How John Peel managed to get away with it

Beneath the hippie exterior there resided a quiet, nerdish, cosy family man, just waiting to emerge

Perhaps it's a trick of the light, but suddenly it seems as if we are living through one of those timewarp moments and that the Sixties are back. An unpopular war has prompted peace demos and paranoiac murmurings about the military-industrial complex at work in America. Pin-up magazines are on the shelves, as if feminism had never happened, and Tony Blackburn is famous again.

A particularly sharp attack of the Sixties has broken out in Hammersmith where a bunch of sex-crazed Catalans are stripping off and doing it to each other every which way on stage in an extravaganza of perversity called XXX. Outside, family values activists have been demonstrating; inside, people have been walking out, shocked that a play based on the work of the Marquis de Sade has turned out to have so much sex in it.

True to form, the Daily Mail was so shocked that it devoted a whole page to the event and, to ensure that its readers understood the full depth of the depravity, featured large colour photographs of some nudie lesbo action. Middle England getting all turned on again; we might be back in the days of Oh! Calcutta!.

With all these echoes of the way we were, it is obviously the perfect moment for John Peel, the murmuring DJ and Sixties hero, to share his thoughts on the years when having sex as much as possible was a valid gesture of protest and the straight establishment was in an almost permanent state of flushed, disapproving arousal.

The fact that Peel will be tucking an advance of £1.5m into his jeans might once have been regarded as a sell-out. Today, now that we are all breadheads, it merely seems sensible. Criticism has instead been levelled at the publishers who shelled out this sum for an old hippie's memoirs.

It is nonsense, of course. Some crazy sums have been paid for celebrity autobiographies (remember that Dale Winton was paid £600,000), but on this occasion the advance looks like a good investment.

Although Peel seems to be neither particularly interesting nor dynamic, a studied dullness indeed being part of his public persona, his career and his success at getting away with things that would have done for almost anyone else will be an inspiration to many. Somehow his life has come to embody the acceptable face of an alternative lifestyle, just the right mix of hedonism and social responsibility.

When he was a 26-year-old DJ in Texas, he is said to have had underage girls queuing outside his studio for the chance to offer him sex. Breezily, he jokes today that he was not asking for IDs at the door. "The interesting thing... was that most were into heavy petting, and penetration was a rarity. But heavy petting was all right by me." As for the age thing, "a lot of 14-year-olds were getting married in Dallas". Indeed, the girl he first married was 15 at the time.

None of this should be particularly startling. A glance through images of the time, contained on record covers and in the pages of such alternative magazines as Oz, confirms that no one was too young to be recruited into the sexual revolution. For the men on the front line, giving drugs to young teenagers and taking them to bed was not corrupting them – a bourgeois concept, – but liberating them.

It is the reaction today that is more interesting. Whereas Jonathan King became a media hate figure and was sent to prison for seducing teenagers, his contemporary John Peel has admitted to heavy petting of 14-year-old girls and remained a national institution, a cuddly champion of family values on Radio 4.

So it has been with his legendary bunk-up with Germaine Greer. He claims she almost raped him. She has recalled that he left her with a dose of the clap. Had this somewhat undignified debate occurred between any other two public figures, there would have been embarrassed hilarity all round, but here normal rules of media behaviour seem not to apply.

Peel's book will sell, of course. He has become a perfect exemplar of how to live your life in public. A semi-toff who went to boarding school, he decided that becoming a working-class Liverpudlian was the way to go and changed his accent. When sex and drugs arrived on the scene, he had his face in the trough with the best of them. Now, with maturity, he has revealed that, beneath the hippie exterior there resided a quiet, nerdish, cosy family man, just waiting to emerge.

Somehow, without trying, Peel reassures everyone. Old hippies believe that, like them, he is essentially unchanged, alternative at heart. Middle England identifies a rebel who has seen the error of his ways and is now a nice, proper celebrity doing voiceovers for dogmeat commercials.

All this ought to be annoying. It is the mystery of John Peel that, for some reason, one is rather relieved that, mysteriously, he has managed to get away with it.

terblacker@aol.com