Jimmy Savile was weird and we accepted it without question – Lesley Keating

I have to be honest and say that, despite loving many genres of music, Michael Jackson was never my ‘thing’. 

However, I respect there are masses of fans who still enjoy his music. Each to their own. It’s their prerogative just as it’s mine to say he’s not for me. 

I did have an album once, a Christmas present from the brother of a boyfriend when I was still at school.It was a really good album actually…but it didn’t convert me into a lifelong Jackson fan.

I always found him creepy and somewhat clichéd, but I totally accept there’s a legion of loyal fans out there who will violently disagree. 

But seeing the latest coverage on the two men making allegations against him over their childhood experiences makes me wonder what his fans are really thinking now.

I can’t help but now see a similarity to Jimmy Savile. Like Jackson, Savile was an oddball.  Someone who, to all intents and purposes, looked and behaved like a completely eccentric weirdo yet, as a media personality, we just accepted it without question. 

He purported to be an all-round do-gooder with a track record of hospital visits and charity support. 

Somehow, we didn’t blink an eyelid when faced with his ridiculous, over-processed peroxide locks, medallion, waggling cigar and his leering ‘hello there, guys and gals’.

It’s only with the benefit of hindsight we were later able to join the dots and discover they didn’t make a pretty picture. 

Time will tell whether Michael Jackson falls into a similar category.

I’m not saying he will be proven as evil as Savile, but I still think there is something deeply unsavoury about a grown man who rearranges his once-handsome features to such a degree that they look like a melted plastic caricature and invites vulnerable young boys for sleepovers in his bedroom.

What were the parents thinking?

Has anyone else noticed very sch-loppy English lately?

More and more recently on TV and the radio, I’ve noticed something intriguing. Presenters and guests are turning words with an ‘st’ sound into those with ‘sch’ instead.

So much so that now there seems to be a glut of oddly pronounced words popping up – words like sch-tudent, sch-trong and sch-tupid.

A variety of announcers on the BBC and ITV alike are doing it quite a bit at the moment but it’s not just in the media. I was queuing in a shop the other day behind two teenage girls who were discussing which ‘reshtaurant’ they were going to have lunch in.

I’m not talking about speech impediments here, just a general lapse into sloppy English.

What is that ‘unexpected item in the bagging area’?!

I really hate those self-service tills in supermarkets.

You need the dexterity of a safe-breaker to get through the experience unscathed. No matter how hard I try, it often announces there’s an ‘unexpected item in the bagging area’ leaving me baffled as to what it could be.

That’s embarrassing enough but then you have to stand there waiting, with a queue building, probably speculating over what you’re ‘trying to nick’, until someone casually ambles over, taps the screen without even looking and off you go again.

I hate that these tills are also making people redundant. I don’t go to the hairdresser and expect to blow dry my own hair. Give me a real person any day.