In 2006, I took the lift to the penthouse of a pale modernist block on Roundhay Park in Leeds to listen to Jimmy Savile. The reason was the end of Top of the Pops. I didn’t know then, of course, that he only became a TV star to have access to children’s bodies; that paedophilia was his vocation, and fame was his enabler and disguise. I had heard the rumours. Lynn Barber told him in 1990 that people said he liked (she meant used) little girls. I didn’t believe it. I was credulous, and he deceived me.
The flat was thickly carpeted, and fusty. I admired his trinkets. I wrote that they blinded me. I noted he appeared to live on sweets. He recited his patter for the Dictaphone. I had heard it all before: pit boy, youngest of seven, then a terrible mining accident, then a glance at a Rolls Royce that changed everything. “And I was filled with a great joy because from where I was standing to where that kid was driving [the Rolls Royce] was only 25 feet. It was there. It wasn’t far to go. It had to be possible.” The patter was his first defence, because it was indecipherable, like smoke. Here is an example: “I don’t do anything for any reason. I do it because I do it. I do what I do and always have done. Just don’t offend nobody. So there.”
We spent a lot of time discussing why he didn’t marry. “You get trapped,” he told me. “You never get anywhere, and you are quite happy to wake up, open your gob, stick food in, close your gob and then die and leave everybody everything. I don’t want to get used to that kind of life because the life I’ve got is much better than that.”
He also said, “I fell in love with them all. I fall in love every day, even now.” He said he had 60 million friends, which, of course, means he had none. “I owe them nothing,” he said, “they owe me nothing.” He had enablers though, among whom I now count myself.
I have since read Dan Davies’s superb In Plain Sight, in which he recounts following Savile for years, trying to understand him. (No one would publish it in Savile’s lifetime.) Davies says that policemen came to the flat each week to drink coffee. Of all the institutions that protected Savile, the police, the NHS, and the BBC were the guiltiest because they knew. They received letters from his victims. One 12-year-old, raped in a hospital day room, wrote a note to doctors on the page of a bible after a nurse told her to keep quiet.
The BBC is no longer protecting him, but they are still selling him. No crime is exempt from the possibilities of mediocre art. They have commissioned a drama called The Reckoning starring Steve Coogan, whose best work until now has been the DJ Alan Partridge. Coogan is an uneasy man who has used prostitutes, but he is not stupid, and his inhabiting Savile is obviously an act of self-exploration and, perhaps, self-hating vanity. Some of Savile’s victims were invited to the set to meet Coogan in costume. The Reckoning’s writer, Neil McKay, who also dramatised Fred West in Appropriate Adult, said: “They wanted to do it, they’re fully prepared, so it will be interesting.”
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