A self-described expert on human psychology, he liked to say that, through his mental strength and his ability to live without normal human relationships, he had created for himself a life of "total freedom". But Jimmy Savile did have many people with whom he had friendly relations.
They were people from all walks of life. Some would qualify as the great and the good - hospital heads, surgeons, top TV producers. Others, the ones he saw more regularly, were down-to-earth types, uncomplicated Leeds men: a hairdresser, a chemist, a policeman.
We'd featured a few of these in my first documentary. When the time came to try to speak to them again I discovered, perhaps not surprisingly, that many of them felt too confused and embattled to go public. Their association with Savile had been a source of pride while he was alive. Now it had become a source of embarrassment and fear. Those who did speak to us were all in different ways grappling with the aftershocks of the revelation of what Savile did.
I asked if she'd read the reports. No, she said. She'd had no real sense of his private life, though looking back little clues stood out. And she mentioned, when I asked if he'd never shown anything other than a professional interest in her, that she would have been too "walnuttish" for him - a word she'd heard him use.
She was then in her mids. A colleague at Stoke Mandeville had a trove of memorabilia, including pictures, an over-sized last birthday card that was never given to him, and a larger-than-life Jimmy Savile bust made out of Lego, which she kept in the shed. She'd spent the greater part of her working life raising money for Stoke Mandeville's Spinal Injury Unit. All that work was now tarnished and rendered suspect.
She spoke of the upset of feeling that her life's memories were at risk of being lost. And then there was Jimmy Savile's personal assistant, the one he'd jettisoned so unceremoniously. She had worked as Savile's diary-keeper and factotum for more than two decades. By her own account, she organised events, cooked for him, and covered for him when necessary.
When he'd felt lonely on a round-the-world cruise because it was full of Americans, none of whom recognised him, she'd spoken to him on the ship's phone every day to keep his spirits up.
Then, without explanation, he'd sacked her, saying simply: "She's out. Her view of Jimmy Savile had been that he was "asexual". She had read the reports, she told me. But she viewed the incidents described as either trivial "a pat on the bum" as she put it or simply made up. Like the colleague at Stoke Mandeville, her life work had been tainted from its association with Jimmy Savile. Her way of dealing with it was simply to refuse to acknowledge the truth.
Re-entering the world of Savile was like travelling across a landscape ravaged by a hurricane. The survivors were making sense of what happened in different ways, but no one was untouched by what they had lived through. Among those I reached out to were the two girlfriends I'd met in At the time of the revelations, they'd come forward to say that they too had been abused by Savile. It was troubling to realise that I'd spoken to two victims while he was still alive.
I wondered whether, if I'd handled the encounter differently, they might have been able to say more. Those two women still didn't wish to talk publicly about what they had been through but they agreed to have a private meeting with me. They spoke about the rumours of his connections to the underworld. They said that, as much as they wished he could have faced justice, they would have been too afraid to go to the police while he was alive. For many, the easiest shorthand explanation of Jimmy Savile has been that "he hid in plain sight".
This was true in one sense. Savile had played up to an image as a white-haired playboy bachelor. His sartorial style - tracksuits, jewellery, weird hair - was a statement of a kind of perpetual agelessness. He looked a little creepy. He wrote about borderline criminal sexual shenanigans in his autobiography, As It Happens, including a night he spent with a girl who was a runaway from a remand centre. But a big part of his life was a kind of double bluff.
Referring to himself as a "pirate" or a "con man", as he often did, served to reassure those around him that he couldn't really be those things - or at least, not in a way that we should worry about. His need to be seen to have secrets suggested perhaps his secrets weren't worth knowing - that it was simply another bid for attention. In fact, Jimmy Savile's offending took place both in plain view and also out of sight - and it was his blurring the lines that was part of the MO.
Victims who'd been groped and complained were told, that's just Jimmy. Some who were groped with other people near at hand felt unable to protest. They wondered if this was, somehow, permitted. Reading the reports of the assaults, it was clear Savile had an ability to work a room, almost like a stage hypnotist working an audience.
Many of his assaults involved him testing the limits of what he could get away with. He would push the boundaries, starting off in a grey area so that sexual assaults weren't immediately recognised as such. Still others were assaulted away from prying eyes - at his flat, in his caravan. She also referred to Savile's claims that large rings he wore were "made from the glass eyes of dead bodies at the mortuary". For Savile's friends and acquaintances who had no inkling of his darker side and only remembered his acts of charity, all this has been hard to come to terms with.
Roger Ordish, producer of Jim'll Fix It, which ran between and '94, said he never suspected any wrongdoing. When Savile stayed at the Ordish family home one night, they put him in a bedroom next to their year-old daughter. Mrs Ordish said she thought Savile treated every woman the same way - "a very unsophisticated, naive, clumsy way".
He thought he was being gallant. It wasn't gallant. It wasn't seedy. It was just very naive," she said. One of Savile's tactics for keeping his friends in the dark about his private life was to keep them apart. But he had a separate set of friends in his home city of Leeds, with whom he would go running or have weekly meals in the Flying Pizza restaurant. As well as Leeds, he had homes in Scarborough, London, Scotland and Bournemouth and had different groups of friends in different places.
They were his "teams", he called them. In Scarborough, Louis Theroux was let into the flat where Savile's mother had lived, and discovered Savile's continuing attachment to her, 27 years after her death. Savile kept clothes belonging to his mother - whom he dubbed The Duchess - in her wardrobe, just as they had been when she had died. After that documentary, the view many held of Savile shifted from odd to creepy.
One key element of the public Savile persona was that, despite hosting children's TV shows, he hated children. Theroux again managed to get Savile to open up when he asked the star why he insisted that he hated youngsters. Was that because such a reply would stop questions about whether or not he was a paedophile, Theroux asked? I know I'm not, and I can tell you from experience that the easy way of doing it, when they say, all them children on Jim'll Fix It, is to say, yeah, I hate them.
That's the way it goes. And it's worked a dream. A dream. Police forces did have chances to take Savile to court while he was alive - but no charges were ever brought. Savile sexually assaulted the girl again later that night.
Savile did not let go and grabbed her breast so hard that it hurt. While holding her hand tightly Savile put his hand up her skirt inside her knickers and sexually assaulted her, all the time scanning the ward to see if anyone was looking. The woman, who has since died after giving her written statement to investigators, ran off and told a nurse. The nurse looked away and took no notice of her. A year-old boy was groped on ward in while waiting for an x-ray in a dressing gown.
Savile walked over and said, 'Things can't be that bad'. A man aged 28 was also groped while lying on a trolley waiting for an x-ray in BBC star Jimmy Savile 'committed sex acts on dead bodies' while volunteering at hospital.
Follow our live coverage for the latest news on the coronavirus pandemic. Jimmy Savile, the late BBC TV presenter revealed two years ago to have been one of Britain's most prolific sex offenders, might have sexually abused dead bodies in a hospital where he worked as a volunteer, say health investigators.
In , police said Savile, one of the Britain's best-known celebrities in the s and s, had sexually abused hundreds of victims, mainly young people, at hospitals and at BBC premises over six decades until his death aged 84 in Now a series of reports covering 28 hospitals where he worked shows Savile used his fame and charitable work to get unsupervised access to patients, raping and sexually abusing boys, girls, men and women aged between five and 75 in wards, corridors and offices.
Some of the victims were attacked as they lay on hospital trolleys after operations. There are also suggestions that Savile, who had publicly spoken of his fascination with the dead, sexually abused bodies in the mortuary of Leeds General Infirmary in northern England, taking advantage of his role as a volunteer porter. She said Savile, a one-time professional wrestler who became famous as a pioneering DJ in the s, gave the account of his actions at the mortuary to a student nurse who worked at a different hospital.
We do know his interest in the dead was pretty unwholesome and that the controls around access to the mortuary up to the early s were not robust. Two witnesses also told investigators Savile, famed for his long blond hair, penchant for garish outfits, and flashy jewellery, wore rings which he said were made from glass eyes taken from dead bodies at the hospital.
Savile was a frequent visitor at Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital, where he had free rein and a set of keys.
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