80 years old; 70,000 cheering

Good men come and good men go, but greats go on for ever. Greats like Michelangelo, Mozart, Shakespeare and Rolf Harris.

Rolf Harris has just turned 80. Yet last week he was the opening act at Glastonbury, the biggest music festival in the United Kingdom.

Seventy thousand people turned out to watch him, most of them young enough to be his grandchildren. By all reports they loved him.

The only 80-year-old in Shakespeare is the greatest of all his characters in the greatest of all his plays, King Lear.

Lear is a short-tempered despot. Two of his three daughters betray him, then belittle him. They drive low platform sandals him mad, first with self- pity, then with self-knowledge. In his madness he sees through an inverted world.

"Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar? And the creature run from the cur? There thou might'st behold the great image of authority: a dog's obeyed in office."

It's an observation as true of the 21st century as of the 16th. Think Tony Blair. Think George W Bush.

But you won't get any of that sort of thing from Rolf Harris. Rolf is among my earliest memories.

I can see him now on television in the 1960s, when he was younger than I am now. He had the same v-shaped beard, only it was black rather than King Lear white.

He was a painter. Not a Michelangelo sort of painter but a cheerful chap wielding a brush you could paint a house with. He'd daub random blobs of black paint on a big sheet of paper.

The challenge was to see where the painting was going. Where it seemed to be going was nowhere. But then suddenly an image swam out of it. It became a picture of a grasshopper or a girl drinking milk. I thought it was brilliant. I suspect I still would.

Rolf's continued to paint. A few years ago he did a portrait of the Queen. The critics scoffed but the Queen apparently liked the way he'd captured her smile. That's typical of sunny Rolf. He doesn't do dark.

But it's not for his painting that Rolf has become known and rich. It's for his music.

His signature song is no Mozart aria. It consists of the last words of a stockman dying somewhere in the outback.

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King Lear's last words come with his one loyal daughter dead in his arms.

"And my poor fool is hang'd. No, no, no life.

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life And thou no breath at all?"

Rolf's stockman strikes a different note. "Tie me kangaroo down, sport," he says. But he doesn't explain what it means. If it means what it says it seems a bit tough on the 'roo.

He goes on to urge his mate Curl to "keep me cockatoo cool". Again he gives no reason for this request. Is the song just a nonsense catalogue of Australian fauna? Or is it some sort of metaphor?

I don't think so, and neither did the authorities in Singapore. They banned it. It was the fourth verse that upset them.

"Let me abos go loose, Lou, Let me abos go loose.

They're no longer of use, Lou, So let me abos go loose."

It's a rare slip into harsh reality for Rolf, but tReplica Watches
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