I watched the Netflix documentary, and it took me back to my Northern childhood.
I think what we forget now, and younger people don't understand, is that JS didn't seem as shockingly dodgy in the 60s and 70s as he does when we see footage of him today because so many men in their fifties and sixties were quite frightening back then. People were harder, more spiky, more dismissive, more harsh (if you want a cultural example, the mum and brother in Ken Loach's Kes will give you a pretty good idea of what quite a lot of Northern working class folk were like back then). I spent my youth, for example, being terrified of men in donkey jackets because of my experiences of 70s strikers, and I still have a shudder when I see a donkey jacket now.
So JS's manner and demeanour weren't particularly unusual back then. A lot of blokes were like that. It's was only his dress that was a bit strange, but that was put down to eccentricity.
It wasn't until the really inappropriate shorts, string vest and shellsuit top combo around children on JFI in the 80s that the creepyness became very apparent (and it seems only kids really seemed to see it). And the fact that while the most of working-class Britain softened and shed those old harsh habits and attitudes, he didn't.
So by the time you got to the Louis Theroux interview, JS just seems like a psycho. It's so obvious there's something very wrong. But thirty years prior, it wasn't so clearcut.
Yes, he frightened me when I saw him on the TV, but then so did loads of other middle-aged blokes in the 70s: neighbours, other people's dads, my grandfather, the meat-van man (he used to threaten to chop our fingers off with his cleaver). And when you've a culture where it's not unusual for an adult to yell "I'll clip your ear when I catch you, you bloody tyke" or "you say that again and I'll bray you" , JS doesn't seem quite so alarming.