Police interviewing former BBC producer Wilfred De’Ath — accused of molesting a teenage girl in the Sixties — might like to read his latest column in The Oldie, written before he was arrested last Sunday.
“I have led a very wicked life,” he writes. “Like many of my operatic heroes (Caligula, Don Giovanni, Carmen, even Falstaff) I have been guilty not only of transgressive behaviour but have been the cause of it in others.
“I have been guilty of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and homophobia. Even now I find it hard to repent since, having excessive vitality and an overdeveloped sense of humour, I believe myself to have been a victim of the Life Force ...
“I know it is pathetic and shallow and immature to want to be famous, but I have craved fame since I was a small boy (some kind of inferiority complex?) and now, at last, I have some.” He’s referring, of course, not to his arrest but to his starring role in The Oldie 20th anniversary book.
De’Ath, 75, also writes about his beautiful fiancée, 37 years his junior. “I wonder whether she will ever agree to marry me?”
In a letter to the editor, an Oldie reader offers his opinion of De’Ath: “The point of Wilfred De’Ath is to provide us with someone to whom we can all feel morally superior without any significant effort.”
