' " Alwen never said anything, and it was some years after they had left the college that they met up again at the Royal Academy's summer exhibition. They were married on March 10, 1958, with Alwen's black poodle as her bridesmaid. That night, the luckless pooch joined the newlyweds in their bed.
After a brief spell as a teacher, Rolf had begun to be invited to appear on television. His affable Aussie blokeishness, and ability to entertain with a paint pot and a brush the width of a loofah, made him a natural for children's programmes. He began building songs into the act, soon feeding in the comic potential of his didgeridoo. His first major hit was the 1962, Aboriginal-inspired Sun Arise.
Sun arise, she come in the morning,
Bringin' back the warmth to the ground,
Dinnnnggghhhh, dunghummm.Unfortunately, at the time the song was recorded, Rolf couldn't actually play the didgeridoo, and didn't know anyone in England who could. Rather than bear the cost of flying in a proficient Aboriginal, the Beatles' producer, George Martin, simulated the sound with eight double basses. The song reached number two in the charts, beaten only by Elvis Presley's Return to Sender.
Rolf has been in demand ever since. Perhaps too much in demand, for in the biography he published last year, Can You Tell What It Is Yet?, Harris candidly admitted to being a poor husband to Alwen, and a worse father to his artist daughter, Bindi. He tells in the book of finding a note in Alwen's diary, reading: "I feel like killing myself. I am so bored. Please take me away from here." In the week that Bindi was born he flew to the United States to keep a routine work engagement.
A change appears to have come after Bindi told him frankly how much his absences had pained her as a child. He says he is choosier these days, although work continues to rule his life to an arguably unhealthy extent, and he was recently ordered to rest after being diagnosed as suffering from exhaustion. He and Alwen, who is a sculptor, live in a large Thameside house close to Michael Parkinson's, near Bray in Berkshire.
Yet the endearingly Tigger-like qualities that have made Rolf such an all-bouncing, all-flouncing children's favourite are nothing if not authentic. Rolf is much the same in real life. He runs everywhere, sings as he goes, talks non-stop in his surprisingly soft, unmistakably Aussie voice, and scribbles manically on whatever surface is available. His enthusiasm and persistence are famous. He first heard Two Little Boys when it was sung to him during a trip to Holland by a wandering fellow Australian. Later, when Rolf couldn't find the tape he made, he tracked the man down 12,000 miles away and made him sing it again down the telephone. The song reached number one.
As an art collector, Rolf may not be a major figure, but he takes his art more seriously than his critics take Rolf. He knows his tastes, too, and he isn't afraid to stand up for them. Along with the likes of Sir Tom Stoppard and the Culture Minister, Kim "Bullshit" Howells, he is scathing about the conceptual art movement and dismissive of its credo that a work is art if the artist says it is.
Those who broadly agree with Rolf that art should bear less resemblance to what you sleep in than what you hang on the wall, could hardly be in better hands. His television programme may be of its time, in the sense that it is showy, chatty and designed from scratch to sneak beneath the innate scepticism of mass audiences. But its soul belongs to another age, in which art was more easily recognised as such. You don't need, as Rolf's tormentors seem to imply, a chap with a bow tie, half-moon glasses and a vault pallor to tell you this. Just look at the pictures and let Rolf explain the rest. He can explain it all if you give him the chance, including why he's the world's greatest artist. "Michelangelo," he says, "didn't do much television."