Why was Jimmy Sevile so beloved by his employers at the BBC, in spite of all the evidence of his serial, sexually abusive behavior?
Eventually he was knighted, officially for charitable work but really for services to execrable taste and downward cultural drift.
Official endorsement of execrable taste was, of course, a boon to those who had to fill several channels a day for 24 hours, because stupid programmes of execrable taste are so easy to produce by comparison with those of intellectual or artistic value, which can be produced only in limited quantity.