Television entertainer whose long and versatile career was followed by imprisonment for indecent assault
For more than half a century until being jailed as a paedophile in 2014, Rolf Harris, who has died aged 93 after suffering from neck cancer, was one of the most celebrated television entertainers in Britain and his native Australia. He was a musician, singer, artist, comedian – a man who, as one journalist put it, had “a professional life that has skipped across disciplines with the agility of a kangaroo”.
He sold millions of records with songs such as Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport (which reached No 3 in the UK charts in 1960), Sun Arise (No 3 in 1961), Two Little Boys (No 1 in 1969), and an improbable reworking of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven (No 7 in 1993). He introduced audiences to the joys of such musical instruments as the Stylophone, the didgeridoo and the wobble board, the last his own invention.
