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

When the time came to speak to the victims myself, I made it my habit on the way to the location to re-read passages from the reports, to make sure the gravity of the offences was in my mind during the conversations.

In selecting contributors, we were – as ever – at the mercy of who was willing to go on camera. We’d been in contact with Liz Dux, the lawyer at Slater and Gordon who was handling compensation claims. It was around this time that the figure of over a thousand victims was being bandied around in news reports. Liz Dux said, with regard to claims she was dealing with, it was closer to a couple of hundred. She wasn’t sure where the larger figure had come from.

She sent out a form letter from the production to alert people to our project should they wish to speak. We’d been keen not to obscure victims’ faces, which limited our pool even further – the idea being that it can look shady and unsatisfying to hear testimony from people whose faces you can’t see.

For me, the second Savile film represented a new way of working. One of the axioms of my programmes, going back to my TV Nation days, had been that I looked at contributors who were making questionable decisions: the Klansmen, the Westboro Baptist Church members. Even in those later shows about addiction and mental illness, the subject of enquiry was people facing impossibly difficult choices, of how best to support troubled loved ones. To speak to victims of sexual assault was new ground for me and, especially given my history with the man, I was trepidatious.

Alongside the new interviews with victims, we would be drawing on the abundance of archive from the original show, the forty-odd hours of rushes, the material shot in the years afterwards, the DVD ‘Jimmy Links’ rushes, the rushes from the tongue-in-cheek mini-doc When Jimmy Met Louis. Ancient battered boxes were brought down from an old storage facility and combed through. All of this was different to our normal way of working. It was also felt that, given my different role in the story, I should be interviewed on-screen by the director, instead of simply voicing the programme.

Early on in the process, I watched some of the rushes from the original documentary. I had always wondered whether there might have been clues that I missed. Possibly in a bid to salvage my image of my own acuity, I recalled that I had pushed him harder at various points, in particular, in the scene at his mother’s flat in Scarborough about his sexual interests and his relationship with the Duchess.

The rushes had been transferred onto DVDs and I watched them at my desk in the open-plan BBC offices in White City.

[From Roll 022, filmed in the Duchess’s bedroom]

LT: Did the Duchess not give you ‘brain damage’?

JS: No. I was fifty-five when she died. We were more like pals. Duchess and me were best pals.

LT: Did the closeness to the Duchess mean you didn’t get married?

JS: No. Nothing. Every day Christmas day, every night New Year’s Eve. Rock and roll, baby.

There followed the conversation, which we’d used in the film, about his ‘girlfriends’. Some had been friends for forty years. ‘I was a pirate,’ he said, who had never wanted exclusive relationships.

LT: Do you think your relationship with the Duchess was anything like a marriage?

JS: That is a non-question. Only a funny fella would ask a question like that.

[LT: keeps at it, asks JS to explain it.]

JS: We were the most normal family in the world . . . When you find someone that loves you they’ll do it for you.

More or less at random, I dug out Roll 74 and Roll 75. Though they were higher numbers, the tapes dated from an earlier occasion – they’d been shot by Will on the toy camera. With just the two of us present, me and Will and no crew, there was a chance this material would be more intimate and more revealing.

The images showed me and Jimmy wandering around a leisure centre in Doncaster, the one where he’d donated a large cuddly toy bear. ‘JS does a slightly weird lower lip thing on a woman’s hand,’ I wrote. ‘Two blokes. JS says, “You’re better looking than me so bollocks.” ’ I watched on: there was some more wandering; we climbed into Jimmy’s limo; we made chit-chat about charity work. ‘JS says, “Don’t play with the switches, ’cuz it knacks all the business up.” JS begins doing a Souza marching-band song.’

I don’t know quite what I’d been expecting from watching the rushes. Maybe that his deviant qualities would be more evident. Or maybe I’d just wanted to see him again with the knowledge of his crimes so that I could merge the two people into one, or just so that I could look at him again knowing what he did. But it didn’t happen: the two people refused to become one, and instead of resolving them I was thrown back into a time before the revelations, into a state of mild boredom, enduring the harmless windbaggery of a faintly ridiculous ageing DJ.

The interviews for what came to be called simply ‘Savile’ took place over several months. It was a far cry from the immersive mode of working I was used to. Instead of the sense of being in a world, we interviewed contributors piecemeal as they became available.

We featured four victims, all female, and representing a spectrum of his offending. We had hoped to film a male victim, but only one was comfortable coming forward, and he had changed his story in significant ways, which I worried would be an unhelpful distraction in the film.

Our first interview was with Kat, the ex-Duncroftian. Now in her sixties, and living on borrowed time in the aftermath of bowel cancer, she lived in Gobowen, a village in Shropshire close to the Welsh border. I took a train up. In her front room, with her long-term partner sitting by for support, she recounted the matter-of-fact details of a young teenager, so abused by her mother and her mother’s boyfriends, that being asked to give a blowjob to a forty-something DJ in the back of his Rolls in return for some tickets to a TV show was, as she put it, ‘not that big a deal, really’.

In subsequent weeks I interviewed others. Cherie lived in Bournemouth, close to the seafront. A talented artist, her home was filled with her oil paintings, seascapes, animal portraits, and numerous pictures of the singer James Blunt. She described how, in 1973, she had been recovering from a breakdown and serious surgery at Stoke Mandeville when he came in through a ground-floor window. He’d stuck his tongue in her mouth – one of the hallmarks of his offending – and, disorientated and with her arms bandaged, she had been unable to fend him off.

Susan, an optician in Leeds, had been delivering some spectacles to Jimmy’s house. He’d invited her inside, kissed her on the mouth, dropped his trousers, and uttered his catchphrase, ‘How’s about that then?’ She’d told co-workers back in the office, who’d laughed. For years afterwards she’d made no secret of the encounter – processing it as a funny story rather than as an assault, and only after the revelations did she come to see it with clear eyes as abusive and frightening.

In Aylesbury, not far from Stoke Mandeville, I spoke to Sam. A woman roughly my own age, she had, as a young girl in the late seventies and early eighties, attended Sunday service at the hospital chapel. From time to time, Jimmy – an intermittently observant Catholic – would show up. Sam described being in the vestry, aged twelve or so, having helped with the collection, where Jimmy would grope and molest her, penetrating her with his fingers, brazenly and almost in view of other church-goers. Sam, too, had been abused by her grandfather, who had raised her. Softened up, her defences scrambled and worn down, she had put up little resistance against Jimmy.

‘I never said to him “don’t”,’ she told me, ‘because I knew he could.’

With all the victims, there was the slightly uncomfortable moment of soliciting their opinions on my original documentary. In my self-involved state, I still imagined there might be a chance they’d recognize the programme’s revealing dimension and give me credit for going as far as I did. Yeah, that didn’t happen. At the same time, it was oddly bracing to feel the force of their unvarnished feedback. ‘I remember thinking “poor Louis”,’ was Kat’s reaction. She said she felt I’d been ‘hoodwinked’ by him. Cherie remarked on how ‘silly’ I seemed, being pushed around by a puffed-up celebrity. But the overwhelming impression they gave was a sense of guilt. They felt bad for not saying or doing more to speak out. Each had thought she was the only one. If only they had known, they said, they would have raised the alarm. They would have tried to bring him to justice.

Alongside the victims we interviewed others – associates, colleagues – who’d worked with him in a friendly way for many years. One was a BBC producer called Gill Stribling-Wright who’d started out in a junior capacity on Clunk-Click, then moved on to Jim’ll Fix It and stayed in touch as she moved up the TV ladder, doing Parkinson and ITV telethons. My director on the original documentary, Will Yapp, had interviewed her for background back in 1999. At that point she’d described Jimmy as a ‘tarnished saint’, someone with a fascination with what makes people tick, which explained his visits to Broadmoor, and who had an interest in philosophy. ‘I don’t think there’s anyone who really knows him completely, someone who he confides all in,’ she’d said. ‘I think there are various people who know a little bit and all of them participate in the compartments that he’s placed them in.’ Now, sixteen years on, she told me that in the years she worked with him she never saw anything that caused her concern. Had she read the reports? No, she said. ‘Because I don’t know what I’d do with it.’ His private life had been obscure, though looking back little clues stood out. ‘Part of his persona was the fact that he would tread very close to the line, in hindsight.’ She mentioned, when asked if he’d ever 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, which meant dry and wrinkly. She would have been in her mid-twenties at the time.

Another colleague, a senior nurse at Stoke Mandeville called Sylvia Nichol, still had a trove of memorabilia, including an oversized 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 and described the moment she called Jimmy because the roofs on the cheap hospital buildings were leaking, and how that had let to him spearheading a charity effort that raised £10 million. All that work was now rendered suspect – seen as a smokescreen for his offending. ‘Sometimes I do say, please can you fix this?’ she said, standing in the shed with his Lego bust. ‘Because I reckoned he could fix anything.’

And then there was Jimmy Savile’s personal assistant, Janet Cope. Janet had been fired unceremoniously by Jimmy after twenty years’ service – told simply, without explanation, ‘You’re out’ – around the time I’d done the first documentary. She had worked as Jimmy’s diary-keeper and factotum. By her own account, she organized events, cooked for him, and covered for him when necessary. When he’d felt lonely on an around-the-world cruise because it was full of Americans, none of whom recognized him, she’d spoken to him on the ship’s phone every day to keep his spirits up. Unlike Sylvia and Gill, Janet had read the reports. She viewed the incidents described as either trivial (‘a pat on the bum’) or simply made-up.

Like the colleague at Stoke Mandeville, her life’s 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 Jimmy 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.

As filming progressed I was in touch via email with Beth, the woman who had written me a letter describing herself and her friend as ‘girlfriends’ of Jimmy’s. I’d been hoping to feature them in my follow-up programme. But both were publicity shy. They had family members who still didn’t know about their association with Jimmy and they were worried about their real identities becoming known. Still, negotiations proceeded. Methods of preserving their anonymity were discussed. Beth was also insistent that she should know the names of everyone involved with the production. Emails she sent were stamped with legalese about their confidentiality and her sense of anxiety ebbed and flowed depending on what was going on in the news. She described the toll the unmasking of Jimmy Savile had taken on her. She’d had a nervous collapse after giving testimony to the Janet Smith Inquiry and another after seeing the Jonathan Maitland play An Audience with Jimmy Savile.

We met – first just Beth, myself and Will. Then later Alice came along as well – nearly fifteen years on from our lunch at the Langham, both of them a little nervous. Both had endured serious illnesses, Beth in particular looked grey and drawn and gave off an anxiety so intense that it was hard to differentiate from low-level passive aggression.

What was odd was that they seemed to have reversed positions in the intervening years. Beth, who’d seemed more protective of him in 2001 and inclined to recollect the happy parts of their association, could now barely bring herself to think about him, so great was her hatred. Remembering some of their encounters brought her to tears. It made me wonder whether, in the scheme of things, the uncovering of Jimmy’s crimes had been worth it for her personally. Alice, on the other hand, seemed lightened by the revelations, still angry, but the anger didn’t seem to eat at her the way it did Beth.

She talked about some feelings of guilt at having done interviews and been part of the posthumous process of unmasking Jimmy. She said she still had some residual fondness for him and talked about the first time he’d taken advantage of her – he’d been forceful but not violent.

‘It wasn’t the worst kind of “rape”,’ she said, doing air quotes.

‘Why did you do air quotes?’ I asked

‘Because the first time was so unexpected and quick. It was only later that I viewed it as rape. But the other times, I don’t view them as rape, because I went back. I knew what I was getting into.’

She described a man who was awkward, who lacked finesse, and she said this in an almost indulgent, pitying way. She said she had dreams about him, since the revelations, in which he came to her crying and she’d feel sorry for him.

‘When we sent you that letter, I think I wanted you to do something, but we didn’t want to be involved . . . Who did you show it to?’

‘My executive producer. I can’t remember who else exactly. But it was an open-plan office. There was no sense of secrecy around it.’

I had the sense Alice might be thinking there was someone who ‘suppressed’ the letter – who stopped me from doing more. I tried to explain that the letter said so much about ‘friendship’ and ‘fun’, there was nothing in it to make me concerned.

‘I took it as, OK, he had girlfriends. He’s not gay. He’s not asexual . . . But beyond that, it didn’t feel especially like news . . . There was nothing in it about sexual assault. And in fact, it talks about a thirty-year friendship.’

‘We put that stuff about being friends in so you knew we weren’t crackpots,’ Beth said. ‘To show we did know him.’

Alice said that when Jonathan King had been convicted in 2005, she’d sent Jimmy a caravan-shaped postcard, saying, ‘Worried you might be next?’ But they had harboured fears about Jimmy’s underworld connections. His boasts of friends in the mafia, his joking references to himself as ‘il capo di tutti capi’, she’d taken at face value. ‘We all agreed nothing could be done while he was alive,’ Beth said. ‘He was too powerful.’

I thought: I didn’t agree nothing could be done while he was alive. But I didn’t say anything.

‘Why didn’t you go to the police?’ I asked.

‘We wanted something much bigger and more public than that.’

It occurred to me that a police investigation would have led to something big and public, but I didn’t point this out, and we all left a little later, having talked for two and a half hours.

I saw Beth a few times afterwards. She’d asked us to keep her involved, and I sent her emails letting her know how the TV project was progressing. It was by now four years since the revelations, but the BBC1 documentary about victims and the appearance of the Janet Smith Inquiry meant there had been a spike in Savile coverage, which took a toll on her health. She’d been going through therapy and on one occasion she suggested I join her for a session – I think to help me understand what she’d been going through – but I declined.

I never saw Alice again. Before our meet-up, I’d sent her a list of questions via Beth. In return, I got a two-page document with thoughtful answers to each of the questions. She described meeting him, when she was aged fifteen, through a friend, at his radio chat show Speakeasy. His first question to her had been, ‘How old are you?’ He’d sexually assaulted her up against the wall of a BBC corridor, and then, a few months after she turned sixteen, he’d raped her in a hotel room.

‘I hadn’t got a clue I was being taken advantage of at that time but I knew it was wrong somehow,’ she wrote. ‘It was only later that I saw it for what it was and became very angry and emotionally confused about it. Although it sounds sick, at the time I even felt flattered at the attention of someone so famous. I felt I was special to him and was fond of him.

‘I am glad it is out in the open as it has helped so many people come forward to report abuse . . . However, as for it being “therapeutic” I would say no. It has been immensely stressful . . . I now realize with vivid clarity I meant nothing to him but that I was taken advantage of, used and abused; I was one of hundreds. I know he was an absolute bastard but another part of me (weirdly) feels I have betrayed him. I am still looking for some understanding of my own experience and emotions. I know I am not to blame but I carry shame and guilt about what I feel I “allowed” to happen.’