Americans will have a hard time understanding the role Jimmy Savile played in British popular culture for decades. A weird, counter-cultural host for the legendary pop music show, Top Of The Pops, he was a constant presence in the 1970s and on. Think Mr Rogers Meets Liberace Meets Ozzie Osbourne. His flamboyant strangeness then turned into something like holiness as he went on to do relentless charity work, hosting a classic show called “Jim’ll Fix It” – a “Make A Wish” format which was about fulfilling the dying wishes of terminally ill children. He was a friend to almost everyone in the British Establishment of both parties and even a confidant of Princess Diana and Prince Charles, as their marriage unraveled.
But he was also, we now know, a rapist, and molester of unimaginable proportions:
A joint statement by National Health Service executives said there had been “truly awful” episodes dating to 1960, when Mr. Savile began volunteering at the Leeds hospital in northeastern England. Research by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children found that, all told, he abused at least 500 victims, the youngest of them 2 years old … “For some, although the abuse took place decades ago, their experience endures as a painful and upsetting memory that still has an effect on them today,” said Sue Proctor, who headed the inquiry. She called Mr. Savile’s professed interest in the dead “pretty unwholesome,” quoting an unidentified student nurse as saying the entertainer had boasted of performing acts of a sexual nature on corpses.
Yes, he abused the dead as well, and in one of the more troubling incidents in his life, he kept his beloved mother’s corpse in his home for several days, sleeping next to her:
We hadn’t put her away yet and there she was lying around so to me they were good times, they were not the best times. I’d much rather that she hadn’t died but it was inevitable therefore it had to be. Once upon a time I had to share her with a lot of people. We had marvellous times but when she was dead she was all mine, for me. So therefore it finished up right, you understand, and then we buried her.
Savile was reared apparently with little affection by his mother; and he had no long-last relationships. If you want to watch a searing and now chilling long interview with him by Andrew Neil, it’s here. Money section: 6:00 to 9:00. Now we see it all much more plainly. His obsession with secrecy, with never “grassing” on “ladies”, clearly indicated something more than just a desire for some privacy in a man as public as any human in Britain. And then we also have a transcript from a long radio interview he did with a psychiatrist, Anthony Clare. Money quote from that:
The tough thing in life is ultimate freedom, that’s when the battle starts. Ultimate freedom is what it’s all about, because you’ve got to be very strong to stand for ultimate freedom. Ultimate freedom is the big challenge, now I’ve got it, and I can tell you there’s not many of us that have got ultimate freedom. I’ve got some considerable clout as well, all over. That is where the battle, the personal battle starts now. I’ve managed to handle complete and ultimate utter freedom. It’s marvelous but it’s dangerous. It would be easy to be corrupted by many things, when you’ve got ultimate freedom, especially when you’ve got clout. I could be corrupted.
Then you see further public near-confessions like this one:
In retrospect, it’s sitting there in plain sight. What blinded everyone to it? Two things, I’d suggest. He was such an aggressive and relentless do-gooder it seemed almost churlish to question his real intentions. That’s precisely the cover that so many priests had. A regular person who is suspected of malfeasance might be investigated more quickly than someone who has a reputation for good works or morality (Savile was a prominent and practicing Roman Catholic as well as being a charity-booster). It’s the moral authority of such people that paradoxically allows them to get away with evil. Which is why, I suspect, many pedophiles sought refuge in clerical garb.
And then there’s the unchecked cultural power of celebrity itself. It was particularly overwhelming in the era of untrammeled network dominance in television. In Britain, in the era when Savile became famous, there were only three and then four television channels. And television was a national obsession. A figure like Savile had a level of media saturation that turned him effectively into a secular god. His large-than-life persona almost demanded a jocular or fawning attitude toward him – and he garnered countless endorsements from the British Establishment – from Tory grandees to Roman Catholic bishops – that he was able to exploit mercilessly with respect to the vulnerable.
We can get depressed about the state of our fragmented culture today, the collapse of institutional authority and trust. And all these represent real losses, to be sure. But our raucous, multi-faceted de-centralized media does do something to help reduce gigantic figures like Savile down to size; and the deference has mercifully disappeared, rendering a man like him less able to hide his predations. Wider and deeper understanding of sex abuse and its horrors has also made all of us less complacent when faced with the Sanduskys and Saviles that prey on the vulnerable and intimidated.
These are all gains, as my shrink puts it. Even as they scarcely manage to counterbalance the vast and incalculable losses that Savile – and his countless enablers – perpetrated and celebrated for so long.
The Dish 