I remember driving through the beautiful hills of Glencoe years ago, when my eye was attracted to a remote cottage on a high promontory which must have commanded a spectacular view of the glens. However, the house looked burned-out and ruined, covered in graffiti, like a desecration. I later learned that this was one of Jimmy Savile's retreats and that after his fall from grace when the news broke about his unspeakable criminal offences against mostly defenceless underage girls (although the programme-makers in fact inform us that allegations were made by victims ranging from the ages of 5 and 75 and included members of both sexes), some locals had taken the law into their own hands and laid waste to it.
Savile was certainly a part of my growing up. Always as much a TV as radio personality, I remembered listening to his "Pick Of The Pops" chart history programme on Radio One and also his "Savile's Travels" Sunday afternoon show, the latter seeing him visit towns and villages the length of the country. With what we know now, one hesitates to think what he might have got up to in these different places. However, his fame and later claim to "National Treasure" status was based mostly on his TV persona, not only as a zany presenter of "Top Of The Pops" but as a bona-fide family entertainer on shows like "Clunk Click" and his biggest TV hit "Jim'll Fix It" where he came across as an avuncular granter-of-wishes, mostly to young kids, making childhood dreams come true. It was massively successful prime-time TV, and ran for years on BBC1.
Savile used his celebrity to raise funds for charities he said were close to his heart, like local hospitals or children's homes and in so-doing raised his society profile so that he was soon mixing in circles with the Royal Family and then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Away from the spotlight however, stories were starting to circle about his propensity for underage girls. He never seemed to have a steady girl-friend, far less wife, living alone after his beloved mother died, occasionally boasting on TV about his roving eye for young girls.
Somehow, by a combination of his "untouchable", TV god-status as well as hiring a powerful, big-name solicitor to aggressively take down any threat of exposure of his crimes to the wider-public, he got away with his abuses all his life and in fact received what was akin to almost a state funeral in his home town before, within a year, the truth about his vile misdeeds finally broke out.
Told over two lengthy episodes, this two-part Netflix documentary series is light on Savile's beginnings, really only picking up his rise to fame as it was captured on the small screen. His depravity is only hinted at before, in the second programme, after he dies, the full story emerges, no doubt shaming his high and mighty friends as well as professional colleagues who somehow missed what was in plain view all the time, that the man was a creepy, crazy monster, using his position of power to gratify his sub-normal urges.
Although it was sometimes slow in pace, this programme eventually delivered its incontrovertible conclusion with great impact as it allows two of his young female victims, now grown to obviously still-damaged adulthood, to tell their stories. As we now know, some 400 people later came forward with similar sad stories and I even remember accusations of necrophilia at one point.
The great sadness here, besides the physical and psychological damage inflicted on his victims, is that he was never brought to justice and died considered almost a national hero. His was a tale of gross abuse of celebrity status which he managed to conceal all his life, although the truth, even sordid, perverted truth like this, thankfully got out to at last set the record straight.
