Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television

‘Well, yet again we are destined to speak by machine,’ said the message in familiar northern tones. ‘Greetings from the Glen. The mountains are high, the snow is good and everybody is huddling together, which is very social, to stay warm and not freezing, and it’s woooooonderful, and you’re down there in that sub-tropic south where nothing means anything – up here everything means something and it’s ten to ten and it’s Wednesday morning and of course we will speak together eye to eye, face to face, or whatever probably before the next millennium, but who knows?’ Beeep!

I listened again, copying it into my notebook, wondering whether it might add something to the book-thing I was supposed to be working on and not thinking too much whether he was still a subject or something more like a friend.

The first contacts with Jimmy that were not strictly journalistic had begun around the time we were called upon to promote the original documentary. We’d done a couple of interviews at a hotel in King’s Cross. After that there was a trip up to Leeds for some more publicity for another project or to record some DVD extras – the exact sequence is hard to piece together now. In a box of material from that time I have some cuttings, dated April 2001, that resulted from our joint publicity efforts for a DVD release of the Best of Weird Weekends – two cover stories from colour supplements, the Glasgow Sunday Herald and the Yorkshire Post, featuring photos of me and Jimmy. One says: ‘Ows about that, then! It’s the Jimmy and Louis show’. The other: ‘The Odd Couple: How Jimmy and Louis got Fixed up’. And so, without quite realizing it, I entered into a strange, mutually parasitic quasi-friendship, quasi-deep-cover investigation into his dark side.

The exact nature of the quasi-whatever-it-was is hard to parse in hindsight. The view is too clouded by the revelations. Certainly he was using us for a sense of relevance, and possibly with the hope of doing further projects. But it’s also probably the case that he enjoyed my company – and Will’s, since we always saw him together. And on our side there was also a mixture of impulses: using him for publicity; later, for material for a possible book that might attempt to fathom the riddle of who he really was; for the strangeness and diversion of the experience – of having a story to tell.

In a way it was all an after-effect of his being on board with the film. From that moment, all sorts of other decisions flowed, to do with a feeling of having him in our corner, a deployable ageing celebrity, a satisfied profilee, who came packaged with his own unintended irony built in. ‘My friend, the weird and slightly creepy ageing DJ Jimmy Savile.’ It made good copy, whether or not it was strictly true.

Jimmy naturally enjoyed the interest in him stemming from the documentary, and when it led to me doing further celebrity profiles, he began taking on a kind of protective interest in my work. After the profile of Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee, he called to complain: ‘You are a Formula One car. You never got out of bleedin’ first gear.’ He was also troubled by a conversation I’d had with Debbie about her reproductive choices in which I’d mentioned that she’d never had children and that perhaps that was one of the reasons she had kept her svelte figure. ‘A gentleman does not fucking ask a lady why she has not had children,’ he told me with some heat, albeit erroneously, given that I hadn’t in fact asked that question.

Drumming up publicity with Jimmy Savile.

The success of When Louis Met Jimmy, followed by series three of Weird Weekends and then the Paul and Debbie film, meant my stock was rising and I don’t doubt that this also factored into Jimmy’s thinking. He viewed himself as a co-author of my success. Thanks to him I’d been catapulted from the niche confines of chronicler of weirdness into mainstream visibility.

At the beginning of 2001, I signed a contract for a book. It was to be a kind of celebrity diary detailing my star-studded encounters, the glamorous social carousel of a young TV presenter making the scene.

I had been ambivalent about the idea of writing a book, for various reasons, not the least of them being that I wanted to focus my time and energy on TV. But I had a romantic attachment to the notion of being an author, and the idea of a diary forestalled some of my fears about not having much time to write. I figured it meant I didn’t have to think of an actual idea, I just had to keep a journal.

The only trouble with this scenario was that I didn’t lead a glamorous existence, nor did I make the scene on any regular basis – my life was pretty boring. I had a new girlfriend by this time and of a night she and I would stay in and watch repeats of The Larry Sanders Show or sometimes go out for meals in restaurants close to her flat in west London. Other than that, I worked. And so my celebrity diary was thin on material. I attempted to remedy this by writing descriptions of the off-camera dimension of the production – the celebrities we were approaching and for the most part being rejected by, the little bits of shooting we were doing – but this had its limitations. How much detail does anybody want or need about the process of booking talent for a TV show? ‘People want to know what goes on behind the scenes,’ the editors said. But the whole notion of my documentaries had been, insofar as possible, to broaden the frame enough so that all the interesting stuff took place on camera. The in-office stuff largely took the form of: ‘We heard back from Noel Edmonds. It’s a no, I’m afraid.’

I diligently kept the diary all the same, sometimes with the feeling of writing something interesting, just as often with a sense of attempting to subsist on my own effluent like a one-man human centipede, my lips sewn tight around my own sphincter. The idea of the diary went in and out of focus. At times it felt like a dumping ground for my worst insecurities. Since some of these were to do with the idea of doing the diary, a lot of the writing was a kind of feedback loop of anger and anxiety directed at my editor and at the book itself – which is pretty weird when you think about it: a book full of abuse directed at the book. But the book was protean in its conception, and in one of its more stable forms it was a meditation on Jimmy Savile and an attempt to go further into unravelling his enigma.

And so, alongside the opportunistic outings up to Leeds for interviews to promote programmes and DVDs, was another motivation to keep up with Jimmy, the idea of generating copy for my diary-book-thing. I wrote entries about the trips to his penthouse and made notes every time he called on the phone with advice or just wanting to pass the time of day. All of which also shouldn’t cloud the inconvenient fact that Jimmy Savile’s company – when he dialled down the Savilisms and was on his home turf of his penthouse – could be quite pleasant. He’d recline on his sofas and play host with the minimum of fuss in his overgrown bachelor pad, offering chocolates and coffees or glasses of red wine, always with some anecdote of recent vintage to do with an advertising campaign he’d just done or an interview in a high-profile national glossy. ‘Ere, did you see FHM this month? Five pages, with a great big full-page photo. “Lock Up Your Daughters”.’

There was almost always some pretext for the visits – a bit of taping, some publicity, plus whatever bit of copy I thought I might extract for my book – but there was also a social dimension, and for my purposes the line between seeing him professionally and personally was somewhat blurred. There were maybe four of these visits – possibly three of them involved an overnight stay. Will would sleep on the sofa; I’d sleep in the spare room. Invariably there would be a trip to the Flying Pizza – usually we would come up on a Thursday, which was a busy night there, and then stay for a few hours on Friday morning to sit in on the Friday Morning Club, a talking shop of elderly male friends of Jimmy’s – unpretentious neighbours and local characters setting the world to rights.

Those trips to the Flying Pizza all blur together somewhat, but there tended to be a set routine. He’d always ask that Will bring a camera, so we could film him going into the restaurant celebrity-style. There was no film in the camera, since the point wasn’t to record the occasion but to create a sense of TV glamour and excitement. Jimmy would stand around trying to attract attention, meet and greet anyone who was interested, sing happy birthdays, and then when he’d exhausted the celebrity duties he’d settle down and eat and we’d catch up.

Mainly he talked – about whichever cruise he’d just been on, which TV commercial or celebrity profile he’d just done. This suited me since I never felt that comfortable telling him much about my own personal life. I’d be listening out for anything I thought might be revealing – references to girlfriends, which did occasionally crop up, this or that woman who would be coming to visit, a female photographer to whom he’d ‘given the Jethro – Jethro Tull – pull’ earlier in the day, or anecdotes about local friends of his, all of whom had nicknames, like Jim the Pill or his hairdresser The Yosh or Marvellous Marvin.

One anecdote he told involved a young female reporter who joined Jimmy on a cruise in the hopes of ensnaring him into a relationship for a putative kiss-and-tell story. In Jimmy’s recounting, the reporter confessed all and they ended up having an affair that remained their secret. I filed this story alongside many others of Jimmy Savile provenance under the heading Probably-Bollocks-Might-Not-Be. Jimmy’s attitude to the opposite sex always had a strange side – and in fact he generally seemed to enjoy affecting a slightly chilling detachment, bordering on callousness, from the normal emotional reactions, but which he would have characterized as a clear-sighted and logical attitude.

Referring to a mentally ill young man who’d written him a fan letter, he breezily said, ‘He’s never getting better.’

‘Seems a bit bleak,’ I countered.

‘Excuse me. I’ll say it again, he’s never getting better.’

There was an occasion – apropos of God knows what but possibly his volunteer work at Leeds General Infirmary and his interactions with sex workers when they’d come in to get patched up on the weekends – when he said, ‘A psychologist will tell you that there is something in all women that wants to be a prostitute.’ And another when I pointed out an attractive woman who may have been in her thirties or forties, and his response was: ‘Grandma.’

‘What?’ I said.

‘Grandma,’ he said again.

Jimmy was also given to the usual sorts of racist speech typical of many of the older generation; possibly he delighted in offending my delicate sensibilities with his occasional references to ‘schvartzers’ and ‘poofs’ and ‘cripples’, though it’s worth saying that he just as often was likely to make statements in favour of fellow feeling and tolerance. On one occasion during filming in Scarborough, before going out for dinner with a gay friend of Jimmy’s, he said, ‘Ere, Eric’s a shirtlifter, right, so no jokes about poofters.’ I’m not sure this qualifies as sensitivity but it seems to me marginally on the right side. He had – by his own profession, at least – a natural affinity with the Leeds Jewish community. He called Jewish people ‘Wejs’ – which is ‘Jews’ spelled backwards – though I’m not sure if this was his coinage. ‘I’m looking forward to some good Wej verbals,’ he’d say en route to a meeting with some Jewish friends.

Another time he called up to chat and share a couple of jokes: ‘Ere, why does Michael Barrymore not need ashtrays? He puts his fags out in the pool! Heh heh.’ Also: ‘What do you call a shampoo for gypsies? Go and wash.’

I didn’t laugh, but I also didn’t judge too harshly, seeing the jokes as the private expressions of an old-school sensibility and part of Jimmy’s natural inclination to shock. He enjoyed dark humour generally. When the police were looking for clues to the identity of the Yorkshire Ripper, for several days they had a large team searching Roundhay Park for clues, or possibly remains, complete with a catering van, close to Jimmy’s flat. ‘When I saw Peter in Broadmoor, I told him thanks for burying that brass in Roundhay Park,’ Jimmy said. ‘I ate free for a week!’ Nietzsche wrote, ‘A joke is an epitaph on the death of feeling,’ and with Jimmy’s dislike of emotionality, his jokes were a statement he was making about his detachment from normal human affect.

The trip up to record the ‘Jimmy links’ for the DVD collection Best of Weird Weekends was another time Jimmy gave hints of dark interests. We’d gone up the night before and made our ritual visit to the Flying Pizza. Then the next morning we sat watching the four episodes of the shows as Will filmed us in a locked-off shot. For nourishment, Jimmy had laid on a packet of Frazzles and some chocolate biscuits.

In typical style, Jimmy showed a yeoman-like commitment to the task at hand. It would have been easy to fast-forward and drop in some comments at salient points but he was set on watching all the shows all the way through – he also said he’d watched them all the day before as preparation. One of the Weird Weekends episodes, about gangsta rap in the Deep South, featured a Mississippi-based rapper called Mello-T, who styled himself a pimp. Mello was a troubling figure, charismatic but macabre and given to pronouncements like: ‘Somehow when a woman has a gun pointed to her head, seems to make her think better.’ Jimmy was quite taken with him. On camera, for the links, he expressed a weird concern that girls who saw the programme might be induced to take up careers in prostitution. Off camera, he commented about Mello: ‘A man after my own heart.’ Again, I noticed this then rationalized it as a bit of Jimmy Savile provocation disguising a deeper truth to do with his view of women as irrational.

After the four episodes of Weird Weekends, as a pièce de résistance, we watched When Louis Met Jimmy. It was almost eerie how easily we slipped back into our respective roles.

‘Petulant!’ Jimmy said, in a sing-song voice, of my attitude in an early encounter. I teased him for his weird inconsistencies and evasions, and the commentary devolved into the same childish repartee as the original programme. ‘You’re tricky,’ he said, ‘but I’m tricky too.’

When he learned that I was working on an entire series of celebrity profiles, Jimmy made semi-regular calls to offer suggestions or advice. Some part of him was probably keen that we should keep it to celebrities of similar calibre to him. He enjoyed Chris Eubank and tried to take credit for it. ‘Ere that were a good idea of mine, the boxer kid.’ When we briefly toyed with a profile of the presenter Esther Rantzen he was dismissive: ‘With Esther it’s just all about Childline. Total snooze.’

He regularly suggested profiling the strip-club manager Peter Stringfellow, who he said was a friend. Stringfellow never showed much interest in our overtures and, as proved the case more than once, Jimmy’s vaunted connections led to no material advantage whatsoever for the production. Based on my experience, if the ability to deliver subjects for a series of puckish first-person TV profiles of intriguing public figures is any guide, Jimmy Savile had as much clout as you’d expect for a deranged-looking man in a tracksuit and a string vest. Among the other people he bruited as candidates for profiles were: then-manager of Leeds United football club, David O’Leary; the singer Lulu; the Romany impressionist Joe Longthorne; and the Kray brothers’ enforcer Mad Frankie Fraser (‘Don’t call him mad’), who had once been resident at Broadmoor and whom Jimmy professed to be tight with.

Jimmy’s suggestions were neither helpful nor unhelpful but revealing in what they said about his interests and the image he had of himself as a kind of behind-the-scenes fixer.

For a long time I imagined that some of the questions I had about Jimmy might be answered if I could just induce him to take an off-camera excursion with me to Broadmoor. I knew he had an interest in criminal mental health but it wasn’t a subject he talked about much.

In the complement of his showbiz interests and charity work, his involvement with the killers and psychopaths at the hospital was the closest thing to something solid. ‘Not criminals, patients,’ he would say. He claimed to be ‘the entertainments officer’ but was hard-pressed to describe what entertainments he’d actually organized. It was said he used to have tea with Peter Sutcliffe but he was cagey on the subject.

I also had the impression he had made visits to Ashworth, the forensic mental hospital where Moors murderer Ian Brady was detained, and another time, when it was in the news, I asked what he made of ‘the Myra Hindley story’. ‘I am the Myra Hindley story,’ he replied gnomically and without elaborating.

I wondered if an outing to Broadmoor would at least be a chance to see Jimmy in a different context, in which some of his contradictions might make more sense. But, despite me asking him several times, no invitation was ever forthcoming and it began to be a bit embarrassing so I stopped bringing it up.

One of the few revealing pieces of information about Jimmy and the truth about his private life came in May 2001, in the middle of the period when I was in sporadic friendly contact with him.

A pair of middle-aged women who said they had been his girlfriends in the late sixties had got in touch by letter shortly after When Louis Met Jimmy originally aired. The letter was from both of them – let’s call them Beth and Alice – and described how they had been part of a group of girls who sometimes helped out with jobs, all of whom were involved with Jimmy. Some left, moved on; others remained in his circle for years. ‘There was never any jealousies,’ they wrote.

It seemed, mainly, a bid for recognition. In the film Jimmy had claimed he’d never had any girlfriends. I assumed this rankled them and that they wanted someone to know that Jimmy had had relationships – which they characterized as casual and ‘fun’. The letter, which I showed to others on the production, appeared to put to bed at least two hypotheses regarding his sexuality: that he might be gay or simply asexual. Other than that, however, it didn’t seem to promise much in the way of revelation and, with other work to do, almost a year passed before I called Beth on the phone and set up a rendezvous.

By this time I was working on my celebrity diary-book-thing, so my main impulse may have been to generate some material for that, though there was also a personal sense of curiosity about what light Jimmy’s girlfriends might shed on his character. Will, my director, came along too. We met at the Langham Hotel, on Regent Street, close to Broadcasting House. They walked in, a few minutes late, two smartly dressed women in their mid-forties, both slightly nervous. It soon emerged they were worried that Jimmy might find out we were meeting.

‘Are we being filmed or taped?’ was the first question from Beth. And then, ‘Why did it take you so long to get in touch?’

Beth led the conversation and was the more voluble of the pair: she’d known Jimmy longer and had occupied a sort of leadership position in their little group, as organizer and diary-keeper. They painted a picture of a coterie of teenage fans who would meet in studio dressing rooms and caravans to socialize and catch up. Trying to get my dates straight, I asked one how old she had been. ‘You sound like Jimmy,’ she replied. ‘That’s the first question he would ask. “How old are you?” ’

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Why do you think?’

We bought Cokes and sandwiches. ‘It’s more than we ever got when filming,’ Alice said. ‘You might get a cup of tea in a transport cafe and a voucher for your train home if you were lucky.’

I asked about the sex. ‘Very quick,’ one of them said. ‘I wondered if that was why he wore those elastic waistbands,’ said the other. ‘You knew when he’d had enough of you and wanted you to go away . . . He’d just say “Good morning!” ’

The impression I had was that the sex was something they tolerated as the price of being part of his inner circle, and the complaints they had were less about – as they characterized it then – his sexual ineptitude and lack of consideration and centred more on his weird absence of manners: the fact that he didn’t see them out or buy them anything to eat or arrange transport back home. Alice said she had only once spent the night with him.

As our conversation went on, I began to sense that Beth and Alice had slightly different attitudes to their experience: Beth still seemed loyal to Jimmy, slightly in awe of him and keen to highlight the fun they’d had; Alice was more ambivalent. ‘At the time it was great fun. A lot of laughs, but there were negatives as well,’ she said. ‘Looking back, I wonder if he gave a shit.’

They’d brought old ticket stubs and photographs, including some that had been taken just a few years previously at a reunion of the group which Jimmy had hosted at his flat close to Regent’s Park. In the pictures they were laughing and clowning – there was one in which Jimmy was making an antic display of imposing himself on Alice, and another of Alice in the kitchen against the wall and Jimmy pressing up against her – you could only see his back and his white hair and her hand poking out from his shoulder. ‘He’s joking in that one,’ she said, pointing at the first. ‘But not in that one.’

In hindsight, it’s tempting to pull out the most telling parts of what they said, those details that support what we later learned, though I worry it gives a misleading impression of an encounter that more took the form of a quizzical and bemused pooling of information – we were like a quartet of puzzlers standing over a ten-thousand piece jigsaw. Each of us gave our impression of the Savile mysteries in a freewheeling bull session. I shared the rumour about his being a necrophile, which they hadn’t heard. They talked about his mafia connections, which they took seriously, and which added to their sense of paranoia.

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I’d appeared more shocked by what they had to say about the callous and inconsiderate sex, but I still had in my head the tone of the letter and the references to reunions and fun and so I didn’t hear what was undoubtedly also there, especially in Alice’s recollections: a persistent sense of resentment and unease about how he had treated them. And there was also an explicit instruction that they would never tell friends about their relationship with Jimmy. They didn’t want their children to know.

Towards the end of the lunch, Alice described approaching Jimmy about taking her child to Jim’ll Fix It – this was years later, in the late eighties. Jimmy had arranged tickets on the condition she came up to see him beforehand and she’d met him in his hotel room. He’d propositioned her. ‘But I was going out with someone at the time,’ she said. ‘I pushed him away. If I hadn’t been, I might have given in. He said, “You must love him very much.” Which was a sensitive thing to say. For him.’

‘He’s so clever,’ Beth said. ‘A genius really. But also mad.’

On the pavement outside, we said our goodbyes. The session seemed to have relieved some of their animus, and my sense was that we all felt better having compared notes. ‘Sometimes I feel like confronting him,’ Alice said just before the two of them walked off down Regent Street. ‘But he’s so clever, I know he’d make mincemeat out of me. It’ll all come out after he dies.’

In August 2001, when Neil and Christine Hamilton were arrested for rape while I was filming with them, Jimmy was fizzing with excitement at having, as he saw it, an inside line to the story through me.

After the documentary went out, Jimmy called to congratulate me.

‘I have spoken to a whole lot of people from all walks of life and they all give it ten out of ten,’ he said.

‘What was your take on it?’

‘They’re a pair of swingers.’

‘How do you mean “swingers” exactly?’

‘They’re a pair of swingers. They’re quite given to having a bit of sexual philandering given half a chance.’

Jimmy was firing on all cylinders. Maybe it was excitement at the programme – that it was being chattered about, and the way his association with me put him vicariously at the centre of things. Jonathan King, the musical impresario and TV presenter, was then in the news, too, being accused of sex crimes against underage boys, and Jimmy began talking about that.

‘It’s six of one and two threes of another,’ he said. The accusers were all rent boys, he said, who were out for cash. ‘Part of the compensation culture.’

‘Ere, what about a thing on rent boys?’ he went on. ‘All you have to do is buy them a sandwich and they run off at the mouth. Half the time, it’s them that gets the punters at it.’

That August I was invited to do a keynote presentation at the Edinburgh television festival, involving clips from old shows and work in progress. For some added value, someone – possibly David or Will – had the idea of making an all-access mini-documentary from the point of view of Jimmy interviewing me: When Jimmy Met Louis.

By this time I’d moved out of my Shepherd’s Bush flat and had bought a house in Harlesden, a said-to-be up-and-coming area of west London. I think at some level, having recently been in a twelve-year relationship and on track to have children, I was carried by a kind of lifestyle momentum into a young-couple arrangement even though I was now single and living alone. My habits of thought hadn’t changed and I still saw myself as a budding family man. But the upshot was that I found myself with a large house and no real sense of what to do with it, other than live in it like a squatter.

When the time came to film the documentary, I’d only been in the house a couple of months. It was big and empty – no sofas, no rugs, no pictures, no comfy chairs, no kitchen table. Just a futon and some clothes on a rack. This may also be one of the reasons I was comfortable having him over. I still didn’t like him knowing too much about me, didn’t quite trust him, and there wasn’t much in the house to give me away.

Will directed. He contacted Jimmy, who agreed to the idea, asking only his usual ‘pourboire’ – his term for a collection of high-priced cigars – from a shop called Dunhill in Mayfair.

Will met Jimmy at King’s Cross, and filmed him in the taxi to the BBC offices in White City. It was midsummer, warm, and Jimmy was wearing a string vest and running shorts. He was by this time seventy-five years old, still bedecked in gold rings and necklaces, his long white hair pulled back in a ponytail. He had with him a knapsack.

He arrived at my offices at a moment when I’d stepped away, and he poked around my small closed-off section, playing the role of an intrusive investigator. ‘What a dreadful tip this is!’ He wrote ‘Louis’ Tip’ on a piece of paper, then took a Polaroid of himself holding it, leaving the photo on my desk. Then, when I turned up, we sat down and he interviewed me, which was a strange experience. He had no natural curiosity, nor did he like to admit to not knowing something, so his questions followed the rhythm of a cross-examination rather than a natural conversation.

We had lunch at the BBC canteen – Jimmy discoursing on the nature of celebrity. ‘Success is a three-legged stool,’ he said. TV, radio, newspapers. ‘If you have all three you can do what you want. But if you only have TV and radio captured, you’ll be dependent on newspapers to print nice things about you. I wrote for the Sunday People for nearly twenty years and I found that when I was doing that none of the other papers were keen to have a go at me because it was like having a go at their own, right? So they went and had a go at somebody else.’

The subject of the Hamiltons came up. Jimmy viewed the story as an object lesson in how those in the public eye are vulnerable, and he impressed on me the need to be careful now that I was ‘at the top of the tree’ of broadcasting and prey to all sorts of prurient tabloid enquiries.

‘Does it perturb you at all that you are actually in that category where somebody can have a go at you?’ he asked. ‘They don’t care whether it’s right, wrong, true, false – so long as they’ve got names, baby, they’ll have a feast. Say, for instance, you were interviewing me on an allegation of something that was not nice, right? And you said to me, you’re alleged to have de-dum-de-dum-de-dum. My answer would be, “It would be a lot worse if it were true.” ’

As ever, I found the idea of being held to ransom by the tabloids for alleged misdeeds a fanciful thing to worry about and I didn’t much like the idea of being clubbed together in his imagined category of embattled ageing celebrities. To wind him up, I said, ‘Well, they do say no smoke without a fire, don’t they?’

After lunch we drove up to my house. With Will filming, Jimmy did a faux-investigative tour of the almost-empty premises. In the middle of one of the bedrooms, as a provocation, I’d left the little wooden box in which I used to keep my hash and rolling paper – I was still then in the habit of smoking a joint at night to help me sleep. I was curious to see Jimmy, whose trademark was his glibness and unflappability, faced with illegal narcotics up close. I had to point it out to him, though I’d left it in the middle of the floor. ‘I’m an Indian tracker,’ he said when he spotted the box. He opened it up, then finding what looked like a small fragrant clod of dried mud, exclaimed, ‘Bleedin’ ’ell fire!’

In the other rooms, Jimmy made a show of attempting to discern evidence of lady companionship.

In a top-floor bedroom, I’d hung some old photos showing Jimmy as a young man. ‘This is your bedroom, if you ever want to come and stay,’ I said, not quite meaning it, knowing he would never take me up on the offer, but also, if I’m honest, not completely not meaning it either.

My main recollection was the sense that he was mentally counting the minutes until he could head back up to Leeds. Downstairs, as I showed him out, I said: ‘Thanks for coming by.’

‘OK, good morning!’ he replied.

‘And if you ever do need a place to crash in London, you’ve seen you’ve got a room upstairs.’

‘Thank you very much. I appreciated that. I’m just going to check that it’s safe out there.’

Making a show of looking up and down the road, he ventured out, then hopped into the taxi that had been ordered for him. As he drove off, three children who had spotted him – though they would have been too small to remember Jim’ll Fix It, so how they recognized him is an open question – chased his car down the road shouting, ‘Jimmy! Jimmy!’

And in fact around this time, the tabloids and the gossips did start taking an interest in my private life. It came to the attention of the press that I had been married, and a reporter from one of the redtops rang Sarah’s doorbell at her new home. They got a photo of her looking bewildered in a long shot with her finger in a copy of a book I recognized as About the Author by John Colapinto.

Among my reasons for being precious about my own privacy was an awareness of what a private person Sarah was, and that grainy apparition of her in a newspaper, clutching a book, came to symbolize some sense of collateral damage wrought by my willingness to embrace fame too readily, to crave success, to be an emotional cretin – I wasn’t quite sure exactly what, I just knew I felt guilty and implicated.

Of all the themes least likely to appeal to a general audience, I realize ‘I’m too famous! Wah! Wah!’ is high on the list. So be it. There are many worse things in a person’s working life, like losing your arm in a threshing machine or getting black lung or sustaining a brain injury in a body slam in a wrestling bout with Rowdy Roddy Piper. Let’s just say that, as I look back at the protracted climacteric of that time and the sequence of trivial incidents that were for me small landmarks of unhappiness, the one that was most surreal was the day Jimmy called and said I wasn’t to worry but a paper had been asking him about ‘Louis Theroux’s secret wife’. ‘They had no chance,’ he said. ‘Because against me the punter isn’t born that has a chance.’

I felt relieved, and then in quick succession came a feeling of disbelief that my life had come to such a pass: having Jimmy Cigar-smoking Tracksuit-wearing Now-then-now-then Savile as a kind of ally and gatekeeper to my private life.