In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

by Dan Davies

  What’s more likely is that hospitals provided Jimmy Savile with both a captive audience and easy pickings. Where better to satisfy his longing for adulation, especially at a time when his age was beginning to show and his allure as a frontline pop star was fading, than in an environment where everyone was confined to a bed? And in being required at the most vulnerable, precarious moments in the lives of some of those people, he was enabled, both in terms of the ready access he was afforded and in the way those charged with patient care could be manipulated. It was a devastating mix, and one that he intuitively grasped.

  Jimmy Savile’s standing as a volunteer and fund-raiser for the sick, the disabled, the old and the young grew apace. In 1968, a patient at Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital wrote to him, asking whether he would open a fete for the hospital’s League of Friends. A gift was sent with the invitation: a Brazil nut set on a wooden plinth. Underneath, on a silver plate, was inscribed the legend: ‘NUTTERS INC – Jimmy Savile.’

  ‘I dropped a line back saying I would only go if the boss asks me,’ Savile told me at our first meeting. ‘I got a letter from the boss so I went. I had an immediate affinity with the place.’ It was the start of an association with the Berkshire hospital that would continue for decades.

  It did not take long for Jimmy Savile to progress from pushing old ladies in wheelchairs at Leeds General Infirmary to being invited into the operating theatre to witness heart surgery. ‘There in front of me was life with a capital L,’ he wrote, ‘and my life can never be the same after such an experience.’ When the patient came round from the anaesthetic, he celebrated by going off to ‘a dance at the nurses’ home’.9

  In May, by which time the ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign had wound down amid widespread apathy and press criticism, Savile was invited to spend a week in Dublin, Belfast and Cork at the request of Lady Valerie Goulding who admitted approaching him about helping her to raise money for the new Central Remedial Clinic with ‘some trepidation’. Savile took along his mother and his white Rolls-Royce and was responsible for raising around £3,000. And according to the Irish Times, he bestowed ‘a kiss on every adult female whom he chanced upon’.10

  Later that summer, he led 500 teenagers on a sponsored walk to pay for the Margaret Sinclair Centre in Rosewell, played football in a half Rangers, half Celtic jersey for St Joseph’s Hospital and gave a sermon at a teenagers’ mass in Tunbridge Wells. In 1968 alone, he claimed to have raised £58,000 for ‘backstreet charities’.11 ‘My conscience is clear,’ he said. ‘I’ve taken a lot I know, but I’ve given a lot as well.’

  *

  Jimmy Savile set his course for the centre of the British establishment with the ‘I’m Backing Britain’ campaign. It won him kudos and respect, which allied to his apparently selfless desire to help those less fortunate than himself, made people begin to reappraise a man who up until that point had divided opinion. His stature was growing within the BBC as well, a fact underlined with the news that he had been signed up by Radio 1.

  The BBC’s new station for pop music had been launched in a bid to fill the void left by pirate radio. By the time the government moved to outlaw them, the pirates, led by stations such as Radio Caroline and Radio London, and operating from rusting ships or disused sea forts in international waters, had changed the listening habits of the nation. It was in response to this demographic shift that the BBC decided to reorganise its radio output, ditching the Home, Light and Third Programmes in favour of four national networks, complemented by a chain of local stations.

  As the controller for Radios 1 and 2, Robin Scott’s first task was to assemble a team of DJs and presenters on a tight budget. His second task was to assuage fears within the corporation. Many on Scott’s roster of disc jockeys had only recently come ashore, and there was consternation about these wildcards broadcasting on the BBC without the safety net of pre-approved scripts.

  As Jeremy Paxman put it to the Pollard inquiry, the BBC had been ‘aloof from popular culture for so long. Pirate radio comes along and all these people in metaphorical cardigans suddenly have to deal with an influx … of people from a very, very different culture. And they never got control of them.’12

  Dawn broke on this brave new world at 7 a.m. on Saturday, 30 September 1967 as Tony Blackburn, formerly of Radio London’s pirate ship MV Galaxy, welcomed listeners ‘to the exciting new sound of Radio 1’ before cueing in ‘Flowers in the Rain’ by The Move.

  Like Blackburn, many of the names on Radio 1’s first roster of DJs had built their followings on the pirate airwaves: Kenny Everett, John Peel, Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart, Chris Denning and Emperor Rosko, to name a few. ‘They have invaded the corridors of the BBC,’ thundered the Daily Mail. ‘What Radio 1 is doing is to introduce a new and potentially vicious competition among the men who make up the new disc-jockey team. They have been given short contracts and great deal of weeding out is yet to be done.’

  Alongside the edgier pirate DJs who doubtless gave the retired Lord Reith palpitations were a cadre of more familiar names: Pete Murray, Alan Freeman, David Jacobs and Jimmy Young, as well as a new talent imported from Ireland, Terry Wogan. But despite being named DJ of the Year by numerous publications over the preceding three years, Jimmy Savile was not recruited for the launch of the new pop station. ‘I think they don’t want me because I earn three times as much as the other jocks,’ he said at the time.13

  That all changed with one phone call from Robin Scott. A show that played records between pre-recorded interviews with ordinary people Jimmy Savile met on his forays around the country was scheduled to start on Radio 1 on Sunday, 2 June. Its host celebrated by ordering himself a £13,500 Rolls-Royce with 22-carat gold handles, and negotiated a boot full of Green Shield stamps into the bargain. He later claimed his deal with the BBC included being bought a brand new Roller each year.14

  Johnny Beerling, who produced Blackburn’s Breakfast Show in the early days and would go on to become Radio 1’s controller, saw the timing of the move as significant. ‘Jimmy had never wanted to be just another DJ on the station and was canny enough to wait … to see how it was doing before he joined. [He] was also shrewd enough to realise there was more mileage in joining as a solo turn than at the same time as all the others.’15

  Four decades on, Jimmy Savile admitted as much to me: ‘There was Tony Blackburn, DLT, the guy who got the sack with the helicopter and the beard [Noel Edmonds]. They were all characters, household names and we were all friends. But we were also in fierce competition with each other. I was the man who never tried. I used to float in and float out, never went to any parties and never once went to the BBC Club. That marked you as a double oddity.’

  Jimmy Savile was spending less and less time in Manchester by this stage. Savile’s Travels, his new show on Radio 1, was predicated on his increasingly nomadic lifestyle, while Top of the Pops required him to be in London more and, it seems, still provided a ready source of teenage girls. On the band’s first appearance on the show, Status Quo’s 18-year-old frontman Francis Rossi was invited to Savile’s dressing room with the words, ‘Come and see me tarts. Some fucking tarts we’ve got in.’16

  The average age of the studio audience at Top of the Pops rose following the move to London, but girls under the age of 18 still found it easy to get in. Now in colour, the show became a weekly window onto the latest fashions. ‘I like clothes that show what a girl is really about,’ remarked producer Johnnie Stewart. Asked whether that included see-through blouses, he replied, ‘There’s nothing wrong with them, and I’d let the girls in, but I would make sure they didn’t get in shot.’17

  Stanley Dorfman, Stewart’s co-producer and director, insists that he never saw Jimmy Savile with a girl at Top of the Pops. He also says Savile rarely, if ever, joined the stars, producers and members of dance troupe Pan’s People in the BBC bar afterwards. ‘He was an absolute enigma,’ says Dorfman. ‘It was like he’d come in every week playing the part of Jimmy Savile. I had no indication
of what he was like at home and I didn’t bother to find out.’

  *

  In November, Savile completed the next stage of his Marine Commando training at Lympstone in Devon, carrying 35lbs of equipment over a nine-mile course in less than 90 minutes. He was also photographed with his arms round the two ‘dolly birds’ chosen as the hostesses on his new BBC1 game show, Quiz Bingo. The format saw teams drawn from hospital staffs all over Britain. The armed forces, the BBC, the NHS, the Catholic Church; Jimmy Savile’s tentacles were spreading into all corners of British society.

  An indication of his acceptance within rarefied circles was to be found in the suit decorated in bananas he wore on one episode of Top of the Pops. At the time, he was ‘chaperoning’ Hillary ‘Gussy’ van Geest, the debutante heiress to a banana fortune. His journey to the centre of the establishment was well under way.

  Dave Eager, who worked as his personal assistant, said this was also a time when Jimmy Savile began to change. ‘One of the things he always said to me about this business is, “The most liked person is also the most hated because it’s worth hating something that other people like … This is why you are always good news for a newspaper. You’ve got to be aware … that the more you become known, the more you become part of the establishment, the more you’re going to get people hating you.”’

  33. EINS, ZWEI, DREI IN THE SKY

  Today’s shell suit was blue with solid blocks of red on the jacket and flashes of white and green on the sleeves. He was wearing a pair of glasses I hadn’t seen before: the old NHS-style in tortoiseshell.

  The electric fire was on and Savile had classical music playing from his favourite satellite channel. A fresh cigar was smoking between his fingers while in the distance, above the boxy houses nestled on the slope overlooking the arcades and chip shops that stretched along the half-moon of the pleasure beach, a squall broke across Scarborough.

  Whenever I stayed with him, the mornings were a time for reflection; it was a still, meditative, contemplative state he seemed to have perfected over the many years he had spent alone.

  I sat down on the velour-covered sofa with its taupe and tan chevrons. Above the fireplace hung a large photograph of the Queen Mary cruise liner passing behind Scarborough’s whitewashed lighthouse.

  I wanted to know about the mysterious powers of hypnotism he claimed to possess. The pitch and cadence of his voice, a voice that became the standard-issue impersonation for just about every British citizen born before 1980, occasionally induced a drowsiness in me, especially if subjected to it for long stretches at a time. After a few hours listening to his pulsing drone – and occasionally being scolded for interjecting with a question or a request for clarification – I invariably found myself needing a break.

  Often we’d sit in silence, and if it was after six in the evening he’d pour himself a generous tumbler of scotch. He told me he’d never touched a drop until after his heart bypass in 1997, maybe because alcohol made him more apt to make the sort of throwaway comments that revealed more about the real Jimmy Savile than any of his vertiginously tall stories.

  So when did he first realise he had powers? ‘I was in the Isle of Man doing a disc jockey thing in Douglas,’ he replied. ‘And in the hotel I was staying at, because I was the star DJ at the time, the waitress came across and said – er – er – what’s his name now?’ He groped for the name of the hypnotist he claimed had recognised his powers. I knew the name, and reminded him: it was Josef Karma.

  ‘Josef Karma. Yes, he was doing a one-man show at the Royal. So Josef comes over to my table. And I said to him, “That’s a fascinating game is that.” And he said, “You can do what I can’t do Jim.” And I said, “What’s that?” “You can do mass hypnosis. You probably don’t know you’re doing it but you know the effect you’ve got on people. You know what you can do but you don’t know how it comes or what it’s called. You can do mass hypnosis and I can’t.”’

  Savile claimed that Karma had offered to teach him about hypnosis, and they worked together for a few weeks before he started to hypnotise people under his tutor’s guidance. He said he found that he could do it quite easily.

  ‘So when I came back to Leeds after the six weeks, I found …’ he paused for a moment to relight his cigar, ‘a hypnotherapy clinic. They’d get patients in and let me hypnotise them and try to sort them out, and I learned various techniques. I don’t use it very often.’

  He cackled and looked straight out to sea.

  ‘There was one classic occasion in A & E at Leeds General Infirmary. This kid, about 12 years old, was in a cubicle having a massive asthma attack. I knew it weren’t an asthma attack because when he saw me I could see the light of recognition in his eyes. So I went in and said “Hello” and he couldn’t breathe. I gave him the “Eins, zwei, drei in the sky”, and he stopped breathing like that.’ Savile snapped his finger.

  ‘The doctor and staff nurse had the needle and all the gear and the doctor said, “Ah Jim, you’re doing your black magic again. You know we don’t like that.”’

  If he was telling the truth, it illustrated the extent to which he was able to penetrate hospital departments. I knew he volunteered in the casualty department at the hospital in Leeds, but was unaware his duties extended beyond wheeling patients as a porter. What he was telling me he was given a free rein to wander in and out of cubicles, and was free to touch as well as speak to the sick and injured.

  ‘I once found a geezer who was in a car crash,’ he went on. ‘I was in the ambulance and I jumped down and walked out and there was this fella, still in the driving seat. His windscreen had smashed and shards of glass had gone into his eyeball. These shards were sticking out of his eyeball. He was in a bit of a state so I did the “Eins, zwei, drei in the sky” – and I told him to hold still and not close his eyes. The ambulance men came and they said, “Uh, Jimmy Savile!”’

  His voice lowered, and his eyes closed as he recalled how he warned the paramedics of what they were about to see: ‘Shards of glass in the eye, just take him out but don’t say anything to him. I whispered in his ear that he was going to be OK now and that everything would be alright.’

  Despite his appearance and unsettling manner, Jimmy Savile succeeded in soothing the nation into believing that, in his hands, everything would be alright.

  In the months after his former friend’s reputation had been reduced to smoking ruins, Dave Eager phoned me in a state of panic. He told me Savile had sent him to check out the venue in the Isle of Man before signing the contract for the summer season. Eager had met Josef Karma and known of Savile’s interest in hypnosis. He was now terrified that he too had been hypnotised; blinded to what was happening right under his nose.

  34. MORE INSIDIOUS THAN FILTH

  As the 1960s drew to a close, Jimmy Savile could reflect on the heights he’d scaled, the riches he’d accumulated and the view from his newly elevated position within both the BBC and society at large. And yet he cannot have been anything other than acutely aware of the appalling duality of his existence. On the one hand, the plaudits for his charity work and the promotions gained on the back of his audience-winning ability as a broadcaster; on the other, the almost total disregard for the risks to his reputation and the wreckage wrought by his darkest impulses and actions.

  The popularity of his Radio 1 show, Savile’s Travels, and the changes afoot within the station only accelerated the pace of his ascent and frequency of his offending. In February 1969, Douglas Muggeridge, the 40-year-old nephew of Malcolm Muggeridge, the celebrated author and jouranlist who had become an outspoken critic of the permissive age, succeeded Robin Scott as controller of Radios 1 and 2. In his four years as head of Overseas Talks and Features, Douglas Muggeridge had described Bush House as ‘like a mini NATO’,1 with 40 different nationalities working in perfect harmony. According to Johnny Beerling, Muggeridge was ‘much straighter’ than Scott and wanted more ‘public service’ alongside the ‘pop stuff’.2

  ‘I like pop
music,’ insisted Savile’s new boss when news broke of his appointment. ‘I have this sort of sympathy with what it’s trying to do, as part of a social revolution.’3 It did not sound like a glowing endorsement of the infant Radio 1’s raison d’être, although Muggeridge went on to say his plans were to expand on the ‘tremendous success’ of the station – and that would mean further opportunity for one of its biggest stars.

  Savile’s Travels was a vehicle for promoting the brand of Jimmy Savile. It was predicated on constant movement and bringing its host into contact with ordinary people. In doing so, it provided a showcase for his extraordinary lifestyle as he variously got lost up Ben Nevis in a snowstorm while testing camping equipment, ran up the stairs of the Post Office Tower for charity or pushed a 13-year-old girl in a wheelchair the 24 miles from Watford to London to raise money for sick and handicapped children. The format established Jimmy Savile not so much as a man of the people, but the man of the people.

  His world was now viewed through the prisms of publicity and profit. In pursuing seemingly philanthropic goals he still succeeded in advertising how much he was making. No chance was missed. A personal appearance to open a new extension of a Halifax biscuit factory allowed him to broadcast the fact he was donating his fee to charity. ‘I suppose the tax people could be awkward and say that as I did the job, it was my fee,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think they’ll mind. They know it’s difficult for stars to help charity. I don’t get the needle to the taxman – we have a very good relationship.’4