Savile's Game

Netflix's 'British Horror Story'

You probably don’t need to be told that watching Netflix’s two-part documentary on Jimmy Savile requires a strong stomach.  This isn’t simply because of the nature of its subject’s crimes, most of which have become common knowledge since Savile’s death in 2011.

The documentary mercifully doesn’t go into these crimes in too much detail. The exception is an extended interview with one of Savile’s victims, which powerfully tells a painful and bleak story shared by hundreds of women and children who fell into the hands of the most prolific sex offender in British history.

The programme doesn’t break much new investigative ground, beyond its jaw-dropping revelation that Prince Charles and the Royal Family sought PR advice from Savile.  But in tracing Savile’s fifty-year career, it examines, for the first time on screen, how Savile was able to commit these crimes without getting caught.

The most obvious answer to this question is Savile’s own personality. To some extent the programme tells us what many of us already know: that the zany DJ with the peroxide hair who was rarely off our tv screens during the 70s and 80s was a cunning narcissistic sociopath and paedophile with a remarkable talent for deception and manipulation.

Through a combination of interviews and archive footage taken at various points in Savile’s career, the documentary shows how Savile created the public persona that enabled him to carry out his crimes in plain sight.

Savile is a singularly repugnant and almost Sadean character, albeit without the aristocratic breeding that de Sade invested in his characters. Savile belonged to the new pop ‘aristocracy’ that emerged in the sixties, in which money and celebrity brought the same privileges that a fourteenth century feudal landowner might once have expected from his tenants.

Whether nightclubs or working as a DJ and tv presenter, Savile played the role of ‘gatekeeper’ to the stars, which brought him an endless stream of teenage girls he was able to bully, cajole or seduce.

Savile was by no means the only member of that world with a fondness for ‘groupies’ regardless of their age, but none of his peers were as prolific or as devious as he was. From his tough guy youth right through to his rancid old age, Savile lived out every depraved fantasy that passed through his mind, in a single-minded industrial scale career of abuse that including molesting brain-damaged girls in hospital beds, engaging in necrophilia as a hospital porter or making rings from glass eyes that he took from dead bodies.

All this was enabled - and concealed - by the skilful cultivation of a public persona as a loveable ‘national treasure’ that took Savile to the giddy heights of the British establishment. Through his charitable work in hospitals, psychiatric institutions and approved schools, he gained constant access to vulnerable people throughout his life, while simultaneously forming relationships with powerful people who protected him from scrutiny.

His wildly-popular programme Jim’ll Fix It turned him into a kind of television magician with the ability to make any child’s dreams come true, and it also brought him an endless stream of children who wanted to appear on his show, some of whom were abused in process..

All this has become well-known since his death, and to some extent it was known while he was alive. But it still beggars belief that one man was able to sustain such a brazen criminal career for so long without detection, and this is where a ‘British Horror Story’ is most revealing.

The Conjurer

Savile is often described in the programme as a ‘conjurer’ and a ‘magician’, but the programme makes it painfully clear that there were too many people in the circles he moved in who were all too easily duped.

Even with the benefit of hindsight he comes across in clip after clip as a singularly charmless character - a crude, loutish, arrogant, self-regarding, misogynistic braggart who constantly dropped hints about what he was really doing that almost no one picked up on at the time.

It’s difficult to watch the fawning media coverage that surrounded Savile throughout his career without feeling aghast at how easily people were fooled and how readily so many people pandered to the grotesque persona that he projected. 

The former presenter Selina Scott is reduced to stupefied embarrassment at the sight of her simpering youthful self flirting with Savile on breakfast TV. One can feel some sympathy with Scott, caught between Savile and her sleazy co-presenter Frank Bough – the fake family man who liked to hang naked and blindfolded from crucifixes in S&M clubs.

Scott has condemned the ‘ ­misogynistic culture that prevailed at the BBC’ at the time she worked there, and this culture undoubtedly served Savile’s interests well.  It is still incredible to think that the BBC’s children’s programme Clunk-Click once featured Savile and Gary Glitter as co-presenters on the same show, who afterwards abused some of their guests in the dressing room. Or that Savile was able to grope girls on camera during Top of the Pops without anyone in authority taking action against him.

In clip after clip, television interviewers chortle at Savile’s deeply unfunny jokes. Melvyn Bragg, Russell Harty, Frank Muir, Angus Deayton, Michael Parkinson - all of them indulged him and played the game he wanted to play. And it wasn’t just the presenters. When an aging, and cigar-smoking Savile was asked by Angus Deayton on Have I Got News For You in 1999 if he had ever been a wrestler, Savile replied ‘Still am. Feared by all the girls schools in the country.’

The guests and audience cracked up, with the exception of Ian Hislop, whose revulsion was obvious. This wasn’t the last time when a ‘zany’ cheekie chappie with odd blonde hair and a reputation for dishonesty got laughs on Have I Go News For You.

Like Boris Johnson, and Nigel Farage for that matter, Savile projected an image of quirky eccentricity and ‘zaniness’ that is deeply rooted in British culture, and can very easily convert the most worthless junk into a national treasure. When Savile cracked jokes about schoolgirls or responded to the use of the word ‘sex’ in interviews with a goodness gracious nudge nudge wink wink, he reached into an ‘oo-er’ tradition that includes redfaced men in saucy seaside postcards, Carry On films, page three girls and the Benny Hill show.

Savile cleverly played to this ‘Jack the lad’ image of an eternal bachelor with no attachments and a constant stream of girls, girls, girls on tap. In doing so, he his fans to admire and envy him, while also obscuring the callousness and sleazy exploitation at the heart of his hyper-libidinous ‘sex life’.

In this sense, there is some truth in Andrew Neil’s suggestion in the programme that the ‘nation failed itself’ in its response to Savile. But cultural factors do not in themselves explain the more specific failures that enabled Savile to carry out his crimes in plain sight. 

Many people were repulsed by Savile when he was alive, and regarded him as a ‘creep’ and a ‘bad man’, and the reason this drip drip of rumours and allegations never resulted in an investigation is because too many powerful people preferred to ignore them.

Savile’s witting or unwitting facilitators belong to a very long list that includes Tory politicians, hospital managers, lawyers, police officers, BBC managers and programme makers, charities and approved school heads.

At one point in the programme, Dominic Carman, the son of the celebrity QC George Carman, who acted for Savile, talks of an ‘invisible club’ at the top of British society, in which a few thousand people provide ‘protection and sympathy that wouldn’t be the same for an ordinary member of the public.’

Savile actively courted this ‘club’, with such success that he became a regular guest of Margaret Thatcher’s family at Chequers. For Thatcher, Savile was the ideal ‘northerner’. At a time when the north was being deskilled and asset-stripped under Tory leadership, Savile was a working class Tory and a modern-day incarnation of the Victorian philanthropists who played such a leading role in Thatcherite mythology.

Savile was the man who raised funds for the repair of Stoke Mandeville hospital - an effort that saved the state from having to provide the money. He was the man given free access to Broadmoor Hospital by a civil servant regardless of the fact that he had no therapeutic experience or qualifications - an appointment that was subsequently approved by Edwina Currie.

As a result of these activities, Savile transformed Stoke Mandeville and Broadmoor into his private predatory fiefdoms. Yet even when a journalist wrote to Currie to complain that two seriously disturbed twins at Broadmoor were being abused, nothing was done. When Thatcher’s own civil servants tried to dissuade her from granting Savile a knighthood, she overruled them.

In 2013 Norman Tebbit told the Guardian: ‘Jimmy did a great deal of good, as well as wrong. And in anybody's life, you have to look at both sides of the ledger’.

This assessment matched Savile’s own stated belief that he had done enough good things through his charitable works to ‘balance’ other activities that he referred to more obliquely, yet Tebbit made it after his crimes were public knowledge.

You don’t have to work too hard to pull the wool over the eyes of people like this. The Royal Family was an equally easy mark. The utterly gormless Prince Charles actually asked Savile for PR advice, and seems to have regarded him as some kind of court jester-cum-consigliere. When Princess Diana asked Savile what he did all day, he replied that he ‘watched porn’, to which she merely tittered, as so many people did.

‘It Was Good While it Lasted’

Savile’s victims were way too far down the food chain to be worthy of much interest. The fact that many of them came from approved schools or mental hospitals meant that they were already regarded as society’s rubbish, and some of them may have regarded themselves in the same way, which made them even more vulnerable to a seasoned sexual predator.

They were certainly not people that the British establishment ‘club’ took any interest in, or made much effort to protect. None of them were in a position to challenge a man who regarded his own litigiousness as a badge of pride, and could call on men like George Carman to annihilate anyone who dared make allegations against him.

In one interview, Savile tells a journalist ‘I’m not of your world’, but he was very much part of the upper echelons of British society that he moved in for many years. At no point have the institutions that enabled and protected him ever really acknowledged their cowardice and in some cases their complicity.

This is partly because the reputational damage was too much for certain individuals and institutions to bear. Too often individual names are missing from ‘lessons learned’ reports into Savile’s activities. Too many questions are never asked or answered.

What were Leeds police officers doing at Savile’s ‘Friday Morning Club?’ Did they really have no idea what kind of man he was? Did none of the BBC programme makers ever wonder at the age of the girls who passed through Savile’s dressing room? Why did Edwina Currie not act on the warnings about Broadmoor that she was given? How did hospital managers not question what Savile might be up to, even when nurses observed him fiddling with corpses in the morgue?

There are many questions like this, that may never be answered, and Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story does not really answer them, except in general terms.

Some have argued that the ‘world has changed’ since Savile’s time, and that it is unfair to hold people to account for ‘errors’ committed in different times, but it’s far too convenient to subject Savile’s career to such retrospective exonerations.

Too many people knew or suspected what he was doing, and turned a blind eye because Savile was too famous, too rich, and too powerful, or because his activities benefited their institutions financially. Some did speak out about what they knew and what they had seen, only to find themselves ignored.

It is tempting - for some - to sweep all this under the carpet, and regard Savile as some kind of freakish aberration that will never be repeated. But we know that he wasn’t. We know about Cyril Smith, Peter Morrison, Greville Jenner, the Kincora Boy’s Home paedophile ‘honey trap’ and so many others who took their crimes to the grave, just as Savile did.

It’s true that the world has changed - up to a point. Society is more willing to listen to the victims of paedophilia than it once was. The police and the law have a greater understanding of what these crimes involve and how they are conducted. Feminism and the Me Too movement have made it possible for powerful men to be held to account - sometimes.

But the downfall of Prince Andrew, the ineffectual police response to ‘grooming gangs’ in northern cities, or failure of the Met to follow up allegations about Sarah Everard’s killer before her death, make it clear that there are other ‘British horror stories’ unfolding all around us.

Hopefully, the horrific legacy of ‘Saint Jimmy’ Savile can galvanise us to be more aware of them, but in order to do that we need to look beyond the man himself, to the institutional failings, and in some cases the institutional and societal complicity that made his crimes possible, and we need to accept that this ‘horror story’ does not have a happy ending.