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

The idea of a programme revisiting the subject of Jimmy Savile – so long deferred, so feared at the channel, and so fraught with difficulty for me – became real in late 2015.

It was now year four in the Savile Disclosures Calendar, and the cultural landscape bore the imprint of everything that had followed from Jimmy’s unmasking. An investigation had been set up by the police – Operation Yewtree – and a host of beloved, and not-so-beloved, TV and radio personalities had been rounded up. There would, in the end, be nineteen arrests – of DJs, actors, musicians – with around half resulting in prosecution, and seven eventual convictions. Most saw it as a necessary rectification of a historic injustice – the failure to listen to and hear victims and reassure them that their accounts of abuse and assault would be taken seriously – though there were also increasingly elements in the media and in the country that viewed the entire process as a witch hunt, an attempt to apply a present-minded moral framework to a more louche and free-spirited era, fuelled by compensation claims and a frenzied tabloid culture, whose resources would be better spent chasing up-to-date cases.

Either way, the post-Yewtree reality was the new normal. Rolf Harris, Stuart Hall, Gary Glitter were all in prison; the DJ Dave Lee Travis had received a three-month sentence suspended for two years. The world had moved so fast that it was hard to recall that as recently as 2005 Rolf had painted a portrait of the Queen, from life, as part of her eightieth birthday celebrations. The BBC had filmed it for an hour-long documentary, called The Queen, by Rolf, and the portrait had been lampooned for its rendering of the royal smile, which showed her teeth on display in a rictus that recalled a silverback readying for battle.

Such painterly misdeeds were once the worst Rolf could expect in the way of publicity. Now he sat in HMP Bullingdon for historic sex crimes.

It had been a strange cultural moment to live through: exciting, salutary, a little voyeuristic, in certain respects confusing, and occasionally – for those, like me, cursed with a tendency to worry over moral wrinkles and hypocrisies – troubling. Certainly I took the view that it could only be a good thing for men and women who’d been assaulted to finally get some measure of justice; that a more enlightened and clear-sighted attitude to the reality of sexual exploitation was now prevailing.

But I also had concerns about the erosion of due process. Ageing politicians and civil servants had been hounded on flimsy or non-existent legal pretexts. Some stars had been kept in legal limbo for months while the police chased paper-thin allegations. At the apex of the panic about sex pests in high places, the police had announced that the allegations of a man known pseudonymously as ‘Nick’ were ‘credible and true’. ‘Nick’ turned out to be Carl Stephen Beech, a shameless compensation hunter and paedophile, who – as I write this – has just been sentenced to eighteen years in prison for perverting the course of justice. But in 2015 his tales of stabbings and stranglings of children involving Leon Brittan and the MP Harvey Proctor were – unbelievably – being taken seriously and used as the basis for a credulous and expensive police follow-up.

Max Clifford, my old sparring partner, had been arrested only a few months into the new era, in December 2012 – Savile Disclosures Year 1.

In the years since we’d made our programme there had already been some surprising revelations. His wife Liz had died of cancer, and afterwards he had outed himself in a profile in the Observer as a long-time frequenter of swinging parties. He’d amplified the account in a ghosted autobiography, Read All About It. He’d been a ‘ringmaster’ at the parties, he wrote, or ghost-wrote, ‘a role I like to have in many aspects of my life.’ If anything it helped to explain why he’d been so quick to believe that the Hamiltons might have attended a sex party in Ilford.

‘I was too greedy to be faithful,’ he continued. ‘Almost anything went, including having two girls at a time. Having sex with girlfriends’ mothers and watching others have sex.’ He described tricking a girl into sex with a friend who was a plumber by telling her he was someone important in show business – seeming to view this as a blow for social justice and a fitting punishment for being over-interested in celebrity. The prank – if you can call it that – reminded me of the same qualities of insensitivity and the need for control I’d noticed during our filming,

Then, after the Savile revelations, he’d gone on TV to make a plea for an indulgent view of stars’ sexual indiscretions. Celebrities were ‘frightened to death’, he’d said.

‘All kinds of things went on,’ he’d gone on. ‘And I do mean young girls throwing themselves at them in their dressing rooms, at concert halls, at gigs, whatever . . . They never really asked for anybody’s birth certificate, and they were young lads.’

Among the ‘young lads’, presumably, Max had included himself, though he’d been in his forties when several of the allegations took place. His fall was precipitous and complete, and because of our association I took a more than usual interest.

At trial, one woman described how as a seventeen-year-old she’d visited him for career advice. Max had told her to remove her dress in his office. The assault took place while Max was on the phone to his wife. Even stranger, he had wanted the victim to accompany him to a dinner so that she could masturbate him under the table as he sat next to his wife.

Several times, according to accounts given in court, he’d impersonated James Bond producer Cubby Broccoli and Stephen Spielberg in order to create an illusion of power and influence.

Max denied everything, writing off his seven accusers as ‘fantasists and opportunists’. Friends from the world of celebrity – Pauline Quirke, Des O’Connor – testified to his tireless charity work, as though good works were incompatible with being a sexual predator. He would still be attempting to have his convictions overturned when he died.

As the Yewtree juggernaut trundled on, with the idea of a Savile revisit apparently off the table due to continuing nervousness at the channel, I’d encouraged the team to explore the general subject area of old-school entertainers and allegations of historic sexual abuse. It seemed a natural subject for us – the queasy cocktail of cold-blooded exploitation, transactional sex, and the lines between the two.

But having put out some approaches, we got not much back. Surprise surprise. Being – as they saw it – railroaded for dimly remembered gropes decades earlier was not a subject the investigated and arrested stars were in a rush to spill their guts about on national TV.

The only celebrity who showed signs of cooperating was the impresario and sometime TV presenter Jonathan King. King had been convicted of multiple accounts of historic sex offences in 2001. In a way, he’d been the Ur-Savile, a show-business star-maker and eccentric who’d used his celebrity cachet and an instinct for vulnerability to prey on vulnerable boys. He’d been released on parole in 2015. But King had already featured in two documentaries – both of them forensic and compelling, one by Jon Ronson, another by Nick Hornby. In both he’d expressed his view that he’d done nothing wrong, an opinion he was entitled to, but expressed himself with such callowness and lack of introspection that he did his case no favours. The idea of another documentary put me in mind of the fate of the corpse of Oliver Cromwell, exhumed in 1660, two years after his death, so it could be hanged.

Around this time, a new BBC₂ controller was appointed – Kim Shillinglaw. It was strange to reflect that she was the sixth I’d served under. When a new one came in, I had the feeling of being seen like a smelly cat that came with the house. One or two people said, ‘She really liked that autism film you did.’ I wondered if that meant it was the only programme of mine she’d seen.

One afternoon I was invited up to the seventh floor of New Broadcasting House, the BBC HQ on London’s Portland Place, to meet her. There was a time when my bosses were from an older generation, I thought when I saw her. But we were around the same age – she was, by the standards of British television, rather glamorous. We talked about some of the ideas my team were working on. Alcohol. Another about brain injury. The perennial subject of celebrities came up, whether there could ever be another When Louis Met . . . I made as if to take the idea seriously. Julian Assange. Blah blah. Nigel Farage. Ha ha! Then, with the same lack of expectation of someone checking the coin return of a random pay phone for loose change, I mentioned the idea of doing something on Jimmy Savile.

‘It’s very strange having known him personally, and realizing this side was hidden from you,’ I said. ‘It feels a little like being friendly with Jack the Ripper. It’s hard to square the two parts of him and I wonder if that’s partly how he got away with it.’

To my surprise she said to go for it.

A slightly weird interim followed. Production on a particular film doesn’t go into high gear until the series producer hires a director. My seniors at the BBC mooted various candidates, including one friend and contemporary whose reaction to the idea when I spoke to him on the phone was resolutely negative.

‘We know how Savile got away with it,’ he said. ‘He intimidated vulnerable people and he charmed those in power. What else is there to say?’

I made my case that he’d become a figure of such grotesquery that we were in danger of making him not quite real, which carried its own risks: firstly, in not telling the whole truth, and secondly, by extension, making it harder to spot Saviles of the future (which, incidentally, would be a good name for an avant-garde band, especially if they weren’t looking to get many bookings). I tried to hint at the need for an understanding of the case that went beyond a simplistic view of perfect victims and perfect perpetrator. I mentioned the existence of victims of Jimmy’s who had, in some cases, been friends or quasi-friends. There were many facets to the case that were less clear-cut and might allow a fuller understanding of how abuse takes place.

And what about the consequences of his crimes on those around him who feel they should have seen more and now are in the position of realizing they spent years of their life with a man unmasked as a sexual predator: his long-term girlfriends – of which there were said to be a couple – how were they to deal with all of this? His family? All of those who knew him, or thought they knew him, people for whom their association with Jimmy Savile and his celebrity and his charity work was one of the defining facts of their long lives – what about them? It seemed to me there were all sorts of awkward dilemmas that we might be able to interrogate.

To all of this, my director friend, making a topical reference to the leader of Isis who was then much in the news, said: ‘Yeah, well, you might have been friendly with al-Baghdadi, but that doesn’t mean you should make a film about what he’s like behind the scenes.’

‘Personally, I think that sounds really interesting. I’d watch it in a heartbeat.’

‘Well, the Isis victims might have other ideas.’

We ended the call in a way that was personable and polite but the clear message was that the documentary was wrong-headed and probably immoral. ‘I really question why Kim has commissioned it,’ he said.

The conversation wobbled me – not regarding the appropriateness of doing the documentary but it made me wonder quite why it was that, when I spoke about ‘the need for nuance and a forensic attitude’, people sometimes heard special pleading or an urge to extenuate and excuse. I thought back to books and films that made an impression on me. Their power and resonance hinged on their uncomfortable details and the awkward quality of the moral ecology they described: victims who couldn’t help but become adjuncts of their predatory conditions; suffering that was in no way ennobling; a strange symbiosis of oppressors and the victimized that ended up immiserating everyone.

Without quite finding the right form of words, I was fumbling towards an understanding of Jimmy’s crimes that did not shame his friends, his colleagues, his family, and most of all his prey for failing to push him off with enough strength, for failing to see more, for failing to cry out, for failing to speak up – for failing to fit into a neat moral category that, for good or ill, is not how many, or even most, people behave.

Embarking in earnest on the second Savile film also meant I could chase down the little clues and leads I’d had about Jimmy over the years and finally answer some of my what-ifs: what if I’d aggressively pursued the little hints that had been shared with me?

One of my first calls was to Noddy Holder, lead singer of Slade, about whom the comedian Phill Jupitus had said ‘He has a folder this thick.’ I made approaches from various angles, via friends of friends and colleagues of colleagues. Word came back that he had nothing to say. I received an email that said, ‘I really never had any time for Jimmy Savile nor knew him.’ Putting myself in Noddy’s shoes, I could see that a call from a strange journalist asking about your relationship with a reviled sexual predator would not bring you pirouetting to the phone. Still, what about the file?

I ended up writing a letter, which was passed on to him. To my surprise he called – Slade frontman, glam-rock icon, ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’ scribe Noddy Holder. He said he’d met Jimmy a handful of times, doing Top of the Pops, and that Jimmy had struck him – as he did many people at that time – as being ‘cock of the walk’, self-important and an egoist, but he couldn’t recall a conversation. More to the point, Noddy had had no inside knowledge of sexual wrongdoing: when the Exposure programme had aired he’d been as surprised as anyone else. The thick files turned out to be a misunderstanding, based on a conversation backstage at Phill Jupitus’s show Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Someone had said they’d heard the journalists on Fleet Street have a file on Savile ‘this thick’ and Noddy had agreed, saying he’d heard the same thing.

Several other calls ended up in a similar place. In a diary from 2001 I’d found a reference to Keith Chegwin describing Jimmy Savile as ‘evil’. I called Keith – he was on his mobile, puppyish as ever, scampering up Oxford Street. He didn’t remember describing Jimmy as evil, though he allowed he might have heard something from another Radio 1 DJ, Tony Blackburn, in the eighties about Jimmy being arrested. ‘One day he’ll have his comeuppance,’ was the attitude at that time, he said. Keith said Tony Blackburn might be someone to contact, which I did. It was an off-the-record chat in his agent’s offices and so lacking in content that I didn’t bother writing up the notes. There were a handful of other calls that went a similar way and the upshot was oddly unsatisfying. I’d been telling myself that Jimmy Savile’s story was there waiting to be told – like a thread, it just needed one tug to unravel. But the reality was different: the missed opportunities weren’t so missed after all. Either that or there were people who were keen not to be seen as having known more, for fear of being tied into a perceived web of complicity.

Then there was a further more awkward development. I’d been hoping we’d be able to include contributions from friends and family of Jimmy’s. I’d been in touch with a self-appointed spokesperson for an underground network of Jimmy supporters – I’ll call her Sally. ‘They call us deniers,’ she said. She didn’t like the term. Sally had stayed out of the spotlight, for obvious reasons, but had run a campaign of letter-writing and behind-the-scenes organizing attempting to rehabilitate Jimmy. She was also a gatekeeper to various friends and girlfriends of Jimmy’s.

By this time a director and AP had been assigned to the project and we’d shot our first interview, appropriately enough, with Kat Ward, the woman who’d set the whole train in motion by writing an online memoir in which she described his visits to Duncroft and then later by being the first to speak up in a spiked segment for Newsnight.

I’d got in touch with Kat via Facebook and the interview had gone smoothly but Kat, as was her right, had told a friend who happened to be a journalist, and he’d rushed out an article about me doing a follow-up documentary. In its haste to stay ahead of the story, the BBC put out a press release, which I didn’t see until it was too late, that couldn’t have been designed to be more alienating to contributors who already had fears of being tarred as accessories to his crimes after the fact. The press release suggested friends of Jimmy’s were holding on to secrets. There was also a gratuitous reference to Jimmy as ‘the man who hoodwinked’ me – somehow taking a programme that still had a plausible claim to being the most revealing portrait of Jimmy while he was alive and turning it into a testament to failure.

The friends and family – Sally, lines that were out to one of Jimmy’s long-term girlfriends, other long-time friends who could have shed light on his nature – quickly evaporated. A lightly amended press release went out a few hours later but by then the damage was done. The four or five of us working closely on the project were called into a meeting with the executive producer and a BBC2 executive at Broadcasting House to sift through the wreckage. The channel executive made the case that we should see the press release as a positive, since it had forestalled the need for an awkward conversation with contributors about what was in the programme. He missed out the fact that such a conversation would only have been awkward because the contributors would have featured in the programme, which they now wouldn’t.

It is hard to overestimate the amount of paranoia and anxiety that surrounded our Jimmy Savile film. By this time another documentary was already in the works – this one for BBC1, designed exclusively to honour the victims. The other film was to be so victim-focused that Jimmy’s face would be deliberately obscured throughout out of a sense of respect for their feelings. My hope was that the existence of this other film might take the pressure off us and free us up to make something more – I suppose – perpetrator-focused. But it was also clear that the wounds were still raw – BBC brass were both keen to be seen to be treating the crimes with their proper gravity but also, behind that, there was a fear that the subject was so radioactive that it should be locked away in a lead-lined box and buried in the deep bosom of the ocean.

As a way of preserving some privacy, the BBC had procured us some quiet offices in Maida Vale away from the hubs of TV-making. We were also taking the precaution of referring to it as ‘Programme Six’.

By this time – late 2015, early 2016 – there were numerous reports in the public domain: novella-length accounts of the findings of in-house investigators. They were published online and had the look and layout of actual books. The police ones came first – the Met, Surrey, West Yorkshire, North Yorkshire, another by the Crown Prosecution Service to determine why the 2009 Surrey Police investigation had gone nowhere. Several NHS reports followed – Leeds General Infirmary, Broadmoor, Stoke Mandeville. Others came later – any school or children’s home Jimmy had been known to have visited was required to conduct an investigation, and the Department of Education supplied an online template for how their published write-ups should be organized. In the final tally, there were a total of thirty-two hospitals, ten local authorities, plus several charities including Barnardo’s and Action for Children. There was also the magnum opus that was the Janet Smith Inquiry.

It has occasionally struck me as odd that these reports aren’t better known, especially given how much money and effort must have gone into writing them. It is true that the local government ones are thin gruel. There are quite a few in which, having been alerted by an ex-pupil that Jimmy may have made a visit to a school sports day or fete, the investigators appear to have spent weeks making enquiries without managing to find a victim while being under an obligation to record every remembered detail from forty years previously. Jimmy lifting up a teenage girl’s skirt ‘by a few inches’ with a hockey stick in 1971 or 72 in a spirit that the person had regarded at the time as ‘insignificant’ was the subject of an entire twenty-five-page report from Saxondale Hospital in Nottingham.

Yet the reports from the hospitals – and Leeds General Infirmary in particular – are another matter. If there was a moment when I felt I took on board the full import and enormity of Jimmy’s crimes, it was when I set a few hours aside to read them, finding myself oppressed with sadness and guilt and foolishness. At the same time there was a weird tension as I struggled to resolve the image of the person I knew with the person being described in the incident reports. It may be that television and newspaper accounts can’t do justice to the crimes of Jimmy Savile. All the sensationalism disappears amidst the accumulation of forensic detail from victims who, with the candour afforded to them by anonymity, can share their accounts of incidents that – in many cases – affected them for life. There is something in the colourless prose of the reports that gives an added power to the stories.

For the LGI report, sixty-four people shared accounts of abuse – incidents spanning nearly four decades, from 1962 to 1999 – and involving men, women, boys, girls. Most were in their late teens and early twenties, but plenty were outside those ages. What is striking reading them – other than the sheer numbers of victims – is the effrontery of his offending, its shameless and almost incontinent quality. Many accounts involve him touching the victims’ genitals, under clothes, under bedclothes, when a mother has left the room or sometimes with a nurse or doctor close at hand. ‘The doctor told me to do this.’ ‘Has the pain gone away now?’ ‘Uncle Jimmy will sort it.’ ‘Uncle Jimmy will look after you.’ Or just as often it is a wordless act, an intrusion so bizarre and unexpected that the victim doesn’t know how to react. In my own work, having interviewed paedophiles who preyed on children, their own and other people’s, I am well aware of the grooming techniques that allow abusers to confuse their victims and lower their defences. But the odd thing about Jimmy was that he didn’t groom much of the time – or he did some version of speed-grooming, based on his celebrity, projecting a sense of authority and, above all, permission – so that, even on those occasions when he was sworn at, pushed away, shouted at, there is no sense of his having been chastened, just a comment: ‘He scurried away’ or ‘He left quickly’.

Many of the victims describe being in pain, being on their way in to surgery or coming out of it, coming round from unconsciousness, confused, dazed, completely off-guard. In this vulnerable state, they were assaulted by a white-haired man in a porter’s outfit or scrubs, someone many didn’t recognize as Jimmy Savile but assumed was a hospital employee. But it’s also the case that his offending was so indiscriminate that it’s hard to generalize about its qualities. Many incidents were opportunistic, relatively fleeting, taking place in corridors and on wards; but some involved a level of forethought and planning, meetings with parents, rendezvous, invitations to the porters’ offices, or in at least one case his mother’s flat, followed by what sounds like a massive physical overwhelm, Jimmy using his considerable physical strength to overpower and rape his victim. Some – especially the later ones, the ones that took place after his peak offending period of the sixties and seventies – were seen as relatively trivial, simply annoying or creepy, at the time and then reconsidered in hindsight. Given the overall impression of compulsivity and predation, one tends to be struck by those handful of occasions when Jimmy is fended off – a young woman who spent the night at his flat, having been invited back to a fictitious party, while wearing her ball gown, and successfully kept him at bay while sleeping in bed with him. One reads the less serious accounts and imagines the Savile deniers holding on to them as their scintilla of evidence for his forbearance and kindly behaviour.

Reading the reports was anguish-inducing but also felt salutary for me personally – a long-overdue inoculation against whatever residual sense of fondness I’d felt towards Jimmy. I discovered I had perhaps felt more attachment than I’d realized, some sense of investment in his not being an indefatigable sex offender. Otherwise why was there so much distress and guilt? Or was it perhaps a normal reaction to the accumulated sense of violation, the pain and distress all those people – adults and children – carried with them? And was it normal, too, to resist believing the worst about someone until faced with the incontrovertible truth? In the reports’ accumulation of clinical detail, they provided a breathtaking portrait of the relentless predatory behaviour of a man who appeared compulsively dedicated to grabbing, groping, fiddling, and intruding.

It was also a shock to see cruelty arising from actions that had almost nothing in them that was reminiscent of good faith – not even the cousin of good faith that is honest selfishness or greediness. Over the years, I’d come to see how much wickedness was a by-product of a kind of self-deception: sincere fascists working towards a bright Aryan utopia or zealots dictating intolerance on the basis of God’s holy word. Even the paedophiles at the mental hospitals I’d visited had, for the most part, persuaded themselves that the children they abused were capable of consent, that they ‘enjoyed it’, and they cited passages from Ancient Greek texts or practices in Papua New Guinea to suggest that it was a modern peculiarity to fetishize the innocence of children. ‘All great deceivers . . . in the actual act of deception . . . are overcome with belief in themselves,’ thus spake Nietzsche. To persuade others, you first have to drink your own Kool-Aid. But how had Jimmy – with his rampant grabbings and rapes – ever imagined that he was being anything other than vicious?