Part Three: Jimmy Savile: Britain's Unending Nightmare

Now Jimmy Saville is at the top of the world: he's become a radio and TV star and found his way into the Royal family's good graces. Now we see what he does with power and access.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the
very worst people in all of history. We are starting
our second week, parts three and four on one of
the bastardist bastards we'll ever do on this show, Jimmy Savile,
British broadcaster and pedophile extraordinaire, and to talk with me

(00:25):
about the latter and worst parts of Jimmy's life and
career as a fucking monster, the Great Courtney Coosak. Welcome back, Courtney.

Speaker 1 (00:33):
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 2 (00:35):
Yeah, thanks for being on. And you've got a book,
a book that we talked about in the first two parts,
but are going to plug again.

Speaker 1 (00:42):
Dear God, if you guys haven't already bought my book,
please do. It is close Girl Gone Wild. It is
about trying to make it in Hollywood. It's an unwitting
feminist coming of age and it's the perfect antidote to
what you're about to hear right.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Now, Beautiful. Well, I guess we can't delay it anymore.
So last episode we kind of ended by talking about
one of the girls that Jimmy impregnated. She was this

(01:17):
one was sixteen. There's a number I came across at
least two stories, and the I mean at least two
direct stories and insinuations of a lot more. I don't
think we'll ever have an idea of how many girls
he impregnated. I'm gonna guess often taught. Generally they had
stories like the lady we talked about where they get
an illegal abortion, they have health consequences afterwards, like that's

(01:39):
a I think probably how a lot of these went.
I'm gonna guess Jimmy paid for a good number of
those over the years. But the same year that happened,
which is nineteen sixty four, the London Metropolitan Police received
a report about a flat in London that was being
used to pimp out children little girls who is not
little girls. I think they were mostly like in teens,

(02:00):
but girls who were in many cases underage, who had
escaped from a nearby facility. For I wrote for a
facility for female juvenile offenders. That's not entirely accurate. It
was called the Duncroft Approved School, and we'll talk about
it more later, but it's some of these girls got
in legal trouble, you know, committing some sort of crimes,

(02:21):
will underage. Some of them are just have behavioral problems.
This place seems to be a mix of like a
juvenile reform school and a place kind of one of
those like troubled teen camps that parents send their kids
too if they're not obeying enough.

Speaker 3 (02:35):
Right.

Speaker 2 (02:36):
And so some of these girls are escaping from the
Duncroft School and they're winding up at this flat where
they're being pimped out as child prostitutes. And the London
Met bust this place in nineteen sixty four, and in
their notes at the time there's like detectives right that
Jimmy Savill was a repeat visitor to the home while
it was operational as a pedophile. Broad right, they don't

(03:02):
go after him or anything. He doesn't get charged with anything.
There's like, oh, Jimmy Savile's going to this brothel for
children an office.

Speaker 1 (03:10):
Famous teenage brothel.

Speaker 2 (03:12):
Wow, yeah, yeah, this brothel for teenage girls who have
gotten in trouble with the law. Interesting, not worth looking
and do further. So that does, though, beg the question
how did he get away with this? And Davies gives
us a good idea of how in his book in
Play in Sight, when he describes an interview where Jimmy
discussed one time that he nearly got arrested because and

(03:34):
Jimmy's telling this to a reporter as like for laughs basically,
and he talks about this too. We're like, well, there's
always these a lot of underage girls hanging out around
my office. And I got in trouble at some point,
like someone called the police about it because they thought
it was suspicious, and so I had to sit down
for an interview with the police chief. And I told him,
you know that your sixteen year old daughter comes in here,
don't you would you rather she was safe with me

(03:55):
or being preyed on by all those scumbacks and slags?

Speaker 1 (03:58):
What again?

Speaker 2 (04:00):
Tell the journalist this, and I think, like the seventies
of the eighties, He's just like, yeah, you know, people
get angry at me for all the underage girls I
hang out around, but some of them are the children
of cops.

Speaker 1 (04:09):
You know. I'm just here to protect him.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
I'm here to keep them safe. They get into trouble
if they weren't around. Jimmy Savil, Oh my god, gosh.
Good times. So Roger Holt, Roger, Yeah, not good times.
Roger Holt was a record industry ad man in like
the sixties and seventies. He's he's a guy like basically
helping to there's a lot of paola going on in

(04:33):
this period of time in the record industry. So his
job is basically to bribe big DJs into playing specific
records or specific songs, right. And there's a number of
ways that they would do this. Sometimes you're just you know,
giving him gifts or hooking them up with, you know,
concert tickets they can give out on the air. Sometimes
it's more direct, we're bribing people. As we've talked about,

(04:53):
some of these DJs are getting bribed in girls. Right.
Not that I'm saying Holt did that. I don't know
what Holt did specifically, but he's a record industry ad
man during this period of time, and he visited Saffle's
Radio one office regularly throughout the sixties. He would later
tell Davies that the DJs love for young girls was
an open secret quote I heard through his office just

(05:16):
in conversation. Jimmy's added again that's how people would talk
about him molesting teenagers. This did not strike anyone. It
struck people as a bit odd. They're talking about it obviously, right,
I don't think it was odd for DJs to I mean,
it certainly wasn't uncommon for DJs to be in like

(05:39):
close quarters with sixteen and seventeen year old girls, which
again was legal at the time. But it's notable that
Jimmy is exclusively going for girls that age and younger,
as opposed to that just being a thing, which I'm
not saying it's okay when it was the thing that
happened sometimes for guys, but people that time are like, wow,
Jimmy really prefers them really young, often illegally.

Speaker 1 (05:59):
So didn't just slip through the cracks.

Speaker 2 (06:02):
Right right, So yeah, what's important is you understand that
Jimmy's love of young girls was seen as noteworthy and
talked about, but was far from an aberration within his
professional circles and certainly wasn't seen as like a reason
to discipline him or look into it any further. What
made Jimmy weird, and the thing people did note about
him at the time is that he doesn't he's not

(06:24):
into the social side of the music business. Most people
who are like DJs or record engineers are like hanging
out with other people in the business, right, They like
like the culture around it, and they're interested in like
the creative aspect of it too, Like they like making music,
and they like they're interested in how music gets made.
Jimmy's not interested in any of that, and he's not

(06:46):
interested in like socializing with his colleagues. In fact, he
has almost no relationship with other DJs, which is seen
as kind of weird. As mister Holt told an interviewer,
he was just a very strange person. You couldn't really
have a conversation with him. I used to see him
at Top of the Pops and I didn't talk to
him unless I had to go to his dressing room.
When I had to go to his dressing room, the
last time I was there, there weren't any young girls

(07:07):
in there, but there were a lot of his mates
that I thought were as weird as he was. There
was definitely a click in that dressing room. Now he's
just saying the last time he visited, it wasn't a
bunch of girls, it was his friends. Weird friends. What
kind of clique do you think Jimmy Saffle's hanging out
with if it's not other DJs?

Speaker 4 (07:25):
Right, I mean, the word is click first of all.

Speaker 2 (07:29):
Okay, you can say it's a click, but thank you.

Speaker 1 (07:35):
So.

Speaker 2 (07:35):
My interpretation of the evidence I have is that Jimmy's issue,
one of Jimmy's issues with his fellow dj he has
a couple issues with his fellow DJs. One is they're
really reckless, Like they're not careful at all about the
Kola stuff. Oh they're not like you know, remember that
speech he gave about being clever versus being tricky. I
think he would say they were clever and he's tricky,

(07:58):
and he didn't want to hang out with the clever
guys because he knew the clever guys were gonna get
busted being clever, whereas he doesn't want to get busted,
so he's gonna stay tricky.

Speaker 1 (08:07):
Now.

Speaker 2 (08:07):
The other side of that, what I think is also
accurate and probably more worth mentioning, is that most of
those DJs are having sex with teenagers kind of you know,
it's not the whole point. It's like a bit. It
gets a side part of what they're doing. And their
lives are not.

Speaker 4 (08:23):
Sexually assaulting children, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:25):
Well they are sometimes, but it's not their primary motivating fact.
Jimmy's primary motivating factor is being able to sexually assault children.

Speaker 5 (08:33):
So the fuck is in his clique?

Speaker 2 (08:37):
Great question. We know that one of his close friends
as early as nineteen sixty six was a member of
the British Royal family, and in fact, the person who
introduces Jimmy to the British Royal family, Lord Lewis Mountbatten,
like the.

Speaker 6 (08:53):
Lord matted, like like.

Speaker 4 (08:56):
Prince Philip, like father figure to kick.

Speaker 1 (08:59):
Charles like, yeah, that's his name, that's his real name.

Speaker 2 (09:04):
Oh yeah, the Lord mount Batton, Yes, that was his
name was. We'll talk about that in a second, so
me mount Batten.

Speaker 7 (09:10):
Whoa oh yeah, oh yeah, they were They introduce Jimmy
to the family.

Speaker 4 (09:16):
Lunch clubs together and shiit, what's the vibe.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
We'll talk about what they might have been doing together,
because these are the royals, you know, we don't have
perfect information about what was going on behind the scenes,
but mount Baton introduces him to people like Prince Andrew,
who's been in the news lately, and of course Prince Charles.
Discuss all that later, but let's talk about Lord mount
Batten for a moment, right. So he dies in nineteen

(09:40):
seventy nine. He again, he and Jimmy meet in.

Speaker 4 (09:43):
Nineteen so this guy is do you know how he
dies and shit like, oh.

Speaker 2 (09:47):
Yeah, yes, he gets blown up by the IRA on
a boat in nineteen seventy nine. Because Lord Mountbatten was
rerored by the.

Speaker 4 (09:54):
US FBI also on that boat, Rob.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
That part maybe not nailed it perfectly, but you did
note that there were children on the boat, Sophie. Lord
Mountbatten was rumored to be a pedophile on a massive scale. Yeah,
which is not ideal. So yeah, you were saying something, Courtney.

Speaker 1 (10:15):
This is so this is Philip's dad.

Speaker 7 (10:18):
No father figure, no, no, no, not father figure, not direct,
but but he he does take the mount Baton name Philip.

Speaker 2 (10:26):
Yes he does, right, I'm not an expert on the Royals,
but it's mount Batton who is introduces Jimmy to the
family and mount Baton is rumored by the FBI before
his death to be a pedophile and a like a
major pedophile. The website Irish Central quotes from an interview
with Anthony Daly, who worked as a rent boy for
London's upper crust in the seventies. That means he was

(10:49):
a young male prostitute for like rich guys in London
in the seventies and he recalled quote Mount Batten had
something of a fetish for uniforms. Handsome young men in
military uniforms with high boots and beautiful boys in school uniforms.
Great stuff. Now, I don't know that Mount Batten and
Jimmy Saville hit it off because they love molesting boys together.

(11:09):
I don't have evidence of that, but we know Saville
loved to molest boys as well as girls, very getting
down to very young boys. These stories did not come
out as early as the reports of Saville abusing and
having sex with teenaged girls, right, but they do come
out later in life, and we have quite a bit
of evidence of this. And one of these accounts, which

(11:31):
comes from the book In Plain Sight, is particularly horrifying
because it comes from Guy Marsden, who was Jimmy Saville's nephew.
He was one of Savill's older sister sons. And he
runs away as a teenage boy after repeated trouble with
the law. He's just one of these kids who gets
in trouble and he and like three of his friends
hitchhike to London. I'm guessing they lived around Leeds or something,
just based on where the family comes from, and they

(11:54):
spent their first days bumming around Euston Station, which they
didn't know at that point in time was a common
pick cup point for men seeking other men or sometimes boys.
After several hours waiting around, one man offered to put
Marsden and his friends up at a flat nearby. They
came over and these guys are, you know, chilling at
this flat. You have to assume paying with their bodies,

(12:17):
you know, for privileged somewhat, but that's what's going on.
And after a couple of days of this, Jimmy Savile
shows up. Now guy is terrified at first because he
assumes his uncle has been sent there to bring him
home and probably knock him around a bit, right, Like
he thinks he's in trouble. And instead Jimmy's like surprised
to see them. And it's basically like, hey, why don't
you guys come with me? And I'm going to quote

(12:37):
now from end plain sight. Marsden claimed that Uncle Jimmy
moved the runaways into a house over the ensuing weeks.
He also took the boys to a number of parties.
There were no women at these soirees, only men and children.
Marsden maintained that he realized immediately what sort of parties
they were. One of the houses he described as being
particularly memorable. The big feature of it were when you
went in the swimming pool. He explained. It were a

(12:59):
room with a big swimming and it were so inviting.
Everybody used it and we're diving into it. It had
lights in it, it was lit up. It was unbelievable.
All you wanted to do was stay there forever. Marsden
said he believes the house belonged to a famous pop
impresario at the time. Don't know who that is. Might
have a couple theories. So what this is is some

(13:20):
of the better evidence that I found so far to
suggest that Jimmy Savill was not just a guy who
abused a lot of kids at scale, but was part
of an or several organized networks of child abuse and exploitation.

Speaker 4 (13:33):
He's sex drafting children, yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:36):
He's and he's part of like a club of guys
who were doing that. And because these kids.

Speaker 7 (13:42):
Sexually assaulting and sex trafficking children in a coort organized way,
is what you're saying.

Speaker 2 (13:49):
Yes, yes, and that's that is what this account suggests.
And there's there's some other things that suggest this too.
But yeah, this is not a thing where like we
have perfect this has not been export for example, the
extent that like the Epstein networks have been, in part
because this stuff doesn't really start coming out until so
much later. But what Marsden alleges is that these kids,

(14:11):
some of these kids are being molested by the rich
and famous men who attend the parties, not actually like
most of them necessarily, which is an interesting point and
I'm gonna explain that in a bit. But Marsden claims
that quote from time to time, they the boys were
led into rooms with adult males. Noises could be heard
coming from inside. None of these kids were stressed. It
was as though they were really really enjoying what they

(14:32):
were doing. That's the sad part, really, and that's not
as strange as it sounds. These are all very poor kids.
Many of them have been kicked out of their homes
for being queer. These kids are living on the street,
They are eating basically by prostituting themselves, and have probably
in general probably have been abused and raped and molested

(14:53):
quite a few times. And this is still more of that.
But the difference is now these boys are getting paid,
they're spending all of their time they're living when they're
not participating in these parties at these various mansions and palaces.
So they're getting to live. These kids who have been
on the street are getting to live that one percent

(15:13):
er lifestyle at the price of being repeatedly raped. That's
what's happening here, and it says a lot about the
desperation of their lives that a lot of these kids
at the time are like, Okay, this is a worthwhile
trade in for me. Right now, after some time at
any one location, they would be put in a car
and taken to a new location. Some parties would go
on for days and would involve multiple different venues. Now,

(15:36):
per Marsden's account, a lot of, if not most, of
the boys aren't being molested, and that's for a reason.
The kids whoul attend these parties range in ages up
to their late teens, so anywhere from six to ten
years old, and Marsden says most of the kids who
were taken into rooms to be abused by adults were
six to ten years old. Right, the older teens aren't

(15:59):
being as often molested, according to Marsden's account, and he
says he was never abused himself. Maybe he's lying about that,
but I he provides a pretty decent explanation as to
why that would be. As he posited, quote, someone must
have had an idea that we would be a good
intermediary for these kids. It might have stressed them if
there were only adult men. So you've got the older

(16:22):
teens there, so the younger boys don't think this is
weird and don't get as scared, and so they can
kind of be like, just go do it, It'll be fine.
You know. The older teen boys are getting something out
of this too. That's kind of what's happening here.

Speaker 1 (16:36):
Wait, so that was my job on the Girl's Gone
Wild tour was just to be the girl, so the
other girls felt comfortable on the bus sadly.

Speaker 7 (16:44):
Wait, Roberts, so you're saying, so what are the ages
of these boys? Their ages anywhere from what to what?

Speaker 2 (16:51):
The kids being molested, he says, are generally six to ten.
Marsden I think was more like fifteen or sixteen, and
the older teen boys are anywhere, like, you know, eleven
or twelve to like you know, sixteen, seventeen years old.
Probably would be seventeen be probably the oldest so all.

Speaker 7 (17:06):
Of these boys are being sexually abused, even if they
aren't aware that they're being sexually abused, because they're being
taken advantage of by adults.

Speaker 2 (17:15):
They're all being abused. They're not all being physically sexually abused.
According to Marsden. Oh so the older boys are there,
Like there's like it's abusive to put a sixteen year
old in a situation where they're like encouraging an eight
year old to go get molested in order to have
a roof over their head. That's a fundamentally abusive thing.
But they're not necessarily being physically molested because their purpose

(17:36):
is to be there to normalize the situation for the
kids who are the real targets. Right, That's what Marston describes,
And that makes sense to me. I mean, like, as
you said, Courtney, there's yeah, like it's I don't doubt this.

Speaker 1 (17:49):
Account understood makes sense.

Speaker 2 (17:52):
So again his account is not that Savill is like
the organizer or the main guy behind it. He's just
a member of this network of very elite pedophiles. Right.
These guys are very wealthy, they have massive properties. They're
probably often doing this like miles away from civilization, a
lot of this is happening on these big English estates

(18:15):
where you're kind of a law into yourself. You know,
you're going to go run to the cops out there.
You're in the middle of pasture land and shit, right,
there's like forests and stuff. Some of these properties have
thousands of acres to them. So and we see in
this and the way this is set up an echo
of how Savill abused the young, like the teenage girls

(18:36):
who were like fans of pop music who came to him.
Most of the girls who showed up outside of his
office or went to shows and hung out with him
before and after shows are not being molested by him.
He doesn't quote unquote pick most of them. And that
fact helps to hide what's going on and make it
seem believable that this is normal and acceptable because most

(18:57):
of the girls you talk to be like, oh yeah,
Jimy's a little weird, but it's fine because they're not
all the target. Right. Does that all make sense in
terms of like how he's structuring this abuse.

Speaker 1 (19:08):
Very sophisticated pedophelia.

Speaker 2 (19:12):
To get away with it as long as he was,
you have to be good at it, you know. He's
also lucky. He benefits from it for a lot of reasons.
But like he's set this up for this way for
a reason, because it works. So Marsden says he never
saw his uncle abuse any boys at these parties. I
don't know. Maybe he didn't. Maybe he was primarily at
the parties to get access or to get favors for

(19:34):
other things. Maybe he's just not into it in that venue.
We know he abused young boys. I think the youngest
I've heard of was five, So we know he abused
young boys, but he may not have done it at
these particular parties for some reason. Maybe this is just
something he saw as useful to like facilitate the moving
of his career. Right. So again, we know he bonds
with Lord Mountbatten in sixty six. We know in sixty

(19:57):
six he's doing stuff like this. We know Lord mount
Matton's probably doing stuff like this. My guess is that
this is how they've become friends, right, And we do
know there's also versions of these parties that are being
held with teenaged girls and a different set of rich
and famous creeps right where there's no boys, but there's
rich and famous men. And then there's like fourteen to

(20:19):
seventeen year old girls. Right, we also know that version
and probably younger. We know that version.

Speaker 3 (20:24):
VOT.

Speaker 2 (20:25):
There's parties like that going on too, I say, yeah, yeah, anyway,
none of this weirdness, none of the fact that's going on,
is enough to get the BBC to shy away from Jimmy.
You know, there's rumors around him, people talk about him
liking him young. He makes some comments about that fuck
is wrong. BBC doesn't give a shit. Oh, they don't
give a fuck about any of this.

Speaker 1 (20:46):
He is.

Speaker 2 (20:46):
In fact, they're going to be a major engine of
abuse for Jimmy Savil. The BBC doesn't isn't just he's
not just a BBC employee who abuses people. He utilizes
the resources of the BBC to aid him in abusing people.
That's a major part of this story. At the start
of the nineteen seventies, they give him a radio one show,
Savell's Travels, which also turns into a BBC TV show.

(21:09):
I think it's called Savill's Yorkshire Travels. I think there's
a couple. I don't understand the BBC's weird A lot
of these shows aren't really archived in full anymore so
I but he does both. It's a radio show that
comes like a TV.

Speaker 7 (21:22):
Watch this really odd guy go to places.

Speaker 2 (21:24):
He lives in a caravan, which is like an RV
or trailer basically, and he's traveling around the country talking
to people. You know, it's like his Anthony Bourdain type deal. Right,
That's that's what people are getting out of it.

Speaker 4 (21:36):
I don't like, I don't like that person.

Speaker 2 (21:40):
It's not great. I'm not not in that, but like
that's the kind of the appeal is he's like this
regular guy. He's showing you the regular guy's view of
these different places in Yorkshire or wherever. So that starts
in like the at the beginning of the seventies. Now,
by the start of that decade, Savill had already established
a strong reputation as a charitable fundraisers. We've said, anytime

(22:02):
he's doing events, he's often having his salary donated to
charity's you know, he starts raising money. There's this thing
people are doing sometimes where like you'll push someone in
like a wheelchair for a distance and you know people
will like pave It's like these different kind of like
you know, run for cancer type charities. You know, he's
doing some stuff like that. In nineteen seventy one, he

(22:24):
participates in his most ambitious charity drive yet, an eight
hundred and seventy six mile walk, and he's he does
this with his Savals travels motor pool traveling behind him.
So he's like sleeping in the caravan at night, and
he's walking all day and people are like joining him
at varying points on the march. This is like a
thirty one day event, and he's never really alone during this.

(22:46):
He's constantly being followed by people. Sometimes, like people who
are in wheelchairs show up and he'll push them for
a while hundreds of folks march alongside them. Jimmy wrote
in his column the next week, quote, I've wheeled cripples
along in wheelchairs who didn't want to be like I've
pushed prams with assorted babies in I've slowed down to
a shuffle with a ninet year old lady gripping my arm,
and sped up fleet footed downhill with an entire youth

(23:07):
club tailing behind, like Hayley's comment. And this actually ends
with one of his first direct things with the fucking
British Royal Marines, which we're not going to talk about
enough in these episodes, But the Royal Marines like show
up to march with him. At the end of his march,
he does a lot of events with them. He becomes
an honorary member of the Royal He loves the fucking
Royal Marines. It's a proud, proud part of the history

(23:34):
of the Royal Marines is Jimmy Stavile got to be
a member. Great stuff.

Speaker 1 (23:39):
Wow, speaks full of the organization.

Speaker 3 (23:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (23:42):
Yeah. He does a lot of lung He does a
lot of marathons, He does a lot of marches for charity,
does a lot of wheelchair pushes, all of these to
raise money for good causes. Savill continued to make outrageous
demands when he would agree to participate in these events,
as he had earlier in his career. During a fundraiser
where he pushed a patient in a wheelchair from Rochester
to Bromley, Saville admitted to press that he'd given this

(24:04):
demand to the event organizer. Find me a blonde teenage
bird who lives in a house with the drive so
I can park outside, so she can wake me up
in the morning with tea at eight o'clock. The organizer agreed.
This is just in the press. God, oh, Jimmy, he
loves those blonde teenage birds.

Speaker 1 (24:21):
You know.

Speaker 2 (24:21):
But he's doing good. He's raising so much money for
good causes. You know, why be angry at him for
being just a little bit odd, right, He couldn't possibly
be hurting anybody you know who else? Oh?

Speaker 5 (24:33):
Sorry, because he's a petophile.

Speaker 2 (24:36):
Sorry yeah, yeah, transition you know who's not a That's
not a good ad pivot anyway, Let's forget I tried
to do that.

Speaker 1 (24:45):
Here's some ass I.

Speaker 2 (24:46):
Am we'd back. So, after committing or committing completing his
nearly nine hundred mile march, was awarded the Order of
the British Empire or ob which is just a step
under knighthood. Now, this entitled him to sign his name

(25:09):
Jimmy Savile Obe, which he does on his subsequent autobiography
that comes out not long after this, and interviews at
the time. He is vocally thrilled by the recognition, which
elevated him to a level of social respectability other DJs
simply lacked. Here's a photo of him after his investiture
at Buckingham Palace. There's Jimmy savill Obe. He's got like

(25:29):
a normal suit on for once in his fucking life.
And he's got this big metal they give you when
you get the obe. He's smoking one of his cigars.
He's got a fucking pinky ring on and the top
hat and his his fucking peroxide white hair, just his
hair like no business around teenage making.

Speaker 5 (25:45):
Making the pinky ring look bad and shit like it's
fucked up.

Speaker 2 (25:48):
Oh yeah, it's not a darker part of Pinky Ring history.
Pinky Ring history and Royal Marine Corps history both both
not low points of both. So Savill's Yorkshire Travels, his
like TV show version of this radio thing hits the air.
In nineteen seventy two, just before that happened. Per the book,

(26:08):
in Plane Sight, the body of fifteen year old Claire
McAlpin was discovered by her mother, surrounded by empty pill
bottles and a red diary. In her diary, she had
obviously committed suicide, and in her diary she repeatedly mentioned
the sex that she had had with top BBC disc
jockeys that she had met while dancing for Top of
the Pops. And again, she's fifteen, This is underaged, this

(26:30):
is statutory rape. That's what she's writing. About multiple disc
jockeys at Top of the Pops at the BBC's hit
show Top of the Pops rape this girl. Saville is
believed to be one of them, Like we know he
was one of them, right, But he mostly stays out
of the fallout around this story because by this point
he's expanded beyond just being a DJ. So the actual

(26:54):
like scandal around Claire MacAlpin's suicide and around all of this,
and it's not just her. There's a couple of other
girls that they find out were being trafficked basically to
BBC disc jockeys as part of like a Paola scam.
And that's the primary thing that blows up into a scandal,
is that a lot of these like DJs who would
like it get brought in from the pirate world, are

(27:16):
accepting fucking sex with teenage girls as a form of
payola for playing songs. Right, That's primarily the big scandal
that happens here, and that's obviously not what people should
have been most angry about, and it's not the only
thing that they're angry about. Some of these guys get
in trouble, but not Jimmy, right, He's never a focus

(27:36):
of these investigations, because by the time this all blows up,
he's kind of moved on, right, Like he's he's still
doing Top of the Pops from time to time. He's
still a DJ, but he's like increasingly starting to be
like a TV and radio star for other reasons. And
so he's just not at the center of this stuff.
But a good friend of his was he was like.

Speaker 1 (27:57):
One of the main Top of the Pops guys, wasn't he.

Speaker 2 (28:00):
Yeah, yeah, But he's not socially a part of that circle.
So most of the accounts they're getting and most of
what blows up is involving other guys and sample we
just kind of know he was involved, but he's not
like at the center of this. And he may not
have actually taken payola. He may have just been molesting
teenage girls, like we know he was doing a lot.
He may not have actually taken we don't know, like,

(28:21):
but he doesn't get in trouble for this, whereas other
guys do. And one of these other guys is a
member of his clique, Harry Goodwin, who was a photographer
for Top of the Pops. Undercover journalists recorded Goodwind bragging
about taking pornographic photos of I mean, and these are
I think most of these are Sea Sam right. I
guess it depends on the age of consent. But he's

(28:42):
taking he's making child pornography with pictures of underaged girls.
I assume some not all underage, but most of them
probably are. And he's also making movies, you know, quote
unquote movies of the statutory rape occurring he's discussed, and
he's playing these. He's selling these movies to pop stars,

(29:03):
not only in the industry.

Speaker 4 (29:05):
Despicably gross and.

Speaker 2 (29:07):
Good friend h yeah, he must be by now great
like yeah, and he gets in some trouble for this,
so you know, again close friend of Jimmy's here making
child pornagre or child sex abuse content of varying sorts.
So a few people's careers end over this, but again

(29:27):
not Jimmy's, because he's moved on. Savell's travels keeps him
on the road and makes his fame much broader than
just pop music at a time when he desperately needed that.
Of course, this doesn't stop him from committing sex crimes.
There were almost immediately complaints along his route of travel
that Savell now well into his thirties was molesting kids.
Radio one controller Douglas Muggridge asked the station press officer,

(29:50):
Rodney Collins to make sure to check and see if
any local newspapers in areas Savile had gone through planned
to print any rumors about his behavior. As mister call
later told the BBC, there were allegations that there were
girls underage, girls involved, maybe in the caravan. However, the
newspapers that mister Collins talked to insisted they were unwilling

(30:10):
to print allegations against Saville, whether they were true or not,
because of all of his charity work and because he
was quote perceived as a very popular man. So this
guy's for the BBC looking into like, hey, are you
going to print any rumors to see if we need
to like bribe these guys or threaten them to stop it. Yeah,
And the papers are like, we weren't going to publish it,
even if it is true that he's molesting girls, you know,

(30:32):
because of all of his charity work.

Speaker 1 (30:34):
He's a good guy.

Speaker 2 (30:35):
He's doing so much good stuff, you know. Yeah, Is
it so bad that he's molested children on while he
does this charity work?

Speaker 3 (30:43):
Right?

Speaker 4 (30:43):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (30:44):
Is someone's got to raise money for charity. You know,
why not let it be a pedophile. A lot of reasons. Yeah,
So again he's like part of what he's doing on
camera for these shows is he's like visiting mom and
pop restaurants and cafes and clubs. He's talking to regular
people in a way that no besuited, highly educated, traditional
reporter could have done. And there's a number of reasons

(31:06):
why Jimmy is so popular. One is that, again, there
had been like a BBC voice. There had been like
a voice that radio announcers when they start doing television
TV announcers are supposed to sort of have to kind
of be proper and to do the job the right way.
And this is a very like this is a system
that is primarily set up for people with specific educations

(31:28):
from specific institutions, and they talk in specific ways. And
Jimmy's a former coal miner from the north voices the
accent of the northern part of the country is seen
as more authentic in the UK, kind of in the
same way as like a southern twang is seen as
both evidence that you might be a redneck and that
you're an honest assault of the earth. Real American, Like,
he's got an accent that works for him in that way,

(31:50):
that makes him seem like a trustworthy, working class dude,
and people are just kind of starved for that. In
Great Britain at this time, there's not a lot of
it in their popular media. And this is part of
why he's so rapidly popular is a lot of folks
in the poorer northern parts of the country see themselves
represented in Jimmy and the fact that he kind of

(32:12):
dresses like a weirdo is like, yeah, but he's our weirdo.

Speaker 3 (32:15):
You know.

Speaker 2 (32:16):
Why should he have to wear a monkey suit like
all these fancy guys. That's kind of and it helps
to it helps to camouflage him, you know. The popularity
is part of the camouflage.

Speaker 1 (32:27):
He's got five different covers. He's a genius.

Speaker 2 (32:32):
He's good at it. Unfortunately, most of the initial run
of Saval's travels took place in Yorkshire, and a BBC
article in May of twenty thirteen, less than a year
after Savle's crimes became were made public, West Yorkshire Police
noted that they had recorded evidence of at least seventy
nine offenses by Savile against seventy one separate people. Quote
per the PBC, thirty five attacks by the broadcaster in

(32:54):
hospitals involved complainants ranging from age five to forty five.
The West Yorkshire Police figures show Saval target eighteen victims
at private addresses and leeds in Bradford. Now again, a
year after he dies and these stories come out within
the first year, West Yorkshire Police have recorded seventy nine
offenses against seventy one people. That's not how many victims

(33:16):
he had. That's what they record decades after the fact,
when it's finally okay to talk about he's abusing hundreds
of people in West Yorkshire alone. Right, we'll talk about
We have no idea how his total number of victims,
but we'll talk about what we know about it. I
just need you to understand this is like an every
night thing for him. He is abusing people with tremendous
startling regularity. In nineteen seventy two. Yeah, sorry, that's like, No.

Speaker 1 (33:42):
Five is so young. You said the range was five
to forty five, five.

Speaker 2 (33:46):
To forty five in that area a year after the
investigation starts.

Speaker 1 (33:51):
Yes, that's nauseating. I didn't even think he went that old.
But the young end of his rage is truly.

Speaker 2 (33:58):
In like the eighties. Yeah, yeah, the young end is
real bleak. In nineteen seventy two, Jimmy had a radio
documentary made about him, The World of Jimmy safvill Obe.
It attempted to investigate who Jimmy was as a person,
something that had already proven nearly impossible for interfy words
to nail down. Jimmy himself claimed to have nothing to

(34:19):
hide from people. Quote, they ask me, are you queer?
I say no, But if I felt that way, I
would have been. They asked me, why don't you get married?
I say, well, I've never felt the need. I've got
nothing to hide from people, And when you come to
think about it, I lead a dead simple sort of life,
which is okay and definitely enough for me. Simple. Now,

(34:42):
the fact that Jimmy has been awarded the Order of
the British Empire, as I noted earlier, it makes it
possible for him to enter these higher echelons of British society,
but it doesn't guarantee that he'll make friends and find
influence there. To do that, he's going to need to
put in work, and initially it seems Jimmy tries to
hedge his bets by getting in good with politicians on

(35:02):
both sides of the aisle. In an article for The
Tribune Feral Kinney Wrights during the politically Feebriles nineteen seventies,
Savill appears to have hedged his bets filming a nineteen
seventy four party political broadcast with Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe.
Liberal politician Cyril Smith, who would be unmasked as a
pedophile in the aftermath of Savill's death, enjoyed a light
entertainment run on Savile's Clunk Clink program. So he does

(35:25):
talk to in the seventies, he's hanging out and kind
of boosting liberal politicians, and he will later boost conservative politicians.
But one of the liberal politicians he boosts, Cyril Smith
and has on his show a bunch of times, is
unmasked as a pedophile. Two that's going to be a
habit for like friends of Jimmy's. We've talked to two
three so far Lord Mountbatten, the dude, the photographer on

(35:49):
the show, and this fucking politician. So that's three pedophiles.
Had a Jimmy sapfle friends already Click yeah, the click,
and also he knows him Prince Andrew. Are buddies know
what Prince Andrew's getting up to? No longer Prince Andrew.
In nineteen seventy five, Jimmy Savill did something rare, which
is that he officially becomes a bigger TV star than

(36:12):
he had ever been like a radio star. This is
the moment where he fully crosses over and from this
point on he's not going to be primarily known as
a DJ. He's going to be primarily known for his
work on BBC TV. The BBC gives him like a
dedicated show called Jim Will Fix It, which airs for
the first time in nineteen seventy five in a seventy

(36:32):
four to seventy five and a primetime spot on Saturdays. Right,
this is like a major show. It's running at basically
the best time you can and the premise is very simple.
Children from around the world write Jimmy Savill letters outlining
their wildest dreams, and jim will fix it so the
dream comes true. Writing for CNN, Dave Gilbert notes that

(36:54):
it's height This program, which again runs until nineteen is
Yeah Not runs from nineteen seventy five to nineteen ninety
four was receiving quote, twenty thousand requests a week. Famous
fixes included an encounter with boxing legend Muhammad Ali and
the boy scouts who wanted to eat their packed lunches
on a roller coaster, resulting in a predictable mess. So

(37:14):
that's the kind of show it is. You can see
why this is such a hit. You know, you've got
first off, you've got these kids, and the way the
show works is like you think it's letters, right, it's
like a make a wish and he gets to read
these cute letters that these kids write with their own drawings.
He gets to laugh at like kids being cute or
spelling stuff bad. Then you get to have the kid
on talk about their dream and then you get to
like film you making it happen for them, and then

(37:36):
he gives them like these medallions that say jim fixed
it for me, which for a while we're quite valuable.
So the series is it's a massive success, and it
makes Jimmy more dangerous than ever because now he's gone
from this is like a DJ who has access to
teenage girls because he has access to pop stars. But

(37:58):
like that has a time on it. For one thing,
Jimmy's pushing middle age now, so it's getting harder and
harder for him to still seem like Britain's oldest teenager.
Now he has a reason to be around kids and
be trusted by them because he's Santa. He's like British Santa.

Speaker 1 (38:15):
It's crazy that they greenlit this show.

Speaker 2 (38:19):
We need a gutt to be Santa. Claus picked the
let's have a giant pedophile. Yeah, the guy whom less
all the kids bring him on. He'll be a great Santa. Yeah.
So the dreams he made come true ran the gamut.
In one early episode, a child wished to fly like
Peter Pand and sword fight Captain Hook and Jim's crew
used like stage rigging and theater equipment to make that
happen in the same way you would for like a
Broadway production.

Speaker 3 (38:40):
You know.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
Another kid wanted to take his school teacher out for
an expensive dinner at a fine dining establishment, and so
they put him up at this like crazy restaurant with
these really elaborate meals and they fill them all of it.
You know, you can see why generations of Britain's ate
this show up right. That said, as innocent as this
is sounds and should have been. The content wasn't always innocent,

(39:03):
and in fact, Jimmy can't help himself from like making
references to his current and future sex crimes. There's bits
of that littered all throughout episodes of jim Will Fix It.
Sophie's gonna provide you with show you all one brief clip.
Ever since I can remember, I've always wanted to be
a singer, but shyness has always got in the way.
Please because you fix it for me to sing?

Speaker 5 (39:25):
Who was sincerely, Debbie Coleman.

Speaker 8 (39:27):
Here's somebody's a helper who also has.

Speaker 1 (39:29):
A problem with being shy.

Speaker 8 (39:31):
Gary Glitter, So.

Speaker 2 (39:34):
Gary Glitter, hah, that doesn't seem like it was too bad, right,
Just a kid who wants to be a pop star.
And he's like, okay, I'll fix you up with my
friend Gary Glitter. And Gary was indeed, Hey have you
heard of Gary Courtney? You don't anything about this guy?

Speaker 1 (39:49):
No? No, Also that kid was twenty.

Speaker 2 (39:52):
So yeah, yeah, kid was twenty thankfully. Gary Glitter, a
major popstar, was a major pop star in the seventies
and eighties and was a close friend of Jimmy Savell.
He was brought down in nineteen ninety nine after being
convicted of downloading child's sex abuse material. He was eventually
charged with child sex abuse and attempted rape of a child,
among other offenses. Glitter and Savile partied regularly throughout the

(40:14):
seventies and eighties and shared a taste for little girls,
and in Glitter's case, the youngest of his victims were
ten and eleven. So great that he's hucking them up
with people on the show. Good to have Gary Glitter
on Jim Will Fix It. At least that what person
seems to have been an adult, Thank fucking god, they

(40:35):
often weren't.

Speaker 3 (40:36):
Now.

Speaker 2 (40:36):
The fact that Jimmy wasn't singled out when Glitter got
busted is extraordinary, especially because Jim made repeated as I
was kind of insinuating earlier. He made repeated open comments
about his attraction to girls as young as eleven in
episodes of his hit show Top of the Pops and
in Jim Will Fix It. Here's just one example, and
this is from the part of Jim Will Fix It

(40:57):
where he hands out his famous Jim fixed It for
me Ad Alliens to winners of the show. So we're
gonna look at that clip right now, if both these.

Speaker 8 (41:05):
Young ladies that Jim'll fix it because how old are you?

Speaker 3 (41:10):
Twelve?

Speaker 8 (41:11):
Hello, judge?

Speaker 3 (41:12):
And how old are you? Ma?

Speaker 2 (41:17):
It's fine, it's fine. Everybody laughs. Right. What did he
say to her? He said, he asked her age and
she said twelve, and he said, hello, judge. Yes, he's
joking that he's going to molest her and get in trouble.

Speaker 8 (41:30):
God.

Speaker 2 (41:31):
And then the other girl says eleven, and he says,
are you married? And everyone laughs. I didn't catch young
larry ladies.

Speaker 3 (41:40):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:40):
I wish this isn't again.

Speaker 7 (41:43):
And I think this is part of his stick. I
was thrown off by how odd he looked at him,
leaning over and he's like, I didn't barely even get
Courtney missed it two.

Speaker 4 (41:54):
I was like, what did this strange man say?

Speaker 3 (41:57):
But not really.

Speaker 2 (41:57):
What he's doing is first making a joke about molesting
a twelve year old and getting in trouble in court,
and then making a joke about wanting to marry an
eleven year old. Those are the jokes. He's not hiding
this or it is. He's hiding in very plain sight,
and that that hello judge bit is a constant. That's
one of Jim's like catchphrases, right is he'll reference his

(42:20):
attraction to a young girl and then go hello, judge.
You know, he makes constant jokes. He'll also joke about
having an upcoming court date, like I've had a great
life and I go to you know, my trials next
Thursday or something like that was like a really common
reference from him. So there's a lot of bits about
him being in trouble with the law for his attraction
to underaged girls that he performs on air with regularity.

(42:41):
Once he dies and all of the stories of the
actual abuse start flooding out into the open, people begin
looking through old episodes of Jim Will Fix It, and
they find a lot of evidence of the pedophile hiding
and plain sight. For an example of that, here's one
find from a user on the website Beta dot com
and this guy's actually like posting video from an old episode.
He's like filming it on his laptop. Again, a lot

(43:04):
of these original episodes are kind of harder to find now.
So Selvie's gonna play you a clip that starts with
Jimmy reading this kid's letter.

Speaker 3 (43:12):
Well, I think about that one as well.

Speaker 8 (43:14):
From Notching for London, Eastport, did Jimmy fix it? I
think you have fixed enough people now and I think
it is about time you were fixed. So will you
fix it for me to come along to the VBC
theater and fix you? Lots of love Barclay Quarter, then yes,

(43:36):
please do not tickle me. Yeah, Barkley, I'm presuming with
blacka qatermen that you happen to be a young man
and of tickling young men. But if you have a
sister who knows.

Speaker 2 (43:49):
Again again, it's just he's just everyone laughs at this
joke about this weird guy tickling a female child against
your will. Right, It's just funny. It's a bit, you know,
Nobody takes it seriously. It's fucking amazing how openness is
like the man. If the show was called Jim a Pedophile,
it could hardly be more open about this guy's proclivities. Yeah,

(44:12):
and yet like paradoxically, the jokes act as a sort
of camouflage, as does as you've said, the way he's
dressed and the way he presents himself, it all helps him.
It's very effective at letting him hide and play in sight,
and in some ways it's giving him like the fact
that he brings the audience in, makes them complicit. That's
part of the tactic. He's they're giving him permission to

(44:35):
act the way he does. If everyone's laughing, can what
he said really be so bad? Right?

Speaker 1 (44:41):
But it's crazy that when Gary Glitter goes down or whatever,
they're not like, oh wait a minute, what about his
best friend?

Speaker 2 (44:48):
But it happened. That happens so often that some guy
will go down for pedophilia who is known as a
close friend of Jimmy Savill, and Jimmy doesn't get in
trouble like it happens a bunch good stuff. I'm happy?
How are you doing?

Speaker 3 (45:03):
Who?

Speaker 1 (45:04):
I'm okay?

Speaker 2 (45:05):
Have we had a second ad break yet, Sophie?

Speaker 4 (45:08):
We have not.

Speaker 2 (45:09):
We have not. Let's do that the fuck now, Let's
take a second and then come back and we're back.
So jim will fix it with such an outrageous hit
that it launched Jimmy's career as a superstar, or at

(45:30):
least a UK superstar. He's never people will notice. He
never really crosses over in the way that like some
big BBC figures do. But he's very popular within the UK.
As Dave Gilbert summarizes generations, of Britain's also remember him
for a string of public information films, including a road
safety promotion that encouraged motorists to use their seat belts,
a campaign that started before wearing belts became compulsory in

(45:53):
the UK. Savill's closing catchphrase clunk click every trip was
instantly memorable and caught on with the watching public. He
also promoted the National Rail Network and a campaign dubbed
this is the Age of the Train. And I read
that quote because it's it's probably impossible for me to
get across to an audience of mostly Americans and people
from elsewhere in the world besides the UK. What Jimmy

(46:15):
Savil meant to Britons of a certain age. The best
I can do is to say that for most young
British kids from like the late sixties and seventies, well,
really like the seventies through the early nineties, Jimmy Savill
was the BBC. He has too many TV shows to
keep track of. He's and whenever there's like a big
we're doing a big fundraiser, we're doing a big New

(46:37):
Year's or whatever thing, we're doing a big holiday thing,
Jimmy's the guy who gets picked a lot of times
to like headline or MC because he's the face of
the BBC right for like twenty years.

Speaker 1 (46:48):
He's kind of like Regius Philbin or something.

Speaker 2 (46:51):
Yeah, yeah, like read but even like I was aware
of Regis as a kid, but we have so much
choice and option for channels and the KAY didn't as
much in this period of time. So the fact that
he is the face of the BBC, like he's to
a lot of kids, they would have just seen Jimmy
as like woven into the foundation of the earth almost

(47:12):
in like if you can if you were a nineties kid,
a kind of like the late eighties through the nineties,
the way that Robin Williams was to our generation where
it was just like this is just like a Robin
never did anything wrong that I'm aware of, but uh
steal some jokes but uh forgivable. You know, he was
pretty coked out, but that level of like this this

(47:33):
guy is woven into the firmament as like a part
of your childhood, right yeah. And they're like an uncle,
like an angle, like the country's weird uncle.

Speaker 3 (47:42):
Right.

Speaker 2 (47:44):
In nineteen seventy one, Jimmy also started volunteering at the
National Spinal Injury Center at the Stoke Mandivil Hospital. He
not only raised money to renovate the hospital's facilities, which
had fallen into tremendous disrepair, but he started doing regular
shifts as an orderly, helping new patients to their rooms
and doing rounds just as an employee would have done.
As we'll talk about, this goes on for decades. From

(48:06):
the start of Jimmy's time volunteering at Stoke Mandival, there
were rumors that Jimmy, per one acquaintance at the BBC
abused his position by having sexual relations with patients, but
this source insists he never heard anything about illegal activity
with underaged girls. So this guy is saying, basically, everyone
knew that Jimmy's sleeping with patients at the hospital that

(48:27):
he's helping to fund and is working at as an orderly,
but we never thought that it was they were underage.

Speaker 1 (48:34):
Jimmy's like, okay, forty, but it's hard for them to
get away. They have some real injury.

Speaker 2 (48:41):
That's literally why he does it. Yes, that's that is
that is the tactic care. Unfortunately, the dark now, however
prevalent these rumors are, they weren't enough to offset the
funds that he's raising for Stoke Mandville, particularly at a
time by the late seventies, Great Britain's social safety net
is starting to look like it's running on fumes.

Speaker 7 (49:01):
It's pretty it's pretty gross that they're like that that,
Like the cost of like fundraising is just like mass
sexual abuse.

Speaker 2 (49:11):
Pedophile abuse people. Yeah, otherwise we won't have money to
keep the spine hospital in business.

Speaker 7 (49:15):
Yeah, they really value they really value people's lives and wellness, and.

Speaker 3 (49:20):
Just so.

Speaker 2 (49:22):
Much angrier. You get so much anger.

Speaker 7 (49:25):
I was like trying to like hold I got really
angry after part two, and I was like, I was like,
I'm gonna try to pace myself this.

Speaker 2 (49:33):
For an idea of how bad this is. We don't
went on the product of factors doing trigger warnings on
this show. Like I cried during the research of these
episodes that hasn't happened for years, Like I am dead
inside and I was fucking full on weeping during some
of the research for this because what he's just the
scale of it and the the degree to which his

(49:54):
victims had no possible method of fighting back against him. Right,
these are He's going after peace people who are the
most desperate people he can find in his society. Anyway,
let's talk about Margaret Thatcher. In nineteen seventy seven, Savill
first hod It a hosted member of Parliament Margaret Thatcher
on a visit to Stoke Mandeville. The two became fast friends.

(50:15):
Thatcher liked Jimmy because his talent for raising money to
fund public programs and facilities meant that the government didn't
need to use as much tax money to support the NHS. Jimmy,
on the other hand, seems to have instinctively seen that
Thatcher was going places and he wanted her to owe him.
His opportunity to do this would come as a result
of the harsh austerity policies Thatcher sought to press upon

(50:37):
the country if she became Prime Minister. Her vision of
an ideal Britain didn't include public funding for health care,
but did include a worship of wealthy and powerful people
and the charity they might be convinced to provide rather
than compulsory taxes. By nineteen seventy eight, Saville was one
of the most prominent charitable fundraisers in the country. If

(50:57):
you just tax rich people to fund your social safe
and you have to fund your hospitals, then none of
them are particularly like like gain a position of necessarily
power over the organizations they're funding. If you're just paying
taxes and that keeps the hospitals going, you can't just
if you just walk into the hospital, We're like, well,
my taxes pay for this hospital. People are gonna be

(51:18):
like fuck you. But if you walk in and say
like no, no, no, like you guys are gonna have
to close down, and I raise ten million dollars to
keep you in business, They're gonna let you do whatever
you want.

Speaker 3 (51:26):
Right.

Speaker 2 (51:27):
That's why a lot of rich people love charity.

Speaker 3 (51:30):
Right.

Speaker 2 (51:31):
That's why again, if you watch The Bone Temple, the
bad guys in the Bone Temple are based on Jimmy Savell.
They're traveling around doing what they call charity. This is
like that. That whole movie is a critique of Thatcherism
and Savill's rolling it anyway. I love that film.

Speaker 1 (51:47):
You're talking me into a wealth tax right now, that's
what it's.

Speaker 2 (51:51):
Oh yeah. However, has Farrell Kenney noted in his piece
for the UK Tribune Savell quote preferred small local charities
over large ones with organized structures. He does a lot
of charity. But again, it's mostly with these smaller orgs
for a reason, because then they're totally dependent on him,
and there's not going to be as much red tape,
there's not going to be as much you know, people

(52:12):
looking into what he's actually doing. And in Kenney's article,
he links to a super eight video from nineteen seventy
eight of Jimmy hosting a charity event for blind children.
In the video, Saville receives a flower from a young
blind girl and then a drawing of himself. And I'm
just gonna have Sophie show you the clip and we'll

(52:34):
describe what's happening for those of you who like, he's
out in front of this facility. He's got on like
this shirt that looks like a fucking what's that?

Speaker 1 (52:42):
It's like a game of twister.

Speaker 2 (52:45):
Yeah, it looks like a game of twister. I don't
know how else to describe it. And yeah, there's this
little blind girl, looks like she's maybe twelve, being like
led up to him so she can give him this
this drawing of himself.

Speaker 3 (52:56):
Yes, she's so pretty as well, oh.

Speaker 2 (53:15):
Did he say?

Speaker 4 (53:16):
And she's so pretty as well?

Speaker 2 (53:17):
And she's so pretty as well, goodness gracious, and again,
you know, not necessarily upsetting unless you know what's actually
going on.

Speaker 4 (53:25):
So icky, if he wasn't such a fucking.

Speaker 2 (53:29):
Pedophile, yeah, exactly. Now. At the time, the more noteworthy
thing about that performance is that he takes out this
photo that's been drawn of him and he jokes about
it being a photo fit of the Yorkshire Ripper, right.
He jokes that this drawing of him is like actually
a picture of the Yorkshire Ripper, who's a serial killer
that was active at the time. This is a guy

(53:50):
who is ultimately murders more than a dozen women by
the time he's caught and is actively killing people, and
like the police are actively looking for him in nineteen
seven eight. Now, the real Yorkshire Ripper was named Peter Sutcliffe.
And again he was ultimately caught and convicted of his crimes,
I think in nineteen eighty one, but that's like three
years away. And what's interesting about this to me, just
as a side bit, is that at the time Jimmy

(54:13):
jokes about looking like the Yorkshire Ripper, he was an
active suspect in the murders. My quote from the telegram,
Savell was brought in for questioning after members of the
public contacted the police naming him as a possible subject.
After a body was found close to Savill's Roundey Park home,
a Harley Street dentist was ordered to make a cast

(54:34):
of Savell's teeth. Now, again, Jimmy wasn't the ripper, but
it says a lot about what he was doing and
how many people did try to stop him, that so
many members of the public reported him as being the
likely culprit that the police force, which was largely staffed
by his friends, had to investigate. That's how many people

(54:55):
think they know there's something going on that they're like, well,
maybe he's maybe he's this real killer, right, Like, there's
a lot people do know what's happening. And then you
try to do something.

Speaker 1 (55:05):
He's a serial something.

Speaker 2 (55:07):
Yeah, wild that he's joking about it.

Speaker 1 (55:11):
Now.

Speaker 2 (55:11):
That same year, nineteen seventy eight, Jimmy wrote another book,
God'll Fix It, about his Catholic faith. It included these
chilling lines. In my early years, I can tell you
I did a lot of things that need a bit
of forgiveness. I was in a business that was fraught
with temptations. Temptations of the flesh are all about so
in my early days, I was a great And he
puts this in quotations, abuser of things and bodies and people. Okay, okay,

(55:39):
couldn't be more clear interesting that abusers in quotation marks.
I don't know what entirely he meant by that, but
you know he's not as interesting Heidene. Yeah. Now, the
fact that he's so public about aspects of his personal life,
as we'll call it, has consequences for him. Other people
do read what he's writing and read these interviews, will

(56:00):
he'll talk about his sex life, and they get upset.
Even if they don't all they don't always mark him
out as a potential pedophile. They don't always realize what's happening,
but they know that something is wrong. And there's also
people in the pop industry who know more. Again, maybe
not everything, but they know enough, They know enough other
people that they know something about what's going on. One

(56:23):
of these people is sex Pistols frontman John Lydon, who
said in an interview in nineteen seventy eight, I'd like
to kill Jimmy Saville. I think he's a hypocrite. I
bet he's into all kinds of seediness that we all
know about, but are not allowed to talk about. I
know some rumors. He then added, I bet none of
this will be allowed out, and it wasn't. The clip
did not air with the rest of the interview. It's

(56:45):
good for that, yeah said something.

Speaker 7 (56:48):
Yeah, yeah, I mean like that guy had a lot
of power and he didn't do that much with it.

Speaker 4 (56:54):
But like you know better than every other adults in
this converse, in this entire thing.

Speaker 2 (57:02):
Yeah, as we'll talk about you know, libel laws in
the UK. A big part of why stuff like that
gets cut out is Jimmy's litigious and people are scared
of being sued by him. Prior to the nineteen seventy
nine elections, Saffle hosted a special episode of jim Will
Fix It at the Houses of Parliament, where Margaret Thatcher
asked him to fix it for her to become Prime Minister.

(57:24):
She was elected on May third of that year. Right
after she took office, Thatcher had her staff at Downing
Street called Jimmy quote. Her secretary rang to say she
was rather upset because I hadn't been round to give
her a badge. To give her her badge, I reported
to Downing Street a few days later and presented it.
Oh good, thank you Jimmy for Margaret Thatcher for fixing

(57:44):
it so she got to be Prime Minister.

Speaker 4 (57:47):
I really hate when.

Speaker 2 (57:48):
A woman gets it so wrong. Oh she's it's we
have barely I crashed the surface of how bad this is.
Now not law. After this, jim was carrying out Jim's
Daily Dozen, a series of sponsored runs through various British towns,
meant his fundraisers for different causes. He asked Margaret which

(58:10):
charity she wanted a chunk of the money he was
raising to go to, and he ultimately presented her with
a check for ten thousand pounds for the National Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children the NSPCC. That's
good Thatcher love cares deeply about the kids. Obviously, now

(58:30):
Jimmy and Margaret would remain close friends for the remainder
of Thatcher's PM ship and life. Jimmy's skill with charity
was extremely convenient given Thatcher's conservative austerity politics. By the
start of Thatcher's term, the National Spinal Injury Center at
stoke manvill was in such bad shape that five ceilings
of housing units had collapsed during a winter storm. The

(58:52):
NHS needed additional funding for repairs, and that was very
much not in the budget or in the spirit of Thatcherism. However,
Stoke Mandeville is a major facility in the UK. It's
like a historically important hospital, and allowing the facility to
collapse would make for terrible pr Because you want to
cut the budget, you want to cut quote unquote entitlements,

(59:15):
but you don't want people to realize that they're you're
taking away their health care so that rich people have
more money. You really want to hide that until the
latest possible moment. Savill held a meeting with Gerard Vaughan,
Minister of State for Health, as Davies describes in the
book for the book Endplane Sight Quote over T and
K at the House of Commons, Vaughan outlined the new
government's thinking on the National Health Services, a philosophy which

(59:38):
ordained that special projects such as rebuilding work at hospitals,
even such urgent work as that required at Stoke Mandival,
would have to be supported by voluntary contributions, in line
with the cuts in public expenditure Prime Minister Thatcher was
implementing across the board. Vaughn suggested this meant they had
a problem, not really, replied Saville, and they struck a deal.
Savell what Jimmy Savely would lead a campaign to rebuild

(01:00:01):
the spinal injuries unit at Stoke Manduvil using private money
and donations. In other words, it was to be a
pioneering example of the type of partnership between government and
the public that the Prime Minister was so keen to promote. Now,
the renovations were to cost between six and ten million pounds,
as Jimmy announced it a subsequent press conference. When he
was asked shouldn't the NHS just be funding this, he replied,

(01:00:23):
this is the way they used to build hospitals years ago,
and laid out how a simple five pound donation could
pay for a brick, allowing every Briton a chance to
support one of the most famous hospitals in the country.
To make a long story short, it worked. Savill used
his connections to wealth and fame to solicit high dollar donations,
and his ability to connect with average Britons and host
public runs and other fundraisers to solicit large numbers of

(01:00:46):
small dollar donations. Now he does succeed in convincing Thatcher
to contribute half a million pounds of public money to
the cause. Right, But that means this goes from a
thing that the NHS would have had to pay ten
million pounds of public money to do, to something they
have to pay just a half million pounds a public
money to do, because he raises the other nine and
a half that's needed. Once the money was raised, Saffle

(01:01:09):
was fetted in a public press conference next to Prince
Charles and Margaret Thatcher herself. This marks the beginning of
his true climb up the rungs of power and fame
in British high society. As Faro Kinney writes, the preceding
years had seen Saffle work his way upwards through media elites,
dance halls to radio, pop television to primetime flagship television,
as well as integrating into the National Health Service. The

(01:01:32):
years that followed, however, can be understood as savile, tirelessly
working upwards through the British establishment, the Thatcher government, the monarchy,
and an ever present relationship with the police.

Speaker 4 (01:01:42):
So do we have any evidence that Charles knows a bit?

Speaker 2 (01:01:48):
We'll talk about Charles a lot more. Don't worry, Zovie,
you can come to your.

Speaker 6 (01:01:52):
Conclusion because I'm just thinking like he he got like
some you know, I would guess we were not upset
with him for you know, not standing in the way
of his brother getting arrested for being a disgusting pedophile
and he got praised for it, and so did he.

Speaker 1 (01:02:16):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:02:17):
Yeah, we'll talk a lot more about nearly done.

Speaker 4 (01:02:20):
No more, I'd like to know more, is what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 (01:02:23):
From the Thatcher years on, Savill was what some Royal
family watchers described as a court gesture to the family. Right,
that's the role he takes on socially. Savil first meets
Prince Charles in nineteen seventy seven, which is the same
year that he met Thatcher and Princess Diana herself later
wrote that Jimmy was a mentor to the future king.

Speaker 3 (01:02:43):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:02:43):
That's Princess dies take on things that Jimmy Saville is
her husband's mentor. Now, I was not at all surprised
to learn that Saville and Thatcher had used each other
for mutual benefit. What did surprise me is that this
seems to have been a genuine friendship on Margaret's part,
as in she deeply liked and appreciated this historically prolific rapist,

(01:03:04):
and he seems to have enjoyed her company and considered
her a safe person to joke around with. After one
lunch in nineteen eighty one, Savil wrote a letter to
Thatcher that included the lines, my girl, patients pretended to
be madly jealous and wanted to know what you wore
and what you ate. All the paralyzed lads called me
Sir James all week. They all love you me too. Great.

(01:03:25):
Its beautiful to see a friendship blossom. It's it's it's
wonderful here.

Speaker 7 (01:03:29):
I don't like I don't like the use of me
too and savile in the same center.

Speaker 2 (01:03:34):
Yeah, me too.

Speaker 1 (01:03:37):
Now.

Speaker 2 (01:03:37):
A little bit about they all called me Sir James
is something he includes here because as soon as he
becomes friends with Thatcher, Saville starts working her to try
to get a white right he's already obe The next
step up is a knighthood baby, and Margaret spends like
a decade fighting for this. She fights, She spends years

(01:03:58):
pushing Jimmy to be a night. In nineteen eighty three,
Thatcher wrote Sir Robert Armstrong, the chair of the National
Honors Committee, to ask about making Savill a Knight but
Sir Robert said no, and his reasoning wasn't that Jimmy
was like obviously a dangerous child predator. It was that
he'd just endured a minor scandal about some comments he'd
made in an interview about the young girls he hung

(01:04:19):
out with at his charity runs. The AIDS crisis was
on fire at that point, and Sir Robert thought it
was inappropriate for the government to celebrate and endorse a
man who made light of premarital sex. He pointed out
that the lurid details of Jimmy's sexcapades hadn't faded from
public memory yet, and it would be best if mister
Savill were to wait a little bit longer for the
BBC quote. We were remain worried, he added. Fears a

(01:04:42):
bit expressed that mister Saville might not be able to
refrain from exploiting a knighthood in a way which brought
the honor system into disrepute. You know, accurate, There's.

Speaker 1 (01:04:52):
No way this was a genuine friendship. They're both just
empty inside and they're such climber fucking fuses the shit.

Speaker 2 (01:05:00):
She goes to bat for him, though, right, you know, which,
like do any of these people have real friendships inasmuch
as Thatcher ever did or Savile ever did, right, they
were tightly they both very much needed each other, right.

Speaker 1 (01:05:12):
And that's like when Trump talks about having like his friends, like,
you don't have one single friend on this foot.

Speaker 2 (01:05:19):
Really, but you have people you need. And it's noteworthy.
The amount that Margaret goes to bat for Jimmy shows
you how much she thinks she needs him. He is
not just celebrity, he's kind of friendly. She is a
major he's a major part of Thatcherism. But she needs him, Okay.
He allows her to do a lot of the austerity

(01:05:41):
shit she wants to do without seeming like she's fucking
the country as much as she is, because he's keeping
the lights on in some of these facilities. And in return,
he gets a blind eyed turn to his molestation of
hundreds and hundreds of people because he's keeping the lights
on in these facilities, which allows her to fucking to
the bone.

Speaker 3 (01:06:01):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:06:01):
That's Savell's role in Thatcherism, and it's a significant one,
as shown by how much Margaret herself goes to bat
for this guy. Now, the fact that it's great love
it when Margaret Thatcher's in the story. Now, the fact
that Sir Robert is worried Savell would use being knighted
in order to like for his own benefit in some

(01:06:24):
way that through the system into disrepute was prescient. Savile's
already at this point using his fame as a charitable
fundraiser to shut down investigations into his sex crimes. For
the BBC, Savill persuaded the tabloids not to run stories
by telling them they would be responsible for the end
of his charity fundraising. Savill himself admitted in an interview
people leap about. Yes, they do if he wants something

(01:06:46):
because of his charitable work, right, Folks will do anything
for me because of all the money I'm raising for
good causes. Now, any hope of negative reporting on Savill's
crimes was further dashed by his close public friendship with Thatcher. Again,
this makes it harder. You're some fucking kid who's like
at a juvenile fuck, like a facility or whatever because

(01:07:07):
you got in trouble for something and Jimmy's molesting you
and this guy's you're gonna try to report the guy
who's friends with the Prime Minister. Yeah, that'll work.

Speaker 1 (01:07:15):
And one of the kid and the real family and the.

Speaker 2 (01:07:18):
Prince yeah, and the royal fucking family. In one episode
of jim Will Fix It, a little girl asks to
be a cop for a day at ten Downing Street,
and Jimmy uses his connections to Thatcher to fix it.
He gets she gets a cop uniform, and she gets
like patrol around in front of the Prime Minister's residence.
And when when Thatcher shows up in her limo or whatever, like,
the kid gets like escortter from her car to her residence.

(01:07:40):
TV viewers eat this up like it's adorable, right, But
his victims, many of whom are stuck in hospitals and
psychiatric wards. See this is more evidence that jim is untouchable.
I found an article on the website Investigative Psychiatry that's
like analyzing a bunch of different investigations several because after
it all comes out how many people he was abusing,

(01:08:00):
all the hospitals he volunteered at have these internal investigations
into how Jimmy was allowed to abuse their patients for decades,
and there's like an NHS investigation, an n SEC investigation.
So this article kind of summarizing all those into investigations
notes he leveraged his fame and claims of high level
political friendships to intimidate those around him. He successfully made
hospital staff believe he had the power to have them fired,

(01:08:23):
well simultaneously coercing vulnerable patients into believing that reporting his
abuse would only worsen their treatment and lead to punishment.
Now he's yeah, it's great. And the fact that for
an idea of how much fucking absolute impunity he has.
You remember in the first couple episodes we talked about

(01:08:43):
Jimmy's got this weird thing about dead bodies as a kid.
It's kind of a regular like thing, like he makes
some really weird statements whenever he sees like dead people that.

Speaker 1 (01:08:54):
Yeah, saw that chit get chopped up.

Speaker 3 (01:08:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:08:58):
Let me read a quote from a BBC article I'm afraid.
Doctor Sue Proctor, who chared an inquiry into Saval's actions
that leads General Infirmary, said the star also had an
unwholesome interest in the dead. It is alleged he posed
for photographs and performed sex acts on corpses in the
hospital mortuary. She also referred to Savle's claims that large
rings he wore were made from the glass eyes of
dead bodies at the mortuary. There's more we could say here.

(01:09:21):
Jimmy's a necrophile. He's abusing dead boy. That's like bad
and gross. That's kind of all we're gonna say that
in these episodes. It's important you know that about him.
But like we're folks, like the living people are like
my primary concern obviously, like this is bad due it's
just meant so bad this guy is. The necrophilia is
like a side note. Also, he's doing this. It's not

(01:09:44):
on the front burner in terms of like the things
he's doing bad.

Speaker 5 (01:09:48):
Could you I just want you to repeat that one
part about what did you say he was with?

Speaker 4 (01:09:52):
What the ring?

Speaker 2 (01:09:53):
Oh yeah what? Yeah? He had he wore he loves
He's got these big rings and he would tell everybody
he made comments on this publicly. They're made from like
the glass eyes from dead bodies that mortuaries. That's where
his rings get there, like big Gym's from. I will
want to say to that, thanks man. So my interpretation

(01:10:16):
of what's kind of going on behind the scenes in
Jimmy Savile's head through this period is this, You've got
this guy who gets his start as a hit DJ
in a time when that means unlimited sexual access to
teenage girls. He enjoys this for years, but he's not
an idiot. He can see this isn't going to last forever.
And since he doesn't really like any of his fellow
DJs socially, he's got enough perspective to realize they're flirting

(01:10:37):
with danger while literally flirting with children. The BBC offers
him a professional escape to a world with less scrutiny
and more money, just as his old colleagues start drawing
attention for their behavior. And then he realizes the more
big public acts of charity he does, the more good
he gets in with the people running the country, and
the more camouflage he gets for his behavior. And this

(01:11:00):
provides him with direct access to victims in his preferred
age range who can't defend themselves. And that's why he
volunteers primarily at spinal wards psychiatric hospitals and as we'll
talk about in our next episode, the Duncroft Approved School
for girls. Okay, and that's part three.

Speaker 1 (01:11:20):
I Oh my.

Speaker 4 (01:11:22):
God, I hate this guy.

Speaker 2 (01:11:25):
Harrowing stuff, isn't it.

Speaker 1 (01:11:26):
This is the worst one I've ever done.

Speaker 2 (01:11:29):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is one of the worst ones
we've ever done. This guy is uh the devil, the
devil himself. Really, I don't even know if.

Speaker 4 (01:11:39):
There's a word to properly describe how disgusting he is.

Speaker 2 (01:11:42):
No, No, I've.

Speaker 4 (01:11:44):
Been trying to think of one, and I'm sad a lost.

Speaker 2 (01:11:47):
He's just a fox that got let into a hen
house made up of every single person in a hospital
in the UK.

Speaker 6 (01:11:55):
Ah.

Speaker 1 (01:11:56):
Okay, cool, I don't even you gotta flug something sorry, Yeah,
my book. Let me recover for a second. I wrote
a book. It's honestly way happier than this, and there's
a lot of sad in the book. It's called Girl
Gone Wild and it's it's feminist, which we need after

(01:12:16):
listening to this.

Speaker 2 (01:12:17):
Yeah, sounds nice.

Speaker 4 (01:12:18):
Abhorrent, abhorrent. I'm just come to credit. I'm just throwing
out words. Abhorous.

Speaker 1 (01:12:23):
Yeah, yeah, obscene, I don't know, revolting.

Speaker 2 (01:12:30):
Loathsome m loathsome is a good one. Yeah, we use
that word or not? Yeah, loathsome. Let's end with loathsome.

Speaker 3 (01:12:37):
Okay.

Speaker 5 (01:12:41):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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