Part One: Jimmy Savile: Britain's Unending Nightmare

Robert explores the life and times of Jimmy Savile, the face of the BBC for decades, an ally of Margaret Thatcher, and a pedophile rapist on an incomprehensible scale.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
All media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Hey everybody, Robert here and the International Academy of Digital
Arts and Sciences have announced that three different Cool Zone
media shows have been nominated for awards at the thirtieth
annual Webby Awards. You can vote on these now if
you just google the name of the podcast and the category.
Behind the Bastards nominated in the Experimental and Innovation Podcasts category.

(00:27):
It Could Happen Here is in the News and Politics
Podcasts category, and James Stout's mini series Migrating to America
A Dream Worth Dying For has been nominated in the
Podcasts Documentary category. And you can find links to vote
for each of these podcasts in the episode description and
in the posts on social media for episodes that It

(00:48):
Could Happen Here and Behind the Bastards, Thank you. Welcome
back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very
worst people in all of history. I'm Robert Evans.

Speaker 3 (01:03):
What were you saying?

Speaker 1 (01:05):
I couldn't hear you.

Speaker 4 (01:06):
I was just so this book.

Speaker 2 (01:08):
Oh is that a copy of Girl Gone Wild by
Courtney Cosak? Oh man, I'm excited to read that myself.
I wish we could get Courtney on the show.

Speaker 4 (01:16):
I'm here I'm here.

Speaker 2 (01:18):
Oh. I probably could have told that by looking at
my screen at any point in time, but I never do.
Welcome to the podcast, Courtney. How are you doing today?

Speaker 4 (01:26):
I'm good. Thank you for having me excited to be back.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
So your book is coming out.

Speaker 4 (01:31):
That's exciting, it's exciting, it's nerve wracking. Yeah, it's all
the things. It's really great.

Speaker 3 (01:36):
So I haven't finished it yet, but it's really good
so far.

Speaker 2 (01:39):
You want to up top here plug what your book
is before we get into the subject of our episodes
for this in next week.

Speaker 4 (01:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (01:47):
It is an unwitting feminist coming of age about trying
to make it in Hollywood.

Speaker 4 (01:53):
It's called Girl Gone Wild.

Speaker 5 (01:55):
It's about all the mistakes quote unquote I've made.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
Yeah, well, and about like your time working for Girls
Gone Wild, which you've talked about on our show a
couple of times in the past, and unfortunately it's gonna
be kind of relevant to these episodes. Do you know
who we're doing this week?

Speaker 4 (02:14):
Did Sophie inform you no.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
No good good? What do you know about Jimmy Savill? Oh?

Speaker 5 (02:23):
Okay, vaguely, I thought you were about to say Joe Francis.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
No, no, no, no, no, no, I was not saying
anything about Joe Francis, but we're talking about Jimmy Saville,
who was a I mean he was everything in UK
pop culture for quite a while, right, Like he started
out as a DJ, he became like a television star
and he was ultimately just famous for being extremely famous

(02:50):
and being the guy who was like always on TV
if you grew up in the UK from like really
the mid seventies up through the late nineties, Like he
was the face of the BBC. Do you know anything
about this guy?

Speaker 4 (03:05):
Is he raunch?

Speaker 5 (03:07):
The first thing that came to mind was like the
stories about you know, Robert Plant Sticking or Jimmy Page.

Speaker 4 (03:16):
But did he have any connection with those bands?

Speaker 2 (03:18):
Yes, he was connected to every band that was big
in the sixties and seventies, pretty much like there are
very few major pop musicians from that, Like I think
people tend to call it like the golden era of
pop music, of rock and roll and whatnot. There's almost
no one that he wasn't connected to, from like Elvis
up through the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Like he knew

(03:39):
all of those guys, and you know it didn't necessarily
wasn't necessarily in good with all of them, but because
of his position as like Britain's top DJ, like he
was connected to all those dudes. We're hearing some stories
about those people, but this guy, Jimmy Saville is probably
the number one request I get from British listeners is like,

(04:01):
you need to do Jimmy Savell. And I've noticed that
Americans tend to be either completely unaware of this guy
or they only kind of heard a couple of things,
and most of what they heard is that after he died,
it came out that he'd been a massive pedophile for years. Right,
this is a guy now committed sex crimes on like
an industrial scale. He's kind of in some ways, he's

(04:25):
kind of like the British Jeffrey Epstein, or at least
he's like one of the guys you could accuse of
being that. But this is you know, when I first,
because I didn't know much about Jimmy Saville, I think
I was kind of vaguely aware that he had existed,
and then you know, he dies in twenty twelve, it
comes out that all there are all these allegations of

(04:46):
horrible sex crimes he'd committed. And when I started reading it. Initially,
it was always framed as like and no one knew
he kept it a secret his whole life. It was this,
you know, there was no way anyone could have realized that,
like the whole time he was this famous powerbroker in
the music industry and and you know British television, he
was also abusing women and boys.

Speaker 5 (05:06):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
And what's really interesting to me is that, like that's
all bullshit. It was entirely obvious the whole time, he
like bragged about it. There were numerous interviews where he
talked about at least aspects of his behavior, Like there
actually was never any excuse for people to be surprised
that Jimmy Saffle was a massive sex best. I mean,

(05:28):
we'll pull up some photos of him later, but I
hate to be like, oh, that guy looks like a pedophile,
but Jimmy Savile was the most that guy looks like
a pedophile pedophile in the history of fucking pedophiles.

Speaker 4 (05:39):
Oh, I can't wait to see.

Speaker 5 (05:41):
Yeah, I feel like, I mean, there was so much
of that in this era too, Like yep, in Woody
Allen films where he's like dating a seventeen year olds
or and that's like not even considered bad.

Speaker 2 (05:54):
Well, no, and it's one of the things I will
I will be using both the terms like when we
talk about what he did, like had sex with, and
the terms molested or raped, because it's often unclear. The
age of consent in the UK is sixteen, so him
having sex with a sixteen year old is not inherently
legally rape in the society that he's doing it, right, Like,

(06:15):
we can have the opinion it's not that that we have,
but that's part of what camouflage is this and at
the start of the pop industry there's a lot of people,
including probably most of the musicians from this era whose
music you like, who had sex with teenage girls, sometimes
illegally because there were a lot of twelve thirteen, fourteen

(06:36):
year olds got in there, but often very legally because
again the age of consent was like sixteen, right, And
you know this is there is an element of at
the start of his crimes, this was a really different
time and the moral values around that were a lot different.
Were part of what happens with Jimmy is that the
period in which he gets famous and has starts getting

(06:59):
access to all these teenage girls is also the period
in which birth control becomes like, like particularly the pill
becomes normalized. Right. So there's just this explosion in people
fucking right that's based on Oh, suddenly, there's no consequences
to it. That doesn't really get like curtailed until the
AIDS crisis, right. And so part of what's interesting to

(07:21):
me is that this is not just a guy who
is this This is part of the story here, is
this is a guy who kind of comes of age
as a famous person during that era where it's really
easy for men at a certain level of fame to
have access to a lot of teenage girls and quote
unquote consequence free. It's not consequence free. There's a lot

(07:42):
of people that he harms permanently, but that's the way
it's seen widely. And then he has to figure out
a way once that era ends and wants his kind
of fame as dj in is to continue having access
to people of that age, and that's when that's when
he goes from a really gross guy in an industry

(08:03):
filled with gross guys who all did very similar gross
things to a unique kind of predator. Right. And that's
the story of Jimmy Sapple. Margaret Thatcher is also heavily involved.

Speaker 5 (08:15):
Oh my god, how old is he in this b
side of the story when he gets really creepy, I
mean beyond.

Speaker 2 (08:23):
He's pretty creepy the whole time, but like in his
it's like in his forties and on that like things
start to get really that he gets that he kind
of a balls in a unique way. Because a lot
of what's interesting to me about this case is that
Savile's not just abusive to individuals, and he is, but

(08:43):
he he's like he's grooming institutions in including the BBC
and most of the major hospitals in the United Kingdom,
in order to get access to victims after a certain point.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Yeah, all right, yeah,

(09:08):
let's let's start the story. James Wilson Vincent Saville was
born on Halloween night, October thirty first and nineteen twenty six,
fucking Halloween, like just.

Speaker 4 (09:21):
Perfect.

Speaker 2 (09:23):
Yeah. His hometown was named consort Terrace, which Wikipedia informs
me is in the Burley area of Leeds in the
West Riding of Yorkshire. Because for whatever reason, people on
that island cannot give normal place names to places like
fucking hey, British people here's a town name for you, Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania see williams Aras. That's how place name should sound.

(09:45):
I don't know what the fuck you guys have been
doing over there, but it's not just bitches. Yeah, oh no.
He's in the Burley area of Leeds in the West
Riding of Yorkshire. To fuck you guys, come on with
your JR token bullshit here, get out, give it a
normal name. I'm sorry British people, but also I'm not so.

(10:05):
In his own autobiography, which was published under both the
titles As It Happens and Love Is an Uphill Thing,
Jimmy writes, Yeah, Jimmy writes this of his own birth.
Some babies are born strong, some weak. Being the youngest
of seven, it would appear that my father's last effort
was lacking in the juices of strength. Eyewitnesses habit that

(10:27):
I was born sound asleep. He's a sickly kid, right,
and his family members, people who knew the family around
that time, confirmed that he was you know, ill as
a child and suffered from regular health problems. He exaggerates
these as part of his personal mythos and narrative. For
his part, Sapple claims that he nearly died when he

(10:48):
was two years old, and was so sick that a
priest was brought in to administer last rites while his
mother prayed feverishly to a then unconfirmed saint, Margaret Sinclair,
and like things were so bad, the doctor just like
leaves at one point and says, just tell me when
he dies, and I'll fill in the death certificate the
rest of the way. I don't want to keep coming
back here. At one point, his relatives think that he's

(11:12):
actually passed on, and his grandmother does like the old
timy thing where you hold a mirror up to his
tiny mouth to see if he's breathing. And in his
book and in numerous interviews over the years, Saville took
great pleasure in delivering the punchline to this joke, which
is that as she puts the mirror down, he pisses,
hitting his grandmother in the eye, and this story improving

(11:33):
He's alive right. This story is a foundational part of
the Savile myth, and in his own autobiography he follows
it with this very strange passage, hardened by my urinary
success of catching my grandmother fair and square, I continued
in my infancy to pee on anything or anyone who
unwarily came into range. And my first recorded applause were
for direct hits on guests, fires, tea tables, priests, and

(11:56):
other such targets. I wasn't very popular for a number
of years. That's weird. That's just an odd thing to say.
It is interesting how early, even in his autobiography when
he's you know, he's a children's entertainer and to a
major extent, right, but he's he's writing to such an
extent about like his penis.

Speaker 5 (12:17):
You know.

Speaker 2 (12:18):
Again, there's a lot of in these in his autobiographies,
and the things he'll say, he will tell like eighty
or ninety percent of the truth. He doesn't quite go
all the way, but you he focuses a lot on
stuff to where like people should have known this is
a guy with a weird fascination with his penis and
like what it's doing. And it'll get a lot more.

(12:38):
He'll talk a lot more, obviously about actual at least
obviously he's not talking about sex crimes here. But it
is weird the degree to which he focuses on this
in as he's talking about himself as a two year
old now his mother. Jimmy's mother, Agnes, gives a very
different account of his infant illness. When she was interviewed
in nineteen seventy in Plane Sight by Dan Davies. She

(13:02):
recalled the illness struck when Jimmy was two and a half.
My oldest daughter had him out in the pram and
stopped at a shop, leaving Jimmy outside. He was strapped
in but jumped about so much that the pram overturned
and the hood caught the back of his neck and
severed one of the muscles. And that's a completely different story.
He's not like a sick kid who's dying and you
in bed or whatever. He's like a kid who has

(13:23):
an injury, a pretty normal kind of injury. Pram falls
over and he gets a muscle that's severed, and the
injury heals badly. Jimmy can't sit up or properly shut
his eyes for six months, even while sleeping. He was
admitted to the hospital. Yeah, it's really a scary thing
if you're the parents he's admitted to the hospital, who
are like, we don't really know what to do. You know,

(13:43):
there might be we could try surgery, but we don't
know if that'll actually work, and his family says, no,
we don't want to like risk that. On the way
back from the hospital, Agnes stops briefly to pray at
a cathedral, and then later that day, Jimmy goes to
sleep and closes his eyes, which initially I verifies the
family because they think he's died because he hadn't been
closing his eyes. But he was actually fine. The injury

(14:05):
had just finally healed. Right. That's a much less dramatic story,
where like in we all we were clustered around. Then
they put the mirror up to see if he was
still breathing. No, he had a weird injury and they
were scared because when he closed his eyes they thought
he was dead, but he was.

Speaker 4 (14:19):
So it's not both. It's one was a lie and the.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
One is a lie.

Speaker 4 (14:24):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (14:25):
I can't think of why Agnes would have lied about this.
I can think of a lot of reasons why Jimmy would. Now.
Agnes did later write to the Catholic Church urging for
the beatification of Margaret Sinclair. But again, this is just
a very different story. His family was very poor growing up,
although not unusually, they were like the normal level of

(14:46):
poor for the town that they lived in. So it's
not like he was the poor kid in town and
had to watch all of these other kids who had more.
It was this is England in like the twenties and thirties,
and he lives in like the north, in a mining town.
Everybody's broke, nobody has money. Then yeah, now again, he
was the youngest of seven and he was an accident.

(15:07):
His mom's like forty when she has him, which is
I mean, that's an old pregnancy today, especially in like
the twenties, that's fairly uncommon. And he was dubbed. He
claims the family's not again child. That's the term he
uses of like they were like, ah, this was we
really can't ever let this happen again. And he's going

(15:29):
to grow up with a chip on his shoulder about this.
He was never very close to most of his older siblings,
and he will later become a mama's boy in a
deeply weird way. We're not really going to talk about
it enough in these episodes, but he's like veering towards
Patrick Bates levels of like very strange mom issues. But
initially he feels like he's ignored, like he doesn't get

(15:51):
a lot of attention, And he'll write about this both
as if it frustrated him, and also he'll talk about like,
and I really like that because I'm a loner and
this really worked out for me. I like not getting
a lot of attention. I can't tell which is coping
and which is the truth. That said, his other family
members don't seem to agree that he was ignored and

(16:13):
not given a lot of attention. His sister Joan actually
says that she and the rest of the family consider
Jimmy their miracle baby, and that he was kind of
fond over by all of his older siblings and everyone
else in the family because he'd had health issues as
a kid. Right, And Davies points out in his book
about Savel that while Saville preferred to portray himself as

(16:34):
the not again baby, as this kid that wasn't wanted
and was kind of ignored, his family insists that he
was treated as the miracle child, the chosen one, right,
which makes a lot more sense based on his subsequent behavior.

Speaker 5 (16:48):
Yeah, some people cannot get enough attention, Like there's no
an endless hole.

Speaker 2 (16:54):
And it's interesting to me that he feels a need
to like lie about this, to complain, to be like, oh,
and they didn't even really they want me. You know,
I had to deal with the fact that I didn't
really belong, whereas his family's like, no, we were obsessed
with him because he nearly died. Now. Jimmy's father, Vince,
was a tall and gangly man who never made a
lot of money, but was employed consistently and seems to

(17:16):
have been like a pretty responsible parent, although not necessarily
in a what you'd call the reputable industry. His boss
was the town bookie, a guy named jim Windsor, who
young Jimmy seems to have grown up admiring Windsor wants
bragged to a newspaper that he'd been arrested once a
year for twenty years. So his dad's he's Jimmy grows

(17:37):
up connected to at least a low level organized crime.
You know. This guy is running like numbers, rackets and stuff,
and his dad is kind of his gopher. But his
dad's also not a big wig. His dad is handling
like very basic jobs for this guy, like he's so
Jimmy sees this dude who is like kind of the

(17:58):
patron of the family who is a criminal and who's
doing really really well. But his dad's never doing really well.
His dad's just.

Speaker 4 (18:05):
Kind of windsor like house of like royalty.

Speaker 2 (18:09):
Yeah, but no, he's not royal. It's just also a
name Windsor I.

Speaker 3 (18:13):
Was like, I was like British windsor the Queen's Corgies.
What's happening.

Speaker 2 (18:19):
No, he's not. There will be royal family connections later,
but not at this stage. This is just a guy
with that last name.

Speaker 3 (18:26):
Got it, got it, got it my bad.

Speaker 2 (18:28):
So from the jump, Jimmy grows up close to and
comfortable with some of the more mainstream elements of organized
crime in his society, and he probably grows up aware that, like,
the people who do best are the people who are
willing to break the rules. And because my dad is
kind of scared of going too far, we never had
a lots as opposed to his boss. Right, it was

(18:48):
a bolder man was willing to commit crimes and get arrested.
So the family is like working, lower middle class, but
he does get to see how the big shots do,
and he kind of comes to want that for himself. Now,
despite the fact that Jimmy often portrays his family as
being quite poor and like unusually poor. It's noted by

(19:12):
people who knew them that Agnes actually like the family
owns an unusually large home. His mom makes them buy
a larger home than they can really afford, so like
a lot of the rooms are kind of empty. I
think because she wants a big nice house is like
a status symbol, right, so she has to budget really carefully.
But they're able to afford the house, so they're doing okay.

(19:33):
He goes to school.

Speaker 5 (19:34):
I was gonna ask you if they lived in one
of those council estates.

Speaker 4 (19:38):
But no, not, no, they're not that poor.

Speaker 2 (19:40):
No, they're not that poor. They're certainly not the bottom
rung in terms of like poverty. They're not like comfortable,
I wouldn't say, but they're getting by. And even though
this house is kind of bigger than they could afford,
his mom is really good with stretching their money and
he's able to like, they're able to afford it. And
this is kind of he becomes like a hand me
down kid. He's known in town. Is like he does

(20:02):
he never no one ever buys clothes for Jimmy. He
wears all of his older siblings clothes, which a lot
of people you know, grew up with that experience. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (20:10):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (20:11):
He goes to school in town, and the main method
of discipline in Jimmy's era and the place where he's
going to school, is that the headmaster will beat you
with a bamboo cane if you're bad. This is not
again weird for the time, but ow but ow. Because
Jimmy is so sickly, he qualifies for free milk and
a free spoonful of malt at school each day, which

(20:34):
I think I think they're trying to help him avoid
getting rickets. I think that's why they get him a
spoonful of malt. I forget exactly why got in town.

Speaker 5 (20:44):
Yeah. Yeah, that's a very.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
Like twenties thirties thing, right, the sick kids get free
milk and malt. This is also something he writes and
talks about constantly because it reinforces his underdog narrative. Agnes
drove the family and they were with Agnes is like
the wearing the pants in the household. Right. His dad

(21:06):
is a very retiring and kind of shy figure. He's
gonna die much earlier than Agnes, and she is She's
the force to be reckoned with. They are extremely Catholic.
Jimmy Saville is raised Catholic and is a hardcore Catholic
his entire life. They almost never miss Mass, and she
makes sure that even with the family budget as tight

(21:28):
as it was, they always have money to put in
the collection plate for arguably the wealthiest institution in human
history at the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Catholic Church
couldn't have gone by without that tuppence that you dust
in there. They wouldn't have been able to afford to
move all those priests to our molesting kids to different
places so they can molest more kids. Of his mom's faith,

(21:49):
Saville said she was an old fashioned religioso. She went
to Mass because she had a guilty conscience. Now that's
interesting to me because he'll emphasize this a lot, guilty
over what. Now we don't know. He never says. This
is one of a number of very vague, never directly
stated bits of Jimmy lore that could be seen as

(22:10):
supporting the idea. Some people have suggested that he was
probably molested as a child. There's not evidence of this.
He never talked about it. I've never heard anyone come
up with any like clear factual allegations based on a
firsthand narrative that he was molested. However, he has a
deeply weird relationship with his mom, and he goes on

(22:32):
to molest hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, potentially thousands of kids.
So people naturally wonder, was Jimmy a victim has himself? Now,
I don't have a satisfying answer on this. This is
going to be one of those things where I just
have to shrug and say, like, I don't know. But
he is like he never has a long term relationship

(22:53):
with an adult woman in his entire life. He never
has a real girlfriend, he never gets married. I don't
think think he's ever close to having a long term
relationship with a woman other than his mom, who he
will like go on dates with and hang out with
as a young man, like he she is like he's
a major part of his social life while he is

(23:14):
like famous in the early years of fame to an
extent that a lot of people have wondered, was it
did something go on there? And I could I will
tell you people wonder that I don't have any evidence.
I'm not aware of any evidence. It's just kind of
a thing people wonder because his relationship with his mom.

Speaker 5 (23:30):
He romanticized him in some way, like that's kind of
damaging enough.

Speaker 2 (23:35):
But yeah, it may not have involved actual molestation. Sorry
I cut you off. Yeah, no, there's no priest, not
that we know of. Like, obviously there are priests who
were around the area he grew up in who molested kids,
because that's true everywhere there were Catholic churches, but I

(23:57):
haven't there's he never alleges that, and I don't have
any and of it, right, so we can ponder this.
And obviously it is not uncommon for people who wind
up being child molesters who have been molested or to
have had like very early traumatic sexual experiences. But that
doesn't have to happen for someone to be a child molester.
Sometimes people are just child molesters because they suck, right Anyway.

(24:22):
His childhood is interrupted by World War II, the Big
Dub Dub dose, although not in a way that was
particularly traumatizing to him. A lot of British kids in
this era have really trauma because they're bombed to rite,
kids in London and stuff are getting bombed and hiding
in shelters, and he gets a bit of that, but
he's in a really good area to avoid. Like the

(24:44):
worst of that. He recalls when he was eleven or
so and the war started, that he and a bunch
of local kids were taken out of the city to
this rural camp where they did minor manual labor in
order to keep them away from bombs. Basically, it's a
long term summer camp where you know, you're working on
projects and stuff, you're helping to build things out in
the woods, and they're just trying to keep you away

(25:05):
from where the Germans are targeting. Now, just based on
when things happened, we know Jimmy was thirteen and nineteen
thirty nine, so he can't have been eleven when the
war started, because that just is doesn't work. One of
the difficulties here is Jimmy gives ages for where how
old he is when a bunch of different stuff happens.

(25:25):
That absolutely cannot be true. And I don't know why
he'd lie about it. This may have just been honestly
him forgetting, because once you get to a certain age,
it's hard to be like, was I ten when that happened?
Was I twelve? Like I can't tell for myself on
some things that happened to me.

Speaker 4 (25:41):
Check your damn memoir though.

Speaker 2 (25:42):
Come yeah, yeah, yeah, but it is a little you
do have to like kind of go back and be like, no,
he couldn't have been eleven. He was thirteen. We know
when he was fucking born, right, he wouldn't have been
worried about getting bombed by the Germans in nineteen thirty seven.
That would have been crazy, and they had started bombing
the UK in nineteen thirty nine. But I can believe that,
you know, maybe that like that era, they were getting

(26:06):
worried about it and stuff. So anyway, whatever, how, whatever
age he is when he gets to this fucking summer camp,
he's only there for a few months before his parents
borrow a car to visit him. I think he's there
for like six months, and then they come to visit him,
and his mom sees that his camp where he's camping
is directly underneath like a massive gasoline tank, and she's like, well, fuck,
he could get blown up here. I'm not gonna let him.

(26:28):
Just all take him home, right. I feel like the
odds aren't any worse that he gets blown up in
leads than sitting underneath his gas tank. So his mom
takes him back home, and this is the moment that Jimmy,
you can tell Jimmy says, this thinks this is the
moment that his life really begins, because once he gets
back home, all the men are away at war. At

(26:49):
this point, this probably would have been like forty forty one, right,
all of the men are away at war, and a
bunch of the older teenage boys who aren't old enough
to have been like drafted yet are working. Right. They're
taking over jobs that the grown men have are no
longer able to do, as are a lot of the women.
And there's shortages of everything. So first off, he is

(27:11):
kind of one of the only quote unquote men because
he's thirteen or fourteen. Now, that's in this era a
child starting to become recognized as a child. But if
you think back to it, if you go back a
generation or two, a fourteen year old is basically a
man in Western society. That's when you start working full time.

(27:31):
That's when people you are old enough to like run
a job and be living your life, and the concept
of a childhood doesn't sort of descend evenly upon society.
It is starting to at this period of time, but
it's also not very it's not weird that he's going
to be treated by a lot of adults as a
grown man, as a fourteen year old or as close

(27:53):
to a grown man, because all of the bigger grown
men are gone, right.

Speaker 4 (28:00):
Including his dad or is his dad still around?

Speaker 2 (28:02):
No, his dad is still around. His father's like old
enough that he's not going to get drafted. But he's
like working all the time and shit. Right, So because
the shortages of everything, a vibrant black market opens up
and Jimmy rushes straight to the middle of it. You know,
he was because of sort of his upbringing. I think
he was primed to be willing to get into a

(28:23):
business like that, and because everyone else is kind of gone,
he's able to start making money by, as he puts it,
we were all in the racket business then, which is
likely true. So he's he's hustling one way or the other.
He's finding things that people need, he's selling them for
high prices. He's like probably nicking stuff to resell. You know,
this is kind of the birth of him like starting

(28:46):
to become and live as an independent person. And he
gets into it basically as a war profiteer. You know,
as a fourteen year old war profiteer, which is interesting.
You know who else is a war profiteers and services?
Very possibly, we have no way of knowing. I would
say there's like a solid forty percent chance that whoever

(29:08):
is advertising this podcast right now is a war profit here.
And hey, somebody's got to make money off of wars.

Speaker 1 (29:15):
Okay, we're back.

Speaker 2 (29:23):
So Jimmy is making spare money hustling until one day
he decides to go buy the one of the big
local ballrooms, the Mecca Locrno Ballroom, which is like a
dance hall, right, and he sees that they need work
because again all the men are gone. He turns himself
into a gopher for the adults in leeds vibrant entertainment industry.

(29:44):
The city had recently been nicknamed Britain's City of Sin
by one Sunday paper, and working at the Mecca is
what gave Jimmy his real education. One that quote, and
this is from his autobiography, qualified me for every a
level that ever existed in hell. He is not really
hiding the fact that he's a scumback. Jimmy continues, not

(30:07):
yet five feet in height, as thin as a drumstick
with big eyes, ears and nose. I was everyone's mascot,
pet runner, holder of mysterious parcels and secrets because I
didn't understand the first thing about anything. I was the
confidante of murderers, whores, black marketeers, crooks of every trade,
and often of the innocent victims they preyed on. I
also played the drums. And he's you know, dressing that

(30:30):
up to make a better story, But this is probably
pretty accurate as to like what he's doing is he
is hanging out with a very bad crowd who are
making their living. Like there's a lot of prostitution that
gets run through this ballroom. There's a lot of like
sketchy stuff happening here. And because he's this kid, everyone's
kind of fine with him being in the room. Now.

(30:53):
He is also doing like a formal job there. The
Mecca was short on members for the bands because of
the war, so as Jimmy tells it, he became the
relief band for the whole establishment, getting paid ten shillings
a week to fulfill a fifty pounds a week job
and scrounging for cigarettes under the seats to make extra coin.
This was a very different time. That's like a good

(31:14):
way to make an extra money is let's find some
half smoked SIGs to sell to people. That tells you
how bad the Warriors were. That there's a good there's
a vibrant industry and cigarettes. People didn't finish, not.

Speaker 4 (31:26):
Even just for him yet to sell.

Speaker 2 (31:28):
Yeah, oh my god, yeah, to sell. He would finish
school at four and then rush to the Mecca to
perform for their afternoon shows. Then he'd have a couple
hours break, and then he'd do a second half hour
spot in the evenings. The relief band was just him
and a girl who played piano, and even in the
thirties and forties, this was not a legal arrangement. Quote

(31:50):
being hopelessly underage and therefore highly illegal. There were times
when I was persona non grata on stage. Don't come
in tomorrow, the manager would hiss, the directors are coming.
When the visiting boss asked where's the second band, the
suave reply never failed. There's a big air raid going
on in Hole or Doncaster or Halifax, and the relief
band is made up of fireman There were always lots
of fires.

Speaker 5 (32:10):
So he is.

Speaker 2 (32:11):
Illegally doing this and it's being justified as like, oh no,
the band's not here right now because they're putting out
fire from the bombs. Don't notice that it's like a
fourteen year old day.

Speaker 4 (32:22):
They're totally adults.

Speaker 2 (32:24):
They're totally adults, and it's a whole band. Now. That
is a fun, old timey tale of child labor, and
we love a good It is, honestly, as child labor
stories go. I don't know they have an issue with that.
I don't think it hurts a fourteen year old kid
for them to play the drums for an hour or
two and night. Right, that's not really that bad as
things go. But you can see what's happening here.

Speaker 5 (32:45):
Right.

Speaker 2 (32:46):
From almost the beginning of his life, Jim is drawn
towards entertainment, and from his first gig, he gets used
to the idea that your age doesn't matter, even if
there were laws against it, and that he's kind of special.
He's not subject to the rules, and that's bad for
a kid to learn. Right, that's going to have consequences.

(33:07):
Right now, Again, the adults around him don't find this
too strange because of the time that this is happening
in right, and Sapville also credits the way he's treated
the fact that he remained small and sickly. I was
like a chair or a table. People used to talk
in front of me because I didn't exist anybody who
had done anything wrong. I knew who had done it,

(33:27):
but nobody ever asked me. And one of Jimmy's great
strengths here is knowing when to keep his mouth shut
around crimes, a skill he would only master further as
an adult. Right knowing how to cover up when he's
aware that something illegal is going on. This is again,
a very very early thing that he learns how to
do now. He claims that his first date is at

(33:50):
age twelve, based again because he's also saying that this
is happening while he's working at the dance hall. That
can't be accurate based on when he was born and
when all of this happened, right, But he claims that
he goes on his first date when he's twelve with
a twenty year old and even if he's fourteen, a
fourteen year old and the twenty year old's pretty messed up,
Right with a twenty year old who worked at the

(34:10):
box office, He takes her out to a movie and
the two made out to some extent afterwards. If this
story is true, and again he's the only source on this,
and he's telling the story because he thinks it makes
him look cool, then Jimmy was molested as a child. Right.
But also he clearly if this happened at all, he
clearly didn't view it that way, and wrote proudly in

(34:31):
his autobiography that he learned based on this fooling around
in the dark. Quote, the ninety percent you can't see
is just as important as the ten percent you can.
These days, the percentage is reversed, but the principle is
the same. Right, this is his first lesson about girls.

Speaker 4 (34:47):
Oh my god, you can totally see how it started.
This is crazy.

Speaker 2 (34:51):
Yeah, it's crazy how much how open he is about this, right, totally.
So young, jim finds himself drawn to entertaining people, right,
particularly to performing on stage and to women, basically from
the time that he's a preteen up to the time
that he's like in his early adolescence. The other thing
he develops early on is a fascination with death, specifically corpses.

(35:14):
In his autobiography, immediately after describing his first date, he
discusses a time of great excitement for me when one
of the Mecca's lady patrons was discovered in several carrier
bags in a ditch. This woman had been chopped to
pieces and had murdered and chopped to pieces. Right, oh
my god. He talks about this grisly murder in a

(35:34):
way I've never heard anyone write about a murder. He
writes that quote. This was a whole new scene for me.
I could never work out why it was necessary to
cut her into bits. All right, well, that's an unhinged
way to describe. That's fucking wild.

Speaker 4 (35:49):
That's one of the most.

Speaker 3 (35:50):
Fucked up things I've ever heard.

Speaker 2 (35:52):
What you mean, what do you mean? It's way worse.
Jimmy Savile's relationship to dead bodies does not get healthier
after this point.

Speaker 3 (36:00):
What jesus, he's what like twelve thirteen?

Speaker 2 (36:03):
You said he's made. He's like fourteen, probably maybe something
like that. It's a little hard to tell. Again, yeah, young, Yeah,
it's fucking.

Speaker 3 (36:12):
Some fucking sick o. Shit.

Speaker 2 (36:15):
What's even weirder is this next bit Again, he's talking
about a woman being cut up after getting murdered. It
was all part of a strange adult world that I
never tried to understand, and even though I had a
good idea who'd done it, no one ever asked me. Besides,
I was far too excited about leaving school the following month.

Speaker 4 (36:34):
He didn't see this body cut out? Did it?

Speaker 2 (36:36):
He did? He's yeah, he did, and he's fascinated by it.
He really likes he witnessed them finding the corpse.

Speaker 4 (36:43):
Yes, yeah, okay, yeah, God, or at.

Speaker 2 (36:46):
Least that's what he how he describes it. It's a
little unclear, but I think so. And this must have
happened when he was fourteen, because he says he left
school the following month and that fourteen is when he graduated.
Right Again, you are kind of in some ways childhood
is start to be more kind of formalized understood. But
there are ways in which you're kind of an adult
at fourteen in this era, right, and he's going to

(37:06):
be treated like one in some ways. So after the
Dunkirk evacuations, everyone in his town had to put up
soldiers for a few days because there was no quartering
Act in the UK, right, which Savill describes as totally bizarre.
And both of his parents become like major activists in
terms of like supporting the war effort. His mom and

(37:27):
dad help organize this big fundraiser in Leeds where they
like gather a bunch of money from the local community
to help pay for the military to build bombers. And
there's a you know, they eventually they raise enough to
build two hundred and fifty bombers. And this is like
a huge story in the local papers. His parents are

(37:47):
in the newspaper and being praised for raising money for
this charitable cause. And that's going to stick with him too, right,
this is a big deal to Jimmy. His two older
brothers were both overseas serving by this point, and one
of them actually got trapped during the Siege of Malta.
Families all over town were receiving telegrams notifying them of
their dead sons and husbands with some regularity. Jimmy watched

(38:10):
all of this happen, but wrote later that quote, I
wondered why people wept during the war when their relatives
had been killed. I didn't even know what killed was.
I was much more inquiring than I was affected. And
that can't be true, right, because, like, you're not a
tiny kid at this point, bro. You were born in
nineteen twenty six, you're like fourteen or fifteen when this

(38:31):
is going on. You know what death is.

Speaker 4 (38:34):
Also, you just saw that lady chopped up, like you
totally know.

Speaker 2 (38:38):
It's greird to be like, I didn't understand why they
were sad that their son was killed. You know what
death is. You're fourteen, you're not like a four year old,
and he was writing about like being a six year
old and I didn't understand why. Well, yeah, that's not weird,
but this is weird. That's a weird thing for you
to say. And he does this a lot. He writes
and talks about the war years often and about his

(39:01):
cognition of what's happening as if he was a small
boy then, and he's not. He's a lateeen like young
adult while the war is going on. So that part's
really weird to me. I don't know what to say
about it other than he does that, and it's kind
of strange that he does that to me. In March
of nineteen forty one, he and his mom have to

(39:21):
run for cover during an air raid. A cop near
them was killed by the bomb, and after the raid,
Jimmy claims that he picked up a black glove with
a hand still inside it. In Davy's book In Plain Sight,
he writes, it is a morbid detail and one that's
savile savored. He's going to tell this story a lot
with a degree of relish, Like he's excited by this,

(39:43):
and you get the feeling that he's excited at the time. Again,
this is all going to be important much later on. Yeah,
he's not well, that's not a healthy reaction. From age
fifteen to sixteen, he just keeps working at the mech
and taking on odd jobs, mainly to provide his mom
with money for food, both of which earn him praise.

(40:05):
Right the fact that he's making money and the fact
that he's like an entertainer. He gets a lot of
praise early on from this. He also starts training with
the Army Air Corps because he's expecting he's got to
be like eighteen when the war ends. He's expecting to
be called up to the RAF in another year or
two when he's like sixteen or seventeen. Like, his expectation
is that he's going to serve. And many people would have,

(40:28):
no doubt been better off if he'd gotten sent to
the front and died some measureshment, but Jimmy had the
dubious luck instead to become a Bevin boy. So in
the early years of the war, British Minister of Labor
Ernst Bevin decreed that one in ten men between the
ages of eighteen and twenty five would be conscripted to
work in the coal mines rather than to fight at

(40:49):
the front. And it says eighteen to twenty five younger
boys got conscripted all the time, as happened in the military,
or not, or got got one way or the other
got in. And Jimmy not eighteen. I don't think when
he gets called in to be a bev And boy.
Although it's a little hard for me to say what
age he is, but he does this. This happens to him,
and this is a foundational part of the Jimmy Savill saga.

(41:13):
Although I can't actually tell you that this one hundred
percent happened, but we'll get to that. Here's a representative
sample of how this is usually described from a see
in an article. He was one of the surviving Bevin
Boys who received an award from the then British Prime
Minister Gordon Brown in two thousand and eight for helping
to keep the mines operational during the conflict, Saville suffered
serious spinal injuries in a mine explosion and left the colliery. Right.

(41:36):
And so that's the standard version of the story that
he does his duty to his country as a mining
boy when he's a teenager, and he eventually after a
couple of years gets horribly injured and you know, has
to leave. And this is a big part because he
he can honestly say when he's like a big entertainer,
I was a coal miner, right, Because a lot of Jimmy's,
a lot of Jimmy's appeal as an entertainer later will

(41:58):
be that he's a he's an authentic voice from the north.
He's a real man of the people, a common man.
He worked as a coal miner as a boy. Right now.
For his part, Jimmy simultaneously claimed to have enjoyed the
work in the minds and to have been haunted by it.
Quote the noise, the dark and dust, and the torn
fingers created an impression of hell that I will carry

(42:20):
to the grave. But he also writes that this is
the period of time in his life where he learns
quote the power of sheer oddness, because he's the weird kid,
and he's notably weird, like other people are kind of
weirded out by young Jimmy. And so he gets a
job most of the time that he's a Bevin boy.
He gets a job where he's basically alone in an

(42:42):
isolated chunk of the mine that periodically coal trucks will
come through and sometimes they get derailed, and so he
has to put them back on the tracks if they
get derailed. And so every day he just goes there
and he's sitting alone for like twelve hours or whatever
in a coal mine, like that's his job. And this
gives him a lot of time to read. This is
kind of when he claims he got his education basically,

(43:04):
because every day he'll come down and he'll turn on
his light and he'll read books all the time while
he's sitting alone in the coal mine. He spends he
claims three and a half years doing pretty much this.
He rarely socialized with his coworkers, and they seem to
have been repelled by him. In fact, Jimmy recalled one
specific moment where this became clear to him quote instinctively

(43:25):
regarded as strange by my mates. There came a day
when they drew apart from me, and I started to
draw apart from the normal world. It all started as
a joke on my part. And this is interesting. The
way he describes that is like, this is when I
drew apart from the normal world. Is really compelling to me.
So let's talk about this joke that he plays that
he thinks severs him from normal society. So one day

(43:47):
he shows up late for work, still dressed in his
best suit that he'd been wearing the night before. I
think he'd been out at the club or something like that,
and he had no time to change. So he goes
down wearing a suit, which perplexes his peers, right, because
you're going to ruin whatever you're wearing if you take
it into the coal mine. Now, because he doesn't want
to destroy his best suit once he gets into his

(44:08):
position down there, because he's spending the whole day alone,
he just strips naked and he wraps the suit in
newspaper and he works in the nude all day. Then
at the end of his shift, he like cleans his
face and his hands off and he puts the suit
back on, and so it appears as he walks out
that he's leaving the mine wearing a clean suit, looking
like he had when he'd gone down the start of

(44:31):
the day. Quote in the history of coal mining, no
one had spent eight hours underground and emerged clean, not
a smudge on the collar or cuffs. Witchcraft it may
not be, but unnatural it certainly was. And I was
branded from that moment, right, So, what's so weird, dude,
that's really odd? Jimmy madd shit. So Dan Davies, the

(44:52):
author of Endplane Sight Inner, asked him about this decades,
like sixty something years later, and when he asks Jimmy
about this moment and like why he did this, Saville responded,
I wasn't sure what it did, but it did develop
my out of the box thinking. I didn't do it
for any reason. I just realized that going back clean
would freak people out, and it did. I realized that

(45:14):
being a bit odd meant there could be a payday
that's going to be super important.

Speaker 4 (45:20):
That's so strange. I thought he was just trying to
save his suit.

Speaker 5 (45:24):
It's also weird that like he wants the body is
described in but then hell is coal mining.

Speaker 4 (45:31):
When he's reading a book, it's like, yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:34):
Well, some of that I think is just because he
wants to really judge up how difficult and even though
he seems to have had basically the best job you
could have now there, he really wants to like play
up because it's good for his later reputation. But I
don't think he's playing this bit up where he's talking
about this why he did this, that he just feels
a compulsion to freak people out and get a reaction.

(45:57):
You look as an entertainer, I get that that kind
of kid in some ways, right, Sometimes you did things
just to see how people react or just because you
wanted to get everyone.

Speaker 1 (46:06):
Laughing, right yeah, I mean jad Gas made a career
of it, right Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:11):
And it's interesting that he's his goal is not to
make everyone laugh. He wanted to freak people out, Like
you could see how a different person could have made
this a funny bit and like brought everyone in and
like this is something that could make your pals laugh
and could like have an impact on them. He wants
to scare them kind of. He wants to make them
to be upset with him and to feel like because

(46:31):
then they won't pay attention to him if they think
he's really weird. They'll give him a wide berth and
he'll get to continue doing his own thing alone. That's
something Jimmy is going to take from this experience, and
it's going to be with him his whole life. So
the war ended and the Bevin boys started deserting the
Minds because they didn't want to work in a mine anymore.
It sucks Davy's. His biographer, suspects that Savill was a

(46:54):
repeat work skipper even before the war ended, and basically
that he was never working as much as he should have.
He was kind of skipping out a lot of the time,
even from the jump. Now this is important because every
version of the Jimmy Savile story includes him being horribly
maimed in a mining accident, which is why he stops
doing the work. You know, However, I can't say that

(47:17):
this really happened or when it would have happened. He
gives different dates for when this mining accident happened every
time he talks about it. He claims to be a
different age when this happens every time he talks about it,
and he gives kind of differing accounts about how it happened.
His initial claims about how bad this injury was and
when it happened simply can't have been true because the

(47:39):
age he claims to have been when he was and
he says this is serious enough that he's basically unable
to move right for months, this can't have happened because
the age that he does that, we know that he
was participating in like a bike race through France, like
there was a postwar like a big bike marathon basically,
and we know he's in it, so it can't have happened.

(47:59):
Then it's really it's unclear to me what actually went
down here. I found a c in an article that
describes him as having suffered a serious spinal injury. And
Jimmy did keep a surgical support jacket that he said
he was made to wear as he was recuperating from
the injury, so he probably got hurt to some extent.
But again, the timelines he give us just doesn't work

(48:21):
with the things that we know that he was doing,
like participating in the first Tour of Britain cycle race
in nineteen fifty one. If he's injured when he claims
he was, and it was as bad as he claims
he was, it can't have happened. The way he said
it did because of the other things we know that
he was doing. So I don't know was he actually
hurt in a mining accident, did it was it a
minor injury or did he just stop going to work

(48:44):
one day and later lied about having been badly injured
in order to like, because that's a better story than
I just kind of abandoned mining. He said in two
thousand and eight that he'd been hurt after working for
seven years as a Bevin boy. And that's impossible. You know,
that's impossible because in nineteen forty eight he was in
a movie. He's like an extra in a film, and

(49:06):
that movie still exists, so you can see that he's
physically healthy. He's visibly very fit in the movie, Like
we know he wasn't in like traction from a spinal injury. Then,
during an interview in the nineteen eighties, Jimmy gave yet
another different story and claim that a chest cold got
him out of the pits in nineteen forty eight. I
think that's a lot likelier, right, just that like, oh,

(49:26):
I just kind of had the flu and stopped coming
into work and started doing other shit. That's a lot
more believable to me, there are some people who suspect
Jimmy Light entirely about being a Bevin boy. I think
that's unlikely, but he definitely didn't do the job as
long as he claimed. We know this because by the
late forties, after the war is over, he becomes an athlete.

(49:48):
He gets into really good shape. He's cycling all the time,
and he's eventually going to be like a professional athlete.
He's also on the side selling scrap with somebody. He's
got like a scra business. He's probably working with his
dad right before his dad passes on, and he does
some odd bits of agricultural labor. There's this like post

(50:08):
war government scheme where they're paying kids to like work
on farms to help get the country back up and
running after the war. Per Davy's book in Plain Sight quote,
it was on one such camp that he discovered his
talent for hypnotism, surprising him in those watching by persuading
an unsuspecting female victim out of her clothes. A sign
of the unpermissive times was that the room emptied. In

(50:29):
a second, he wrote, that's kind of the first story
Jimmy gives us of him doing something really sexually questionable
that like both he's studying hypnotism to get ladies to
take their clothes off, and that everyone else in the
room is really uncomfortable with what he's doing, right, and
he's like, ah, it's a sign of the times. We

(50:49):
were more repressed back then. No, Jimmy, that's just weird,
just like really uncomfortable, fucking weird dude.

Speaker 5 (50:55):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (50:56):
You know what else makes people uncomfortable?

Speaker 4 (50:59):
Products of services?

Speaker 2 (51:01):
Sometimes sometimes so. By the late nineteen forties, Jimmy's dad
is ill and dying, and that makes Jimmy increasingly the
breadwinner and emotional support for his mother, and he begins
to slip noticeably into the role of caring for her

(51:21):
beyond all of her other children. It was his mom
that tipped him off about one of the most significant
moments in his life. Some neighborhood kid had wired a
gramophone up to a radio, allowing you to basically get
kind of a proto DJ set going. This is like
the birth the early birth of like the turntable systems
that like DJs use now. Is like a gramophone we

(51:43):
hooked up to a radio to make it louder. So
Jimmy falls in love with this. He buys this thing
and he starts. He holds an event and sells tickets
to it. He has his mom make refreshments. He like
rents out a room at a social club owned by
the Catholic Church, and he's like doing what one of
the first DJ sets anyone would have ever done, right
where he's like putting on records and like picking what

(52:06):
songs are gonna come on at what time. This is
like very prehistory of DJing. DJing. Only about twelve people
show up, but Jim was electrified to see people dancing
to music that he picked for them. Quote. I felt
this amazing. Power is the wrong word. Control is the
wrong word. Effect could be nearer. What I was doing

(52:28):
was causing twelve people to do something. I thought, I
can make them dance quick, I can make them dance slow,
or I can make them stop. That one person, me
was doing something to all these people. And that's really
the thing that triggered me off and sustained me for
the rest of my days. That's really important.

Speaker 5 (52:46):
His ego is entirely too inflated for being a DJ.

Speaker 2 (52:51):
Are you kidding me? But it's interesting you talked to
I've had a lot of friends who were DJs. You
talked to most people who are into this, and they
he asked, what appeals to you, It's like the music.
They love music, they like dance, like there's something about
the art. Jimmy is always very clear he doesn't care
about the art. He is not at all interested. And
this is a creative endeavor. He likes being a DJ

(53:14):
because you get to make people do stuff. You are
controlling the emotions and mood and to an extent, the
movements of a group of people. The control is what
appeals to him about being a DJ. That's very upsetting.

Speaker 4 (53:27):
That's so strange. Yeah, take a hypnotist kind of continue.

Speaker 2 (53:31):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly exactly as Davis notes, and I
think is as obvious from that quote. Jimmy like the
art of what he's doing is kind of lost on him.
He's purely in this for power and control. So he
starts hosting more of these record dances, renting whatever venues
he could find, and occasionally running out halfway through a
set when his equipment broke. Because this isn't None of

(53:53):
this stuff works very well at the time. Now, this
is also the first time when he starts to write
about taking birds home from shows with him. He almost
exclusively in his autobiography and in his personal writings refers
to girls and women as birds. Right, that's the term
he uses, and he uses it constantly.

Speaker 4 (54:11):
Well, it is common at the time.

Speaker 2 (54:14):
Very common at the time, very common. He keeps doing
it through the seventies and eighties, nineties, which is weird,
but at the time. Again, that's part of the story
is when this starts, it's not so weird. He's a
teen young adult at the time, when he's seventeen eighteen.
The fact that he's taking sixteen, seventeen, sometimes fifteen year
old girls like home from the club at night isn't

(54:34):
the weirdest thing in the world, right, Like it, it's
not considered too strange by any of the people because
he's right in that age bracket more or less, right,
he is a teenager too at the start of this,
and so it's not seen as super odd. And part
of what's interesting to me is that Jimmy never kind
of gets out of that mind state, right of like

(54:55):
the one that he has when he's like an eighteen
year old, right, And it's a poortant you know that
he goes down this road very early. Now, we don't
actually know when this starts to happen, when he starts
DJing and you know, fucking taking girls home from these
shows that he's doing, because by realistic calculation, it should
have been around nineteen forty eight, forty nine or fifty
maybe even fifty one, but Jimmy would sometimes say these

(55:17):
shows took place in forty three or forty four, So
I can't take any of the dates here too, Seriously,
it's just impossible for me to know. But by his
late teens to early twenties, Jimmy is playing shows as
a DJ. He's not making a lot of money at
this though, but like he gets obviously he's interested in
it because of the benefits that it brings him. That said,

(55:38):
because it's not making money for him, he decides to
try his hand at being a pro cyclist. He'd always
liked cycling, he'd been into it as a kid, and
this is when cycling started to take off as a
competitive sport in the post war period, and he gets
really into that, and he was actually pretty good at
cycling for a while. He competed reasonably well. He never
wins any major races, but he fit second in a

(56:00):
big one in nineteen fifty.

Speaker 3 (56:02):
I just like, I'm sorry, I have to say it.
It's like, Okay, I was like seventeen, I worked as
at a restaurant.

Speaker 4 (56:10):
I carried theod to the tables, but like that's.

Speaker 3 (56:12):
Not what I was into. And so I it's like
it's like if I was just like and I became
a professional basketball player, Like what, yeah, Like what I.

Speaker 2 (56:22):
Mean, it's it's not it's a It's a part of
what he's doing here is in this post war period,
there's a bunch of open places, right. Cycling has just
started becoming a competitive sport. So it's just some dude
you can kind of slide in and if you're okay
at cycling, maybe make a life of it. And it's
going to be the same in the music industry, the
same as a DJ. Like he is looking for places.

(56:44):
He's looking for things that where there might be money
and where it's not. It's a new thing, so like
it's not really been ironed out how this business is
supposed to work. It hasn't ossified yet, so it's easy
for him to get in, and it's easy for him.
Was like, yeah, I'm a professional cyclist and then I.

Speaker 3 (57:08):
Walked into a room and I got my first job.

Speaker 4 (57:10):
I had experience.

Speaker 3 (57:12):
That's the and now I'm a pajillionaires of the post.

Speaker 2 (57:17):
War experience for a lot of assholes in a nutshell. Now,
Jimmy's never super committed to the competitive side of racing.
I think he likes it because there's a lot of girls,
right uh. In fact, he loses one race because he
and his buddy, as they're cycling passed, see some girls
having lunch by, like you know, in a park or something,

(57:38):
and they decide to stop and flirt with them, and
so everyone else passes them. He regularly flexs the power
of his oddness here too. He starts doing that. In
his cycling days, he would do shit like he would
show up for races wearing a full tuxedo and he
would hire someone to like run up for everyone else's
pre race. He's got his tucks on, and he hires

(57:58):
someone to run up with like a tray in a mirror,
so he can like freshen up and get like make
himself look nice while everyone is like prepping for the race.
He's doing this as a bit, and he's doing this
because it makes him stand out. One of his buddies
later said of him, he was a good writer, but
he was never a great writer. He was a real character. However,
some of the other writers thought he was a bloody fool,

(58:20):
and he was a buffoon at times. In fact, his
buffoonery is gonna be what takes him further than the cycling,
because he's never good enough to really make a living
as a professional cyclist. But he does. He does become famous,
even though he's never one of like the guy's winning races.
He's one of the most famous cyclists of his day

(58:40):
because of his bizarre behavior. He gets his first nickname,
Oscar the Duke Seville. He registers as Oscar Seville for reasons,
or Oscar Savill for reasons that I don't know. But
he gets his nickname the Duke because he finishes the
race while smoking a cigar, imitating Winston Churchill. As Jimmy
later said, I was forever with the gimmicks before gimmicks

(59:02):
had ever been invented, and someby's gonna show you a
shirt from not too much later in this period of time,
there's Jimmy with a cigar. He's always got his hair
like that. It's he's this is a young British man
with a cigar in his mouth and like long shock
white straight hair, like clearly like bleached white hair. It's

(59:23):
really strange. No one else looked like Jimmy Saville, like
at any real point in his life. And he dies
like again, I hate doing the Wow, that guy looks
like a pedophile thing. But that guy looks You wouldn't
trust that guy with you kids, right, that's again there's
something dangerous about that.

Speaker 3 (59:43):
It's a very off putting looking person. One thing's for
sure is our colleagues, James Stout, former cyclist, also British.
This is like opposite day. James Stout is evil James, Yes,
evil James and like and one thing I know about
James is James fucking hates this guy.

Speaker 2 (01:00:02):
We've never spoken about it. I mean you really hate
this guy. Oh yeah, got started with the evil. He
hasn't even done anything all that evil yet. He's just
done some really weird and upsetting things photo deeply bad.
Sorry yeah, like fucked up bangs. I don't know how
to describe it to you other than fucked up.

Speaker 4 (01:00:21):
Man.

Speaker 2 (01:00:21):
So Jimmy's proud appeal vastly exceeds his actual skill on
a bike, and race promoters noticed this, and after a
match in which he showed up hungover and collapsed mid race,
he's offered a job. They're like, look, Jimmy, clearly cycling
isn't going to work out for you, but everyone loves you.
You're like one of the maybe the most popular cyclist
we have. How about trying your hand at being a

(01:00:43):
race commentator? Do you want to be the guy who like,
like talks about what's happening basically right? And as Jimmy said,
it turned out I was a natural ad lib broadcaster
and this is going to be his the big break
that leads to everything else that we're going to talk
about in these episodes. But that is the end of
part one. Courtney Kosak, how are you feeling?

Speaker 4 (01:01:04):
Who? What an exciting episode?

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
Yeah, we've just kind of got the Jaws music going.
You know something? Really, you know this is going to
a terrible place.

Speaker 5 (01:01:15):
I do recognize him based on that photo that you showed.

Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
He is a very and if you did, you see
the sequel to twenty eight years later, The Bone Temple. No,
oh man, there's a reason so all of the bad
guys in that movie are dressed like and aping Jimmy's savile.
And there's a reason for it because that movie. You
haven't seen it. I love it. The whole film is

(01:01:40):
an extended critique of Thatcherism, and there's a very good
reason why the psychotic like murderous villains are dressed like
Jimmy Savill. But we'll talk about all that later. Courtney,
you want to plug anything before we roll out here?

Speaker 5 (01:01:53):
Well, I want to plug Sophie's facial expressions during this episode.

Speaker 2 (01:01:58):
Excellent, they were.

Speaker 4 (01:02:00):
So good, such a good compliment to yours. And also, guys,
by my fucking book.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
You'll like it.

Speaker 4 (01:02:06):
It's called Girl Gone Wild?

Speaker 2 (01:02:07):
Yeah, yeah, yeah? What else are you doing nothing? Buy
your book? Wow? Mm hmm.

Speaker 3 (01:02:15):
I don't know should we should we continue, should we
record part two? Or should we just take a break
and just like I'll read Girl Gone Wild?

Speaker 2 (01:02:23):
I don't know, I'm going to take a break. I'll
read the entirety of Courtney's book and then we'll come
back in like four minutes. How's that sound perfect?

Speaker 3 (01:02:31):
Great?

Speaker 2 (01:02:32):
Great? Great? All right, everybody, We'll be back Thursday with
some stuff that's really going to upset you.

Speaker 1 (01:02:38):
Good night, Behind the Bastards is a production of cool
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