ABC Documentary ‘Rolf Harris: Primetime Predator’ Revisits the Entertainer’s Hidden Abuse and Fall

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is returning to one of the most corrosive celebrity scandals in modern British and Australian entertainment with Rolf Harris: Primetime Predator, a two-part documentary that will debut Tuesday, June 9 on ABC TV. The series centers on the late entertainer’s double life and, crucially, includes interviews with survivors who have never previously spoken publicly about his crimes.

The title alone signals the shape of the story: the rise from suburban Perth to national and international fame, followed by the long, ugly record of abuse that persisted behind the public image. According to the ABC, the film is designed to show how Harris built influence across television, radio and the charts while concealing conduct that would later define his legacy far more than any of his hits or TV appearances ever did.

Before his name became shorthand for disgrace, Harris was a familiar figure in Britain, the U.S. and Australia. His 1963 single “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport” reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, one of the clearest signs of how widely he traveled as a pop entertainer. In the U.K., he scored hit records with “Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport”, which peaked at No. 9 in 1960, “Sun Arise”, which hit No. 3 in 1962, and “Two Little Boys”, the final No. 1 in the market during the 1960s. Later, in 1993, he returned to the U.K. top 10 with a cover of “Stairway to Heaven”, tied to the Australian TV show Money or the Gun.

His career carried him into institutions that tend to confer a kind of cultural legitimacy by accumulation. In the U.K., Harris was made an OBE, an MBE and later a CBE. In Australia, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia and inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame, a distinction that ARIA has since removed from the record. At one point in the mid-2000s, he was even commissioned to paint Queen Elizabeth II, a sitting that was turned into a documentary. These were not side notes to his fame; they were part of the machinery that elevated him.

That machinery began to unravel in 2013, when Harris was questioned and arrested under Operation Yewtree, the police investigation into sexual abuse among figures in the English media elite, including the late Jimmy Savile. A year later, after trial, he was convicted of multiple indecent assaults on women and young girls between 1968 and 1986 and sentenced to five years and nine months in prison. He was released in 2017, still denying wrongdoing and never apologizing to his victims.

Harris died in 2023 at 93. The ABC says the years since have changed what can be said publicly.

“In the years since, the silence that once protected him has begun to lift,”

the broadcaster said in its announcement. The network describes the documentary as one that

“gives voice to those who were previously unable to, as they share their experience on their own terms.”

It adds that Harris’s death

“has finally lifted a veil of fear once cast by this powerful figure, and survivors who long feared retribution are at last able to speak.”

Rolf Harris: Primetime Predator airs at 8.30pm AEST on ABC TV, with both episodes available to stream on ABC iView.