by Dan Davies
He was a blur of perpetual motion, and ordered a custom-built motor home to facilitate his criss-crossing of Britain. ‘I want to live the life of a gipsy,’ he proclaimed on unveiling the £6,500 Mercedes Devon Conversions with its large double bed at the back, upholstery in red, gold tassels for looping back the curtains and a stained glass dividing door. It would provide his primary lodgings, and, more importantly, make him more elusive than ever. With its bed and guarantee of privacy, it was a vehicle built for purpose. As he said at the time, ‘There is no end of uses to a motor caravan.’5
‘They never knew where I went,’ he told me of his bosses at the BBC. ‘I used to park it outside Broadcasting House. People couldn’t believe it. For about four years I parked on a piece of dirt around the back of King’s Cross station.’
While the summer of 1969 saw rioting in the streets around the old family home off Burley Road in Leeds, Jimmy Savile was having the time of his life. He became the first civilian to be presented with a Marine Commando Green Beret. Shortly afterwards, he stripped to the waist and cavorted on a float with a 20-year-old carnival queen at the Battle of Flowers parade in Jersey. His mother rode in a car behind, holding aloft a card with the message: ‘I’m watching you Jimmy’.6 If Agnes Savile knew nothing of what her son was up to, their relationship was used to create the impermeable veneer of innocent fun that became his trademark.
In late September, Savile was asked to compère Radio 1’s very first talk show, Speakeasy. Produced by Reverend Roy Trevivian of the BBC’s Religious Broadcasting department, the 45-minute, Saturday afternoon discussion programme was designed, according to the Radio Times, to address ‘what really matters to teenagers today’. As the nation’s oldest teenager, Jimmy Savile would be required to interview experts and guests in between playing hit records and fielding questions from the studio audience of youngsters.
The novelist John Braine was one of the panel guests for an early show that tackled the subject of nudity. In admitting he liked looking at naked women, but still believed that ‘short skirts and transparent blouses were the engines of the devil’,7 Braine epitomised the gulf between the old and young in a society that was in a state of flux. Other topics for shows included teenage marriage, drugs and alcohol.
In October, a Speakeasy on censorship played the controversial record, ‘Je t’aime, moi non plus’ by Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg. The single had been banned by the BBC and described by the Vatican as ‘obscene’. Afterwards, producer Roy Trevivian said he agreed with the ban. Jimmy Savile had different ideas, however. ‘To my mind the words are completely innocent,’ he said. ‘It’s just the heavy breathing that gives rise to certain thoughts.’8
In another programme discussing the issue of birth control, Savile said something that would have stung the girl Alan Leeke knew in Manchester, or the young secretary raped in London: ‘I have never given anyone a kid in my life and I am sure that if I was having it off and the Pope said I had committed a sin by not producing offspring, I would say I’d wait to appear before Our Lord because I don’t think he’d be that unreasonable.’9
Trevivian, a Methodist minister turned Anglican clergyman, was a brilliant but troubled character. ‘He was a quite extraordinary person,’ says Reverend Colin Semper of the man he succeeded as the show’s producer. ‘He was a really dynamic presence in religious broadcasting, but he drank quite a bit.’
An obituary for Trevivian bears this out: ‘The work of a producer-cum-performer perfectly fitted one side of his character, but left the damaged side cruelly exposed,’ it said. ‘The years of total abstinence required of him by Methodism were more than made up for in Broadcasting House bars.’10
Despite Trevivian’s drinking and bouts of melancholy, Speakeasy quickly built a reputation for attracting high-profile guests. In the build-up to the 1970 general election, Defence Minister Denis Healey and Conservative party chairman Anthony Barber both appeared in a bid to appeal to young voters. In January 1971, Enoch Powell faced Jimmy Savile’s inimitable brand of questioning: ‘Now Enoch, what do you think about the permissive society at the moment?’. ‘Now Enoch, you’ve got two lovely girls and well, if they’d been lads instead of girls, what do you think about pre-marital sex?’
Bosses at the BBC were won over by Jimmy Savile’s ability to act as a bridge between generations and social classes. So much so that he was the controversial choice to present a BBC2 show, Ten Years of What?, that looked back on the 1960s. And rather than falling flat, as some critics within the BBC predicted, he earned fresh acclaim for the way he approached interviews with heavyweights such as Cardinal Heenan, the Archbishop of Westminster, Enoch Powell, Malcolm Muggeridge and Arnold Schlesinger, former aide to President Kennedy.
As a profile piece in the respected magazine the Listener later suggested, ‘The way he conducted himself in BBC TV’s review of the decade … persuaded many of those within television, who had dismissed him as a mere fairground huckster, that he had a keen understanding of current affairs; and in Speakeasy, his capacity to grasp the most esoteric of subjects and conduct discussions with some high-powered intellects betokens an active brain under the cloth and bells’.11
In August 1970, Jimmy Savile was invited by the BBC to sit on watchdog panels that advised on programmes and policy. ‘I’m very pleased about it,’ he said. ‘The governors realise that even though I have straw on the outside of my head, it doesn’t mean there’s straw inside it too.’12
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That same summer, Jill (not her real name) was a newly married 19-year-old living in Brighton. She told me about one day receiving an unexpected visit from a man driving a Rolls-Royce. The man told her he was Jimmy Savile’s chauffeur, and his boss, who was making a personal appearance at Worthing Town Hall, wanted to meet her. Jill had been a member of Savile’s fan club and had written to the disc jockey two years earlier.13 She agreed to go.
When Savile spotted her, she said, he put his arm round her waist and frogmarched her to his motor caravan, locking the door behind them once she was inside. ‘He was standing up, and it was weird. He said to me, “Oh you’re a beautiful little dolly bird” and I just sat there and thought, “Is this a compliment?” I wasn’t sure. He said, “I’d like to lock you up in my cupboard and take you with me everywhere I go”, and I sort of just looked at him and thought, “What is happening here?” Then he said, “I could buy the house next door to your house and I’d be very happy.” He kept saying, “I’m the strongest man in England” and I remember I just looked at him and thought, “This guy’s a nutter.” Then it happened so fast; he was on top of me. I was back on the bed and Jimmy Savile was on top of me. It was literally a fight. He was trying to rape me.’
‘He shoved my hand in his trousers. He had an erection,’ she says. His hands, meanwhile, were exploring under her skirt. According to Jill, Savile demanded to know whether she was on the pill. When she replied she was not, he got angry and shouted, ‘Why not?’14
After twenty minutes of struggle, Jill managed to pull herself free. As she headed for the door, Savile asked whether she wanted to be a dancer on Top of the Pops and said she could take something from the motor caravan as a souvenir. She took a small crucifix with a deer at the foot. She still had it when she reported the attack to Sussex Police in 2007, and when she recounted her story for a second time to a Crown Prosecution lawyer in 2012.15
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‘Such an ectoplasm exists around [Savile],’ wrote Philip Norman in the Guardian in the summer of 1971, ‘that it has become difficult to perceive the actual man at all … He and the BBC are now one, and what a beast with two backs and several wigs that makes.’16
Norman’s tirade broadened into a wider attack on what he saw as the insidious effect of Radio 1 on the nation’s intellectual health: ‘Savile and Young and Blackburn – how like the names on a death roll they sound – are in fact part of a life that will not change: a power stronger than government, more insidious than filth, and as permanent as the Inland Revenue.’
/> Although he was never able to laugh at himself – the wilfully bizarre appearance, the nonsensical catchphrases and the espousing of bizarre philosophies on life were all protective layers, and ones he managed – Jimmy Savile could afford to let such criticisms ride. The truth is that his burnished reputation, one that he had fashioned himself as an everyman saint, was now blinding all but his victims and those, like Norman, who were repelled by his very being.
And how appropriate that this elevation should be celebrated in the first month of the new decade with an appearance on This is Your Life, after Eamonn Andrews surprised him by stepping out of an inspection parade of Royal Marines.
Jimmy Savile had discovered that people would do pretty much anything for him because of what he did for charity. ‘People leap about, yes they do, they leap about if I want something,’ he confessed.17 On a wheelchair push from Rochester to Bromley in Kent, he revealed that he wrote to the organiser with his now customary demands: ‘Find me a blonde teenage bird who lives in a house with a drive so that I can park outside so she can wake me in the morning with tea at eight o’clock.’ ‘They leapt about,’ he said. And in the morning? ‘Knock, knock.’
Charles Hullighan, head porter at Leeds General Infirmary, enthused in a newspaper interview about Savile’s work at the hospital. ‘At present most of Jimmy’s work is in Casualty,’ he said. ‘He arrives at midday and stays till five the following morning. Sometimes he comes and works on the busiest nights in Casualty – Saturdays. Sometimes he goes on ambulance duty.
‘If you really want to know what Jimmy gets out of working in the Infirmary,’ added Hullighan, ‘I think it is for the relaxation of meeting people. People are his life. You have to see him handling them to realise how deeply he is involved.’18
What Hullighan got out of it is another matter entirely. In 1972, he was made company secretary of the firm that dealt with Jimmy Savile’s earnings. He was paid a monthly salary and contributions towards a pension, sums that enabled him to own homes in Leeds and Scarborough. Exactly what he earned is not known, but the Telegraph reported that in 1981 he shared in directors’ pay of £91,500, the equivalent of more than £300,000 today.19
At Broadmoor, Jimmy Savile had awarded himself the title of ‘Honorary Assistant Entertainments Officer’. He began organising concerts on Thursday evenings and a regular disco night. ‘I am the hospital’s contact with show business,’ he explained of his role. ‘I don’t work at Broadmoor as I do in Leeds Infirmary. It is not that sort of place. But I have access to all the wings and I visit to talk to patients. Chat, as you know, is a form of therapy, so I can be of help.’20 The same method was working at Britain’s highest security mental hospital.
In March 1971, soon after accepting a Carl-Alan disc jockey of the year award from Prince Charles, Jimmy Savile set out on his greatest physical test to date: an 876-mile walk from John O’Groats to Land’s End. His Savile’s Travels motor caravan followed behind, the driving shared by the Manchester taxi driver he had bought his first Rolls-Royce from, a young businessman from Hull, his brother Vince and the transport manager from Broadmoor Hospital, another hospital employee who had been sucked in and who, like others, would be named as a beneficiary in his will.
Thirty-one days later, a 33-strong Royal Marines band, helicopters and a crowd of hundreds joined him for the last two miles of his epic trek. ‘A fantastic fact is that I’ve never been alone for one hour since leaving John O’Groats,’ he wrote in his newspaper column the next week. ‘I’ve wheeled cripples along in wheelchairs who didn’t want to be left out … I’ve pushed prams with assorted babies in. I’ve slowed down to a shuffle with a 90-year-old lady gripping my arm and sped fleet-footed downhill … with an entire youth club tailing out behind like Halley’s Comet.’21
Walking among his flock, shepherd’s staff in hand, Jimmy Savile’s conviction that he was a ‘chosen one’ had transmogrified into something altogether more terrifying. A self-appointed Messiah figure was now among us.
PART FOUR
35. YOUNG CRUMPET THAT WOULD KNOCK YOUR EYES OUT
After completing his length-of-Britain walk, Jimmy Savile rewarded himself with a short break before starting work on Savile’s Yorkshire Travels, a new television series for BBC North. More likely is that he was lying low after the body of 15-year-old Claire McAlpine was discovered by her mother, on the floor, next to her bed in the family home on Bushey Hill Lane, Watford. Empty sleeping pill bottles and a red leatherette diary with a tiny lock and key were found nearby.
The girl’s mother, Vera McAlpine, claimed the diary revealed her adopted daughter had been having sex with BBC disc jockeys she met through Top of the Pops after appearing as one of the show’s dancing ‘dolly birds’ under the stage name Samantha Claire.
As the News of the World reported, ‘The diary told of one radio disc jockey who took Samantha to his home for the night and gave her a pill which made her feel she was “floating on a cloud” It told of another DJ who asked the teenager back to his sumptuously furnished home and about whom passages in the diary so shocked her mother that she immediately contacted the BBC.’1
Claire McAlpine’s suicide was the second controversy to hit the show in a short space of time. Since 14 February 1971, the BBC had been reeling from seven consecutive weeks of stories published by the News of the World. They were exposés that promised to lift ‘the lid off the BBC and the glamorous world of the disc-jockey’.2 Payola – cash payments to obtain plugs for records and appearances of bands on TV shows – was the first scandal. It was one that the BBC hoped would die down after it launched a half-hearted investigation into bribery and made a token dismissal or two. It was wrong.
The revelations contained damaging details on the use of call girls and sex parties as inducements to ‘well known BBC celebrities’, the deceit of producers and DJs in pushing records in which they had a financial interest, the rigging of the pop charts and female record pluggers ‘working on a bed-for-plugs basis’.
‘There are only two ways to get air-play … money and sex,’ claimed one promotions man in the first instalment of the paper’s sensational scoop. And with the BBC enjoying a monopoly on airplay for pop music in the post-pirate era, the result was ‘a Klondike-style rush from the record industry’.
If payola was the name given to the scandal that engulfed the BBC, the five-month investigation by a team of the News of the World’s reporters went a good deal further than the murky practices involved with promoting new records.
Jimmy Savile managed to stay out of the story, other than for a quote he gave in early January when the allegations first surfaced: ‘Pluggers and payola people never bother me,’ he said. ‘What could they give me that I haven’t got already?’3 It was true that Savile’s Travels was not regarded as a prime target for the pluggers; at the Tuesday morning ‘surgeries’ in the Radio 1 Club offices on the fourth floor of Egton House, the holy grail was getting records approved by the producers of shows presented by Tony Blackburn, Tony Brandon, Dave Lee Travis, Terry Wogan and Jimmy Young.
More pertinently, Jimmy Savile was not someone who particularly liked his fellow disc jockeys. He was therefore unlikely to have been caught rolling around the floor with them in a potfuelled orgy at a plugger’s flat.
Things became more uncomfortable, however, when the investigation moved on to Top of the Pops, and specifically the activities of one of Savile’s good friends, the show’s in-house photographer Harry Goodwin. The pair had known each other since before the programme’s launch, from their days of knocking around together with Bill Benny in Manchester. ‘We had the best of times; we were very close and loved arguing the point together,’ Goodwin recalled many years later. ‘We would argue about who was the better with women.’
Undercover reporters listened in as Goodwin boasted of taking pornographic pictures of young girls on Top of the Pops and showing ‘blue movies’ in his locked dressing room for production staff. When an ‘internationally famous British male sta
r’ offered to buy one of the films, Goodwin refused, saying, ‘You are not having it because – [another famous TV star] is one of my best customers and he has not seen this yet. He will go mad when he sees this.’4
Goodwin claimed he was ‘shopped’ and went on to relate how three CID officers and a security officer at the BBC ‘inquired into the matter’. He said, ‘They went through every locker – they were all wrenched open – and they never found nothing.’ More telling is that he admitted he was tipped off ‘by friends’.5
Stanley Dorfman confirms that Top of the Pops had been the subject of a police investigation in the late 1960s after allegations were made that underage girls were being exploited in the dressing rooms before and after shows. ‘There was a rumour,’ he explained before admitting members of staff were interviewed.6 ‘The police came to inquire and we had them in the office for a week,’ he says. ‘Nothing came of it and they went away.’
In Goodwin’s taped conversation with the News of the World, he talked of girls in the studio audience posing for ‘porny’ photographs, and recounted a liaison between a male member of a pop group and a girl dancer. ‘The people who see that show don’t know what’s happened [behind the scenes],’ he bragged to the undercover reporter. ‘I think they should start the cameras in the dressing rooms.’ Less than two weeks after the story ran, Claire McAlpine was dead.
Vera McAlpine told the News of the World how she had read Claire’s diary a month before her daughter took her own life. She had been horrified to discover entries containing accounts of Claire spending the night with two BBC DJs, one with a show on Radio 1 and the other a presenter on Top of the Pops, and had banned her daughter from ever appearing on the show again. Of the Top of the Pops presenter mentioned in the diary entries, she said, ‘Some of the passages were so shocking that I would rather not repeat them … But the police know what they said.’