The Sick Legacy of Jimmy Savile

I always thought Jimmy Savile was a complete abomination. Eccentrics and rogues can indeed be lovable, but the one-time BBC DJ and Top Of The Pops presenter gave the breed a bad name. He made my skin crawl.

I am not claiming any presience here. I knew nothing about his twisted career as a sex abuser. I had no idea that he spent a huge part of his life feeling up unsuspecting girls and arranging trips to special needs schools to foist himself on underage kids. But everything about him gave me the creeps. I didn’t like his ludicrously kitch get-ups. I didn’t like the show-piece cigars. I didn’t like the pink sunglasses. I deeply distrusted his showy devotion to his mother, whom he described as “the only woman for me”. And the self-conscious kiddie DJ babble appalled me. There is always something deeply wrong with adults behaving in a grossly infantile way. Now that the grisly truth has started to emerge about his predilections, no-one epitomises this in a more sinister way than Sir Jimmy Savile.
Everything about him screamed of self-aggrandisement on a vast scale, of arrested development dressed up as buccaneering individualism. It made sense that he wanted to be buried in a gold coffin. His life was a monument to vulgar egotism.
I often wondered how he got away with it, turning such grotesque base material into the stuff of popular culture celebrity. But of course he did far more than that: Jimmy Savile successfully wormed his way into the affections of the British TV viewing public. He became a national institution. It was his ultimate defence, a screen behind which he could hide his inveterate nastiness.
As is the case with many of the most insidious paedophiles, Savile was supremely devious. He himself came up with the idea for Jim’ll Fix It, a programme which was created as a magnet for children – which got the green light from the BBC in 1975 and ran at prime time every Saturday evening for almost 20 years. The format was simple: kids wrote in with wishes that the programme-makers went about fulfilling. Its success was a triumph for nauseating sentimentality.
But to say that is merely to scratch the surface. Because even this twenty-year long exercise in self-congratulation became a platform for Savile to abuse kids, who were lured into his dressing-room at the BBC and fondled or, in some instances, raped. “Do you want to earn your Jim’ll Fix It badge,” he asked one participant, Kevin Cook, who was nine at the time. Cook has stated that Savile proceeded to sit him down on a chair in his dressing-room, and to sexually assault him.
Jimmy Savile was awarded an OBE in 1971 and a knighthood in 1990; he spent Christmases with Maggie Thatcher at the Prime Minister’s official country residence, Chequers; he was lionised by British royals and – an unrepentant ‘bachelor’ – is said to have given marital advice to Prince Charles and Princess Diana (the mind boggles); he was renowned for his ‘charity’ work and was named Knight Bachelor, Papal Knight Commander of the order of St. Gregory the Great by the Vatican. “His story was an epic of giving,” Monsignor Kieran Heskin told his funeral in Leeds. “Giving of time, giving of talent, giving of treasure. Jimmy Savile can face eternal life with confidence.”
In fact it was an epic of sex abuse, bullying, intimidation and preying on innocent children. It was a life of gut-churning selfishness and criminality, lived with apparent impunity, with any allegations that were made against him being ignored or swept under the carpet.
It is hard to believe that he escaped censure for so long, that he was never challenged successfully by any of his victims while he was alive. But it was his very status as so called “national treasure” which made it difficult to make anything stick and which prevented many of those on whom he inflicted himself from making official complaints. Besides, those that were made were not pursued effectively by the authorities. It was far more convenient to bury them.
Savile organised a Friday Morning Club which met every week at his apartment. Among those who attended regularly were both serving and retired police officers, some of whom were no doubt complicit in his nefarious activities. Maggie Thatcher wasn’t the only Prime Minister to whom he was close: some campaigners believe that he was involved in procuring young boys for her Tory predecessor, Ted Heath, taking them to the latter’s yacht to be used and abused.
His autobiography, the ludicrously titled Love Is An Uphill Thing, relates a series of unsavoury events with a sense of entitlement that is staggering in its arrogance. In particular he recalls an incident from his days as a nightclub manager in Leeds. A high ranking ‘lady officer’ arrived at the club one night. She showed him a picture of an ‘attractive’ girl, who had run away from a remand home, and asked his assistance in finding her. “If she comes in,” he recalls telling the policewoman, “I’ll bring her back tomorrow, but I’ll keep her all night first as my reward.”
You might imagine that he is merely congratulating himself on his wit – but no. Savile boasts that it is “God’s truth” that the girl arrived in due course at the club and that he convinced her to allow him to hand her in the following day, if he let her stay at the dance and go back to his place afterwards – which he was only too willing to do.
The incident is summed up in what is one of the most astonishingly shameless statements you will ever see in print. “At 11.30 the next morning,” Savile recounts, “she was willingly presented to an astounded lady of the law. The officeress was dissuaded from bringing charges against me by her colleagues, for it was well known that were I to go, I would probably take half the station with me.”
Savile was not alone among DJs and broadcasters in behaving as a predator. As the allegations against him mount – there have been over 300 at the time of writing – the police have launched an investigation, and almost as surely as day follows night, other well-known names will be dragged into the morass. The rumour-mill has gone into overdrive, with a number of other DJs and ‘personalities’ being fingered by the tabloids.
It is important, in a situation like this, not to metaphorically tar and feather people unless they are genuinely guilty of abuse. The publicist Max Clifford has revealed that over a dozen celebrities have been in touch with him, scared that their reputations may be ruined when they did nothing worse, in their minds, than take advantage of whatever sexual offers were going, at a time when that was regarded as the done thing.
Whatever about that – and we will wait and see what the individuals involved have to say when the time comes – there is certainly a distinction between the Brendan Smyth-like abuse of children in places like Haut de la Garenne industrial school, Stoke Mandeville Hospital and Duncroft Special Needs School, of which Saville was guilty, and the kind of groupie culture which was prevalent in rock ’n’ roll and among DJs in the 1970s.
Either way, the fact that Jimmy Savile could evade charges during his lifetime is reminiscent of what happened in Ireland with members of the Roman Catholic clergy. Savile was a member of a different kind of special caste. But it is not too far-fetched to suggest that he was like a secular Priest, who wrapped himself in a cloak of charitable piousness all the better to enable himself to get away with crimes of monstrous egotism, violence and cruelty against vulnerable children.
Of course, the decisions taken in the BBC to suppress a Newsnight investigation into accusations against Savile after his death were thoroughly despicable. It would seem impossible for anyone who encouraged or facilitated that cover-up to survive. But the issue runs far deeper than any show trial at the BBC might imply. The authorities, and in particular the police, have questions of their own to answer in relation to the long-term culture of silence which enabled Savile to die a free man.
“I am a very tricky fella,” the DJ told Alex Bedfield in an interview not long before his death. Savile was proud as punch about it too. “Tricky is much better than being clever,” he added. “If you’re clever you can slip up. But if you’re tricky you never slip up.”
If you’re sufficiently tricky you have positioned yourself that there are too many others you could drag with you, if you were to go down. That seems to have been Jimmy Savile’s sick genius. But it is no excuse for the failure on the part of the police and the authorities generally to protect his victims.
His tombstone bore the inscription “It was good while it lasted.” That has now been removed and Savile lies in an unmarked grave. The madness remains, however, that it lasted so long.