IAM tempted to stop reading the papers. I mean, to open any of the regional or national newspapers this last couple of weeks is to become convinced that everyone is either a paedophile, serial groper or, alternatively, a victim of such a despicable person.

Is there something about being a TV personality that makes you likely to go in for child abuse? And what about the spat between the rather unappealing Lord Rennard and the even less appealing women he is said to have abused, fondled, insulted, groped or otherwise annoyed in an infinite variety of unsavoury ways? At the risk of sounding even more of a male chauvinist – cor, d’you remember that hallowed phrase from back then in the days when we were all so liberated and right-on? – isn’t there something rather wimpish about these Lib Dem girls who have gone crying to Nick Clegg (of all people) to avenge them of the groping grizzly Rennard? Why didn’t they just smack his face or knee him in the b***s?

The trouble is that there has been a great reversal. Decades ago, when youngsters were disgustingly interfered with, they protested that they never reported the incident because they wouldn’t be believed. Maybe they were right.

But now the emphasis has swung in the very opposite direction, so that merely to claim you were once a “victim” guarantees that everyone will believe your story.

But is it beyond the bounds of reason to conjecture that while there were and are certainly nasty men such as Jimmy Savile – and God knows how many more from the sets of the pop programmes and the soap operas – there are also lying children determined to blacken anyone’s name simply in order to draw attention to themselves?

Please don’t throttle me for merely asking the question – the question which suggests that not all those who look so innocent are as innocent as they look; or even that many of those who, it is suggested, are bang to rights might actually be innocent? I’m not taking sides, you understand, but only asking the question – because I do truly fear that somewhere in all this mess of publicity and celebrity voyeurism serious miscarriages of justice might be perpetrated.

The case of Jimmy Savile was one long miscarriage of justice. And the miscarriage was in that he was never made to answer for his crimes. There is no doubt that his colleagues and employers at the BBC knew what he was up to. I know this because I made quite a few programmes for the BBC myself in the 1980s and 1990s. And it was common knowledge that Savile was a child molester.

He got away with it because he was famous and untouchable – though his victims weren’t, unfortunately.

But I know about Savile from another, independent source. In 1985, I published a book and my publisher took me to lunch to celebrate its launch. Making conversation, I asked him who else might be publishing books with his company.

He said: “Jimmy Savile has just finished a memoir for us. But you want to stay away from the likes of him. When he’d finished his book, he came to me and said, ‘Right, I’ve done my bit. Now get me a 12-year-old lass. I deserve it’.”

How many more children might have been spared his abuse of them if those who blew the whistle on him in those days had been believed?

Of course, the fact that Savile was undoubtedly guilty doesn’t mean that all those now being charged are guilty too.