I remember Max Clifford as the big-bouffant, smart-suited, high-profile guy publicising the stories behind some of the major sex scandals which bedevilled John Major's failing Conservative government in the early 1990's, most prominently the one involving his Minister for Culture, David Mellor, who was the subject of a lurid tabloid exposé of his football shirt romp with a young model. It seemed at times that if you were rich and powerful but with the merest hint of a skeleton or two rattling in your closet, Clifford was the guy to approach if you wanted to extort from them the maximum price for publicising peccadilloes great and small. Sure, early on, some of his publicity stunts might have raised a giggle, like the fabricated Sun newspaper headline "Freddy Starr Ate My Hamster", but looking back, they were clearly dreamed up to publicise, if anything, Clifford himself.
Every tabloid newspaper of the time as I recollect had a gossip column no doubt keen for salacious stories of the rich and famous. Occasionally, however, a story would come along which was way too big to be a mere titbit and instead got elevated to page 1, usually with supporting pictures and interview. Chances are that back in the day Clifford would have quickly moved in to own the story himself, signing up the complainant for no doubt a major percentage of the negotiated "kiss and tell" fee. Among his early clients was the emergent Simon Cowell, who we see publicly thanking Clifford for his services for no doubt heightening his media profile and we know where that ended up. More than this, however, the publicity-hungry Clifford would occasionally set himself up as some sort of moral guardian of society, in particular claiming the major credit in exposing the disgraced glam-rock pop star Gary Glitter and going on record denouncing Glitter's depravity as if he was a latter-day Mary Whitehouse.
The programme then cuts to a mature woman, her back to the camera to protect her identity, retelling her story of how at age only 15, she was raped and later intimidated into silence by Clifford, after he had promised her high-profile attention in the papers and television. Other women with near-identical stories to tell, are also seen relating their victim-experiences at Clifford's hands at similarly young ages.
Clifford even had the chutzpah to commission a writer to write his own authorised biography who is filmed recounting his frank narration to her of some of his nefarious practices, including phoning up past victims, changing his voice and impersonating a fictitious person to further compromise and intimidate them.
Finally however, in the wake of the Jimmy Savile Yewtree enquiry, a crusading reporter broke through the Fleet Street glass ceiling protecting Clifford as finally the victims' voices were heard and at long, belated last, he was taken down and convicted of his crimes, eventually dying in jail some years ago before he'd served his full time.
There's no one in this programme to defend Clifford, which may tell a story in itself, in fact not even the daughter who we learn posthumously appealed her disgraced dad's conviction only a couple of years ago, which duly failed. Clifford was then convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison, making no sign of contrition as he was sent down. Indeed in the most remarkable clip shown here, the one where Clifford does a "Trump" in hovering behind and photobombing a TV news reporter doing a live piece-to-camera on his own trial, I almost couldn't believe my own eyes.
The part that the Fleet Street press, which Clifford had of course fed their daily diet of sleaze for so many years, in allegedly failing to report his crimes, is called to question if not followed up as it perhaps might have been. I'd also have been interested to find out more about, for example, Clifford's wife and learned her side of the story but unsurprisingly, she didn't participate.
This documentary may not have been balanced, but there's no question that his young female victims, now grown to woman-hood and still bearing the emotional scars of their traumas, clearly felt vindicated in finally having their voices heard and in their eyes at least, along with, I suspect, many more of us, seeing justice done at last.
