Jimmy Savile accused in ITV documentary

bb1 wrote:Maybe because he had so many hanging around, giving every impression of thinking he was sex on legs, he assumed that every young girl he came across felt the same way about him? Which they clearly didn't.

BBC Entertainment & Arts
18 October 2012 Last updated at 11:48
Jimmy Savile: The modern Jekyll & Hyde

Jimmy Savile's abuse has only come to light since his death last October

Millions knew Jimmy Savile as an eccentric TV personality. To some, he was Saint Jimmy, who changed lives by raising £40m for charity. But after dozens of allegations of serious sexual abuse, it has transpired that few people knew the real Jimmy Savile.

What his fans and many friends did not know was that he was also, as police put it, a "predatory sex offender" who preyed on vulnerable under-age girls and boys in dressing rooms, his caravan and his Rolls Royce.

Savile once famously said he had no emotions.

"That would make me bad news for a psychiatrist or a psychologist because there's nothing to find," he told Dr Anthony Clare in BBC Radio's In the Psychiatrist's Chair in 1991. "What you see is what there is."

But that was the carefully constructed Savile myth. It ensured very few people ever really got close to him, or knew the truth about what made him tick.

The public persona portrayed him as eccentric and flamboyant, but essentially straight-forward and good-natured.

The mask rarely slipped during his lifetime, and it helped him deflect accusations of anything more sinister. He would attract speculation because he was odd, he would say - but that was all he was.

"It's a nice thing that I have nothing to hide from people," he told a documentary titled The World of Jimmy Savile OBE in 1972.

"They ask me, are you queer? I say no, but if I felt that way I would have been. They ask me, why don't you get married? I say, well I've never felt the need.

"I've got nothing to hide from people and when you come to think about it I lead a dead simple sort of life, which is OK, and definitely enough for me."

But in one rare moment of candour, he was asked by the interviewer Louis Theroux in 2000 why he had said he had no emotions.

"'Cause it's easier," he replied. "You say you've got loads and then you've got to explain them for two hours. The truth is that I'm very good at masking them."

Savile, one of seven children and the son of a bookmakers' clerk, had survived serious spinal injuries while working in a coal mine as a teenager before becoming a dance hall DJ and manager after World War II.

His clubs included Mecca Locarno club in Leeds in the early 1960s. Post-war austerity was being blown away and Savile claimed to be the first person to DJ with two turntables so there were no breaks between records.

Jeffrey Collins, a DJ at the club, says: "Yes, it was common knowledge that he would take girls into his office.

"It was usually the girls that would come on to the guys. You wouldn't think of asking 'Are you 16 yet?'

"Obviously Jimmy was older. He should have asked questions. He should have asked their age if they were under 16. I'm not saying it was right."

Dennis Lemmon, who worked as a bouncer at the club, says Savile gained a reputation for liking younger girls.

"You'd get a group of 15- and 16-year-olds who'd sit together and Jimmy always seemed to concentrate on these groups instead of the older ones," he tells the BBC.

I heard through his office, just in conversation, 'Jimmy's at it again'”

Roger Holt
Former record plugger
"We'd chat anything up with a skirt on in those days but Jimmy seemed to make for these younger groups."

One day, when Savile arrived in a bad mood, Lemmon asked a colleague what was wrong. He was told Savile was due in court the following day after "messing about with a couple of girls".

When Lemmon later asked how the case had turned out, his colleague told him: "It never got to court - they dropped the charges."

"I said 'How the hell did he wangle that one?'" Lemmon continues. "He said 'He did what he did last time - he paid them off.'"

If the case had gone to court and Savile found guilty, Lemmon reflects, "it would have nipped all this in the bud".

So how did he get away with it? "He was a very powerful man, wasn't he?" Lemmon replies. "A very powerful man with a lot of influence."

Even at the start of his career, his forceful personality was fully formed and he claimed to have the muscle to back it up.

Savile told Louis Theroux that during his club days, he "invented zero tolerance" and was "judge, jury and executioner" when he locked trouble-makers in the club basement.

Lemmon does not remember it that way and says Savile "wasn't a physical type of bloke at all".

But he does recall Savile asking him to accompany him around the dancefloor in case someone threw a punch. He was not to be messed with.

The aura remained as Savile became more famous and influential. He later boasted of friendships with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Prince Charles.

Even if he held no influence over his friends in high places, it is not difficult to see how a young girl could have believed that her word may have counted for less than his.

And yet, for many of Savile's friends and acquaintances, the recent revelations are harder to deal with because Savile could also show great kindness.

Lemmon recounts how the star spoke to his son when he was dying of leukaemia in the 1980s after recognising the surname on a hospital ward.

"He said to Russell, are you a relative of Dennis Lemmon? He went in and chatted for half an hour and our Russell thought the world of him. Jimmy hadn't seen me for 20 years but he remembered the name. That's his good side."

After the clubs, Savile went on to become a familiar presence on Radio Luxembourg, Radio 1 and BBC TV, with hit shows including Top of the Pops and Jim'll Fix It.

Savile insisted that he "hated" the children on shows like Jim'll Fix It as a way of deflecting rumours.

Weighed down with jewellery and with cigar in hand, the tracksuit-wearing, platinum-haired showman cultivated a reputation as a larger-than-life celebrity.

In recent weeks, figures from the music industry and TV world have claimed to have heard rumours about Savile's behaviour, but without seeing any evidence.

Roger Holt, a former record plugger who would visit the Radio 1 offices every week in the 1960s, says Savile's predilection for young girls was "an open secret".

"I heard through his office, just in conversation, 'Jimmy's at it again,'" he says. "He used to travel the country with his colleagues at the BBC [who would say] 'Oh he gets these young girls in his Rolls or the caravan when he was travelling around.'

"They'd just say 'Oh he's after these young girls.' It was an open secret in the record industry."

Savile would not socialise like other DJs, Holt recalls.

"He was just a very strange person. You couldn't really have a conversation with him. I used to see him at Top of the Pops and didn't talk to him unless I had to go to his dressing room.

"When I had to go to his dressing room the last time I was there, there weren't any young girls in there - there were a lot of his mates who I thought were as weird as he was. There was definitely a clique in that dressing room."

Some suspicions have centred on Savile's activities in his caravan while on the road with a Radio 1 show called Savile's Travels.

In 1973, Radio 1 controller Douglas Muggeridge asked the station's press officer Rodney Collins to check whether any newspapers were planning to print rumours about his exploits.

"There were allegations that there were girls, underage girls involved, maybe, in the caravan," Mr Collins tells the BBC.

He reported back that the papers had "heard these allegations" but were unwilling to print them "whether they were true or not" because Savile did a lot for charity and was "perceived as a very popular man".

Savile's autobiography had a photo of his mother on the back cover
Savile persuaded the tabloids not to run stories by telling them they would be responsible for the end of his charity fund-raising, according to broadcaster Paul Gambaccini.

Savile was said to have raised £40m for charities and it was an effective form of emotional blackmail.

His caravan was mentioned again when Savile appeared on TV panel show Have I Got News For You in 1999. Panel member Ian Hislop asked him what he did in the caravan.

"Anybody I can lay my hands on," Savile replied, letting his guard down for the sake of an apparent smutty joke, and getting loud applause from the audience in response.

Jim'll Fix It was Savile's most successful TV show, running for almost 20 years between 1975 and '94. But the show's producer Roger Ordish 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 14-year-old daughter. "We, in our innocence, had no idea," Roger Ordish's wife Susie says.

Mrs Ordish says Savile treated every woman the same way - "a very unsophisticated, naive, clumsy way".

"He would kiss every woman's hand. He thought he was being gallant. It wasn't gallant. It wasn't seedy. It was just very naive. There was no depth to him," she says.

"Because of his clumsiness with women, which was not in the least sexual, I thought he was one of those asexual people."

Savile had access to several hospitals through his role as a volunteer
Despite her shock at the recent revelations, Mrs Ordish, too, has tales of Savile's good side. When her mother went into hospital for a serious operation, he sent flowers and phoned the hospital to let the nurses know he was a friend, in the knowledge that they would make a fuss of her as a result.

"He could be very kind and his acts of charity were not always for publicity," Mrs Ordish says.

One of Savile's tactics for keeping his friends in the dark about his private life was to keep them apart.

Many fellow DJs, with whom he worked on BBC Radio 1 for decades, admitted that they barely knew the man at all. But it transpired that 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 rooms at Stoke Mandeville hospital in Buckinghamshire and Broadmoor in Berkshire.

He 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 - who he dubbed The Duchess - in her wardrobe, just as they had been when she had died.


Film-maker Louis Theroux gained some insight into the real Jimmy Savile in his 2000 documentary
Savile also revealed other foibles, like the fact that he only took a single pair of underpants away with him, which he washed in the sink every night. 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.

"I think he was always slightly defensive," Roger Ordish told BBC Radio 4 last year. "In interviews, I felt he was saying 'you're not going to catch me out' when the interviewer wasn't wanting to catch him out."

Savile's defensiveness was telling. Theroux again managed to get Savile to open up when he asked the star why he insisted that he hated youngsters.

"We live in a very funny world and it's easier for me as a single man to say I don't like children because that puts a lot of salacious tabloid people off the hunt," he replied.

Was that because such a reply would stop questions about whether or not he was a paedophile, Theroux asked?

"How do they know whether I am or not?" Savile said. "How does anybody know whether I am?

"Nobody knows whether I am or not. 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 my policy. That's the way it goes. And it's worked a dream. A dream."

New 'Victim' Claims Savile Abused Her At 15
Sky News – 55 minutes ago

Another woman has come forward and claimed she regularly had sex with Jimmy Savile at his flat in Salford when she was just 15 years old.
The alleged victim said she met the BBC DJ at a disco in Manchester in 1966 and he invited her to his flat in Higher Broughton.
The woman, now aged 62 and from Wythenshawe, south Manchester, said on one occasion she recalled Savile being disappointed because she had changed out of her school uniform.
She said: "To hear him still described as Sir Jimmy Savile and still celebrated for his charity work is a slap in the face to those of us he used.
"I was 15 when we started, but 15 in 1966 was probably like nine today. I had a flat chest and was only starting puberty.
"By the time I turned 18 and was more like a woman, he lost interest and denied even knowing me."
Police believe the veteran DJ, TV presenter and charity campaigner may have abused up to 60 victims over six decades.
It came after Twitter users led speculation over the identity of another BBC presenter who has been accused of sexual misconduct.
The person was alluded to as "Uncle Dick" in an autobiography published in 1999 by the BBC World Affairs Editor John Simpson.
Mr Simpson said he discovered the claims when he was writing an obituary of the presenter, who died in 1967. He did not name the man.
The veteran journalist says he informed his then boss about the allegations and claimed he was told to keep quiet about it.
He wrote in Strange Places, Questionable People: "Week after week, children from all over the country would win competitions to visit the BBC and meet Uncle Dick.
"He would welcome them, show them around, give them lunch, then take them to the gents and interfere with them.
"If parents complained, the Director-General's office would write saying the nation wouldn't understand such an accusation against a much-loved figure."
The family of radio presenter Derek McCulloch - known as Uncle Mac and the voice of Larry the Lamb in Toytown - said claims circulating that he was the individual being referred to were "complete rubbish". ******
McCulloch's Wikipedia page has been blocked for editing and the episode of Desert Island Discs in which he spoke to Roy Plomley about which music he would choose to have with him if stranded on a desert island is not currently available on the internet.

THE TIMES UK
Leaked Jimmy Savile email puts BBC's defence in doubt
BY: BEN WEBSTER From: The Times October 19, 2012 10:31AM

THE BBC's stated reason for cancelling a Newsnight investigation into sexual abuse by Jimmy Savile has been cast into doubt by a leaked internal email seen by The Times.

Disclosure of the email will increase suspicions that the Newsnight report was dropped last December because the BBC feared that it would clash with planned Christmas tributes to one of its biggest stars.

The email, dated December 7, reveals that Newsnight journalists had been "focusing on allegations of abuse" and not, as subsequently claimed by the BBC, on an alleged failure by police to investigate Savile properly.

A senior BBC News press officer wroted the email, which also reveals that the Newsnight investigation was so well advanced by December 7 that the press office was preparing "lines to take" to respond to questions after its planned broadcast.

It shows that the BBC was aware of the risk that the report would raise questions about why it had failed to expose Savile as a paedophile while he was alive.

The press officer writes that "we may well need to do a bit of managing around this" and that "we should bear in mind how BBC complaints team respond".

The email casts doubt on the explanation for cancelling the Newsnight report given by George Entwistle, the director-general, and other senior senior figures at the corporation.

In an email to staff on October 5, Mr Entwistle wrote: "As is now well known, the BBC Newsnight programme investigated Surrey Police's enquiry into Jimmy Savile towards the end of 2011 but decided not to go ahead with the broadcast. The decision was made honestly and honourably."

Mr Entwistle sent that email two days after ITV had broadcast a documentary containing much of the same evidence gathered by the BBC.

On October 4, David Jordan, the BBC's director of editorial policy and standards, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that Newsnight had been investigating a "particular aspect" that it had been unable to substantiate.

He said: "What they were looking at specifically was allegations that had been made to Surrey Police in 2007 and they had themselves received an allegation that the investigation conducted by Surrey Police in some way hadn't been done properly. They looked into that allegation and actually it turned out not to be true."

The BBC began briefing in January that it had dropped the Newsnight report because it had been investigating "alleged failings within the CPS" but had found no proof of any such failings.

Peter Rippon, the editor of Newsnight, wrote a blog on October 2 defending his decision to drop the story. It stated: "I decided we should pursue the story because of the nature of the allegations and because the key witness told us the police had investigated the claims but the case had been dropped on the grounds he was too old."

Mr Rippon claimed that the story his journalists had been pursuing had been "weakened from a Newsnight perspective" because they had been unable to establish any "institutional failure" by the police or the Crown Prosecution Service.

He also said: "Newsnight is not normally interested in celebrity expose." However, well-placed BBC sources said that the Newsnight team had been focusing for several weeks on exposing Savile as a paedophile and had gathered 10 alleged victims and witnesses.

The sources claimed that at a very late stage, days before transmission, Mr Rippon had introduced a new condition that the report would have to meet if it were to be broadcast. He insisted that his journalists substantiate an allegation by a woman they had interviewed that the police or CPS had dropped the investigation into Savile only on the ground of his age. When the CPS responded that Savile had not been charged because of lack of evidence, this was used by Mr Rippon to justify dropping the story.

The Newsnight journalists were furious because they knew that they had gathered far more evidence than had been considered by the CPS in 2007. Surrey Police said that it had investigated an allegation from one woman.

Rob Wilson, the Conservative MP for Reading East, who obtained the email, said: "Mr Rippon and the BBC have sought to portray that the axed Newsnight report was not an expose of Savile, but was focused on the reasons the police and the CPS dropped their investigation.

"This leaked email and the evidence from internal BBC sources casts doubt on the carefully crafted version of events posted in Peter Rippon's blog.

"We need a full explanation of why the focus of the Newsnight expose of Jimmy Savile was abruptly changed at the last minute.

"If the suspicions of a management cover-up are to be dispelled, the independent Pollard review must make clear the circumstances surrounding the Newsnight editor's sudden and late change of heart."

Mr Rippon is expected to be interviewed by Nick Pollard, the former head of Sky News appointed by the BBC to investigate whether there were "any failings in the BBC's management of the Newsnight investigation".

Mr Pollard will also look at whether the BBC should have disclosed to police the evidence it had gathered against Savile but refused to broadcast.

A BBC spokesman said that the press officer who wrote the email was away and could not be contacted, adding: "We will pick this up as soon as we can in the morning."

The 'victims' owe it to others who were abused as children to TELL THE POLICE, NOT NEWS INTERNATIONAL.

Lamplighter wrote:

The 'victims' owe it to others who were abused as children to TELL THE POLICE, NOT NEWS INTERNATIONAL.

Totally agree, but there is no fame or fortune to be made from telling the police, is there? LL

bb1 wrote:Which is a world away from preying on children in residential care, as has been alleged he was doing.

THAT is what needs to be investigated, not ancient tales from repentant groupies.