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out hot air through its grille.
    *
    Late in the 1980s, when Rolf’s act began to seem antiquated, his cover version of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ updated him. ‘It was very square to say you liked Rolf Harris before that,’ he complacently noted. ‘Suddenly it was very cool to say you liked Rolf Harris.’ Musical performances at the Glastonbury Festival established him as a harmless, gormless figure of fun, immune to the irony of the ovations he was receiving from the muddy mobs of rock fans.
    Rolf’s original audience had grown up, so in 1994 he took on a more avuncular role and began a ten-year run on Animal Hospital. Like Christ, he had suffered the little children to come unto him in Cartoon Time; now, ministering to poorly quadrupeds, he turned into St Francis. In an episode featuring a euthanised Alsatian called Floss, audiences sniffled as a teary Rolf consoled the dog’s sobbing master – ‘the first time,’ he later announced, ‘that viewers in England had seen two adult males unashamedly crying on TV’. Once a festive, mischief-making imp, he had matured into a shrewd orchestrator of the nation’s tenderest emotions. In 2001 he reverted to an earlier vocation, setting up his easel to pastiche Degas and Monet in the first series of Rolf on Art, a long-running show that encouraged and empowered amateur painters. As a result, the ageing Rolf joined the ranks of the Old Masters: in 2012 a Liverpool museum sold record numbers of tickets to a retrospective exhibition of his work. ‘Rembrandt, Rubens and Rolf, all in the Walker Art Gallery now,’ said a fawning BBC reporter.
    â€˜The world has learned from him,’ Clive James declared at the end of the birthday poem he addressed to Rolf the moral mentor, ‘and I likewise.’ Accepting his near-priestly status, the Church of England invited Rolf to write a preface to a booklet that explained the notion of bereavement to children: ‘G’day kids’ was his salutation before he brought his little readers the bad news about mortality. His wife’s brother suggests that Rolf may have undergone a conversion when he witnessed the healing feats of the Indian ‘godman’ Sathya Sai Baba (who was himself accused of sexually abusing his young male acolytes, to whom he offered his penis as a token of blessing). Short of performing miracles, Rolf said that his purpose on earth was ‘to spread a little love and affection wherever I can’ and ‘to talk to everyone and be accessible’. Accessibility, however, is a two-way street, and in several of the incidents described by the prosecution in its case against him a child’s request for an autograph allegedly led almost immediately to molestation.
    In 2005 his painting of the Queen conferred respectability on Rolf, but during the sessions he did his best to be unrespectable, as if still teasing his prim mother. Rolf’s music is about his body’s cheeky production of sound, and painting licenses him to make an almost scatological mess. Explaining his technique, he told the Queen that when he confronts a pristine canvas his first move is to ‘kill the white’, dirtying it with a puddle of colour. ‘Extraordinary,’ she remarked with her usual equanimity. To cover up his missteps, Rolf tends to splash turpentine around, so he asked the Queen if she disliked the smell. Unfamiliar with its resinous stink, she gave a wary reply: ‘Well, we’ll tell, won’t we, soon?’ Later, flicking his brushes, he whispered to himself about the risk he was taking: ‘Imagine if I sloshed paint all over the Queen!’ She remained unblemished, but Rolf’s banter – about domestic pets relieving themselves on the carpet, and the stench of dissected horses in the studio of the eighteenth-century equine painter George Stubbs – flirted with impropriety.
    By now Rolf had