Part Two: Jimmy Savile: Britain's Unending Nightmare

Robert explains how Jimmy Savile went from bike race commentator to pop music DJ and gatekeeper to the stars, and how much of Britain clamored to give him access to young girls as a reward.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
All Media, 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 has been nominated in

(00:23):
the Experimental and Innovation Podcasts category. 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

(00:46):
social media for episodes that It Could Happen Here and
Behind the Bastards, Thank You, Welcome pod. Behind the Bastard's
cast Robert Evans with Courtney Kosak and Sophie Lichterman. How
Everyone be?

Speaker 2 (01:05):
We are good?

Speaker 1 (01:06):
Is that good?

Speaker 3 (01:06):
Sophie?

Speaker 1 (01:06):
Is that to get intrail?

Speaker 4 (01:09):
I liked it. I just gave Anderson my dog, like
a really big treat and she's enjoying it, which makes
me happy.

Speaker 1 (01:15):
Good good. I just scarfed a bunch of trail mix. Uh,
I thought for you tidied up slightly upstairs? Hey, Courney,
what's we're now recording part two?

Speaker 4 (01:25):
What's that cute thing behind you?

Speaker 5 (01:28):
This?

Speaker 2 (01:28):
This is my book cover our Girl Gone Wild?

Speaker 1 (01:32):
Yeah? Do you want to tell the audience about it
a little before? We talked about a pedophile more?

Speaker 2 (01:37):
Well, hopefully you listen to the first episode, but it
if that would be weird.

Speaker 5 (01:44):
Yeah, it's called Girl Gone Wild. It's about when I
sold t shirts on the Girls Gone Wild tour. It's
about acting in independent films. It's basically about learning about
what society thinks of women, which is a lot like
this episode.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
Yeah. Yeah, unfortunately, So well, I guess let's get back
into it, shall we.

Speaker 4 (02:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
So when we left off, Jimmy had just mate tried
his hand, or at least his legs, at becoming a
professional cyclist and found out that he wasn't quite good
enough for that, but he was really good at being
a weirdo, and that got him a gig commentating for
bicycle races. Right, So his first proper media job was

(02:33):
calling races for the Daily Express, because that was the
newspaper that was funding the first tour of Britain race
Back in the day, newspapers used to have money and
they would like fund or support stuff like big races
in the like for a while. Since newspapers worked that way,
that was.

Speaker 2 (02:50):
Like a pain laugh. That was like a was like
a triggered cackle.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
It was like yeah, but it wasn't all good because
clearly that's how Jimmy Savile gets his fucking break, right.
So this newspaper that's funding the races he's doing like sees, oh,
this guy might have this guy might have like it.
You know what it takes to be a sta. So
they make him a race commentator and he is very
good at that job. They pay him a sizable fee.

(03:16):
In nineteen fifty four and this jump starts his career
as a bona fide celebrity. He becomes the face and
voice of the Daily Express and that starts to earn
him attention from the BBC and from Radio One, which
is the BBC's radio thing of a jigger right now.
Back then, the British media environment was much more restrictive
than it is today, and the BBC has essentially a

(03:37):
monopoly on legal radio play. Right You're not allowed to
just have another radio station, right, you can get in
trouble for that. Now. As a result, the BBC is
like they're very much see themselves as cultural gatekeepers of
like what should be acceptable and popular in Britain. And

(03:58):
this pisses off every because people who run the BBC
are old, stuffy, rich assholes and they have terrible taste
in music. And this is the moment in which pop
music is starting to explode. You know, you have this
period of time like the mid to late fifties, early
sixties where we've talked We talked about this on our
episodes about Phil Spector with my buddy Will Greasy Will.

(04:22):
This is the first time in which teenagers are like
a demographic that you're marketing towards and selling towards, and
that music is angled heavily towards the teen set because previously,
you go back fifty years, teenagers are all working in
the minds or something. They're not dancing at party clubs
or whatever. They're not they're certainly not like a chunk

(04:45):
of the of the populace that you are like trying
to sell stuff to.

Speaker 5 (04:49):
Right.

Speaker 1 (04:50):
That is also started to change right now now because
the BBC has essentially this monopoly on what can be
on the radio. There's this vibrant community that pops up
of pirate DJs who are like very literally pirate DJs.
This is some very cool stories that come out of
this because these guys are like living on boats and
old defense platforms in this scene broadcasting youth music illegally

(05:14):
to the island. It's fucking awesome.

Speaker 2 (05:16):
They're legit pirate DJs.

Speaker 1 (05:19):
Like literal pirates. Yes, there is a movie called Pirate
Radio that's at least ostensibly about this. I don't remember
how good a job it did, honestly, I just remember
it exists. So the very idea again of youth culture
is new and scary to a lot of influential people
in British media because these are members of the upper
class and they're kind of worried in part because they're

(05:41):
all everyone who's got money in the Western world is
terrified of the communists, right, and so there's this fearful
understanding that these young people have different values, maybe it'll
lead them towards like socialism and all these other scary things.
And there's also just this aspect of this has never
been a thing that existed before teenagers and they're being

(06:02):
a whole media industry geared towards teenagers. Is it good for?
Is it making them bad? Is it going to damage them?
You know, there's a lot of concern about that sort
of thing, and unfortunately the concern is focused on like
the kind of music as opposed to maybe the people
making the music and playing on the radio, which is
who they should have been scared of harming the youth
of Britain. The music itself isn't really doing any damage.

(06:26):
But I bring all this up to point out that
it is very difficult and is a very strange and
noteworthy historical fact that within this kind of sclerotic and
very much like not welcome, not open to newcomers, not
open to like different ideas, this list like media culture,
that a guy like Jimmy Savile becomes prominent because Jimmy

(06:52):
talks like a working class man from Leeds and he
dresses well like this. Sophie'll show you one photo of
the guy where he he's got like he's wearing like
a black velvet mask around his face, he's got his
hair slightly curled, his long white hair, and he's got
like a lace fucking gauntlet around his hand. It looks
like it's hard to tell what is going on with

(07:14):
his sleeve there. Yeah, he looks like.

Speaker 2 (07:16):
Hey, Loki loved the sleeve.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
And he's always every time he goes out in public,
every time he's DJing at an event, every time he's
like broadcast he's doing because he's going out to these
like races. He's always dressed weird in some way. He's
always wearing costumes, and he never talks about it.

Speaker 4 (07:36):
I hate to be the person I would wear the
shit that blazer with the lace cup.

Speaker 5 (07:42):
Yes, the mask is an improvement over the just the maskolse.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
The mask helves.

Speaker 2 (07:48):
Weirdly enough, hides his But you know.

Speaker 1 (07:54):
Is he never talks about the way he's dressed, and
when people ask him, he'll try to deliberately avoid the question.
And he taught he writes about this. I think it's
because he knows. Basically, if you talk about it or
explain it, it's not nearly as it doesn't it's not
nearly as interesting. If you just show up dressed like
a maniac and pretend like you're a normal person like

(08:14):
everyone else, that gets you more retention. And yeah, that's
that's what he's doing at this point in time, he.

Speaker 5 (08:21):
Learned his lesson from the coal mine situation.

Speaker 1 (08:25):
He really did. And part of what he's learned is
that if you're dressed like a weirdo, not only does
it get you attention and can't quote unquote pay off,
but people don't poke too much around you. They're not
gonna look to see they're not. No one's going to
investigate to see if you're like a dangerous weirdo, because
they already know you're some kind of weirdo. Right, That's

(08:46):
something he starts to realize about about this, about like
dressing this way, is it weirdly enough? Standing out and
looking like a maniac divert suspicion and interest away from
his actual behavior.

Speaker 2 (08:59):
That's it.

Speaker 1 (09:01):
Jimmy is immediately successful as a broadcaster. People love him,
particularly teenagers, even though by this point he's well into
his twenties. He talk, he understands their slang, He talks
like a teenager. He understands the music they like, He
understands how they're spending their time because he socializes almost
exclusively with teenaged girls. Right, and he's doing this because

(09:23):
he is having sex with slash molesting them. The legal
definition is dependent upon the age that they are. Again,
as I've noted, but that's exclusively who he hangs out with.
So he does understand them, right, And at the time,
other people in the media are just like, well, he's
the only one these kids seem to really like get

(09:45):
you know, he understands the kids, and we know there's
a lot of money there, so we better keep paying
Jimmy Savile because he's the only adult we know who
can communicate with the teenagers.

Speaker 2 (09:57):
Right now, nobody thinks to go and I wonder that is.

Speaker 1 (10:01):
And I will no doubt not at this point in time,
nobody's concerned about that they.

Speaker 2 (10:06):
See in the twenties.

Speaker 1 (10:08):
Sorry, yeah, he's in his twenties. He's in like his
mid twenties by this point, Okay, mid to late twenties
during this period, and part of what's happening is they're
scared of the teenagers, right This is a frightening and anarchic,
seeming new segment of the culture, and Jimmy can control them.
So a big part of his early success and famous
his ability to convince people in the media who come

(10:28):
from money and who are part of this like, you know,
this rarefied air of people who got to do that
job back then, that I can make these kids less
scary and uncontrollable to you. I know how they tick
and I can control them. Right, that's why they're hiring him, right,

(10:49):
So that's great. Basically, he he provides these media elites
in Britain at the time with a degree of control
and predictability over a bunch of teenagers who scared the
living shit out of them. Now, good stuff. Nothing like
this has ever happened since his main job was still djaying,
and by this point he's helping to manage the Mecca

(11:10):
dance hall. He is like the manager of the whole
dance hall, and he's often doing shows and he hits
upon the brilliant idea in nineteen fifty five of playing
top pop hits for his audience while they waited for
the house band to rest between sets. So normally you
just have the band stop and I either maybe you
have a secondary band do something or whatever. But Jimmy
comes in and he starts DJing and just putting on

(11:32):
playing the hits for these kids. And he's really good
at knowing what they want to hear, and he's good
at you know, he's talking in between putting on these songs,
he's getting the crowd amped up. You guys know what
a DJ does, right, but very few people are doing
that at this point. He's one of the first generation.
He's not. He'll often claim to have been the first DJ.
I don't think that's really true. But he's part of

(11:53):
the first generation of guys doing this right. And this
proves to be extremely popular and it earns him a promotion.
So he's a job managing a different, much larger dance
hall in London. So he's now moved from Leeds to
London and he's running this big dance hall and he's
got access to this full size ballroom and the power
and funding to try something more ambitious than that crude

(12:14):
gramophone wired to a speaker that he'd used previously. According
to the book in Plane Sight, he was connected to
the company Westrex, who made turntables, and quote he said,
he walked into the pala which is the dance hall
he's running to find an electrician fitting a record deck
in the box from which the lighting was operated. He
told the man he wanted two turntables and for them

(12:35):
to be installed on the stage, one next to the other.
It was. He claimed the first twin turntable system in history.
Now it wasn't an article I found on CNN notes
commentators have pointed out they were available decades earlier, But
he was one of the very first guys to do this.
Jimmy is legitimately quite novel. I'm sure he saw someone

(12:56):
else do it, maybe, but there aren't a lot of
people who did that before. Or Jimmy Savill who had
a twin turnsable system running right, probably a black guy.

Speaker 5 (13:05):
Everybody in music's ripping off right, right black people at
this point.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
Yeah, yeah, But Jimmy does get that reputation as being
like the first DJ to do this, like, and he's
got that reputation for quite some time. He also develops
a reputation for always traveling with a security team of
large and angry bouncers, which he bragged about for years,
using to brutalize people who stepped out of line during
his shows. He had a zero tolerance policy, and he

(13:31):
talks about this a lot in interviews and stuff because
he was he really liked telling stories about having these big,
dangerous men beat the shit out of people at his command. Now,
the fact that Jimmy was always surrounded by dangerous men, was,
Davies suggests, probably due in part to the fact that
at night he would pick out one or more of

(13:51):
the girls at his shows to invite backstage, and he
was scared of their parents. Right, So Davy suggests he's
kind of lying about the fact that he needed these
guys to keep ordering his shows. He wanted a bunch
of scary, big guys around him because he's fucking a
bunch of teenagers and their parents get angry. Right, And
at this point this is when this stopped by the

(14:13):
I mean it had happened at some point previously, but
by this point he's like twenty eight years old. It
is no longer. Even within the standards of the time,
people think it's a bit weird that he's pretty much
exclusively going after like sixteen year old girls, sometimes young.

Speaker 4 (14:28):
So he's molesting a bunch of teenagers. He's sexually abusing
a bunch of teenagers.

Speaker 1 (14:35):
Some of them for in legal I would say, in
moral terms, yes, in legal terms, a lot of these
are still sixteen year year old girls, and that is legal. Right.
This is important in terms of like why nothing is
done right. So one of his first victims was Kathy Kirby,
who became a prominent singer later herself, but at age sixteen,
went to see twenty eight year old Jimmy Savile at

(14:56):
the Palais. She claims he pursued her and her even
young her sister, which is not legal now. She turned
him down, but the next year, in nineteen fifty six,
Kathy got to perform on stage at the Palais and
was invited to tour with the band leader Bert Ambrose,
and she says that she hit on Bert, but he
turned her down because he was forty years older than her.

(15:17):
And I don't know if this is Burt actually trying
to be a good guy or just being creepy, but
the way he frames the way he explains turning her
down is that like, you need to get some experience.

Speaker 5 (15:26):
Now.

Speaker 1 (15:27):
He may have just meant I don't I'm not gonna
get with a teenage girl. That's fucked up, but she
interprets this as, oh, I need to go have sex
with somebody else first, that that's what he wants. And
maybe that's what Burt did want. I don't know the guy, right,
but Kathy, because again she's a teenager and she's using
the logic of a teenager, decides not to say no
the next time that Jimmy propositions her so that she

(15:50):
can get experience. And again, she's seventeen at this point.
This is legal, right, But that's one of the first
stories we have of she's very uncomfortable. She's particularly uncomfortable
that he's hitting on her fifteen year old sister. But
she does eventually sleep with him because basically she thinks
it'll get her in with someone in the industry she
really like wants to have a relationship with and work with.

(16:12):
And this should get to kind of how murky a
lot of it is at this period of time, right,
this is this is not at all something we can
talk about directly using all of our modern terms.

Speaker 5 (16:22):
Right. Well, actually, people today love to cite that this
was quote unquote normal.

Speaker 1 (16:29):
Back it's not normal, we can say, because again she
thinks it's weird that he's hitting on her sister, right,
But she also doesn't think it's weird when she's seventeen
to hit on like a forty year old guy. Right,
So there is this is a different time with different values.
But what you should note is that by this point
in time. This early in the story, people know it's weird,

(16:51):
and that Jimmy likes some young and that that is weird,
even within a time period in which it's not at
nearly as abnormal for older men to have sex with
much younger women. Right, even in that period of time,
Jimmy is weird and gets a reputation for liking them
young women and girls, right because he's doing both, you know, professionally.

(17:12):
During this period, Savill seems to go from strength to strength.
He starts mixing popular songs together when he's on stage,
in a manner much more familiar to modern day listening
as DJing. But again, he's not interested in making music
or the artistry of any of this. The appeal to
him here is always control. Hence, once he turned his
second dance hall into a hit, he started stopping shows

(17:35):
regularly to announce Smooch Time, in which he gave the
teenage participants permission to grind and make out with each other.
This was totally novel, As one regular this is someone
who was attending these shows as a teenager at the time,
later told biographer Dan Davies he was giving teenagers the
chance to get together. Teenagers had the chance to hug

(17:56):
each other and fall in love. It was a romantic,
fantastic time. And I can see how for the teenagers
at the time this would be really nice. Right, You've
got a culture that's much more repressed, and there's you're
suddenly getting this permission in a public space that like
it's okay to make out with other teens. Right. It's

(18:16):
like you're with your boyfriend, you're out at the club
and he's like, okay, it's not you can all make
out now, right. It's very popular, I guess, is what
i'd say, like a lot of people. And again he's
not this is he's the one on stage. He's not
making out with anyone at this point in time. He
will after the shows. But what he's doing here, as
much as a lot of these kids like it, is

(18:38):
he's normalizing the fact that it's like it's not weird
to have sexual and like romantic physical contact at what
is his place of work. Right, And even though he's
on stage when he's announcing smooch time, this is going
to help to normalize what is going to become predation
from a nearly thirty year old man to a bunch

(18:59):
of largely fifty to seventeen year old girls. That is
part of what's happening here, but nobody it's not noticed
as that because all the teens are just happy that
someone's saying it's not bad for you to make out
with your boyfriend a girlfriend, right, Yeah, like you could
get how that camouflage is it? Right?

Speaker 2 (19:15):
It's excellent camo. I mean it's really good. Kind of
a genius, yeah, evil genius.

Speaker 1 (19:22):
Unfortunately, he is very good at this. In nineteen fifty eight,
he's hired by Radio Luxembourg, an independent station on the
continent that was popular with the youths. This gives him
access to pop musicians, to the biggest stars of the days.
He's talking with the Beatles, he's talking with the Rolling Stones,
He's talking with fucking Elvis, right, I mean at varying

(19:44):
points in time, that's not all starting in nineteen fifty eight.
But if someone is a pop musician who is famous
and beloved, he knows them, and you've heard him talk
to them on air, so you know he knows them,
and this gives him a huge amount of power over
the teenage girls his audience. Now to the adults who
are running the business, and who own these venues. This

(20:06):
helps to reinforce Jimmy's status as a teen whisperer, right,
although this is largely based on a misconception they have
about his fame because they see like, oh wow, the
teenagers love Jimmy. What's really happening is the teenagers know
Jimmy has access to the musicians they love, and so
they follow him because he provides access to these pop stars. Right,

(20:29):
and he increasingly grows skilled when he's talking with these
teenage girls who are lining up outside of his office
after the show, at making himself into a gateway between
these kids who are obsessed with their favorite musicians and
those musicians. That is what provides him with the bulk
of his victims. He is the door. If you make
Jimmy happy, Jimmy can introduce you to the fucking Beatles.

Speaker 3 (20:51):
Right.

Speaker 1 (20:52):
What won't you do for that guy? If you're a
sixteen year old girl in this period of time, Right.

Speaker 2 (20:57):
It's like Weinstein can get you a part of it.

Speaker 1 (21:00):
Maybe, yep, yep, it's how it works pretty much always right, yep.

Speaker 2 (21:05):
Disgusting.

Speaker 1 (21:07):
One former employee at the Plaza, which is one of
the dance halls, he managed recalled seeing a line of
girls outside of Jimmy's office queuing up regularly for what
was euphemistically called a chat with jim No, he used
to always say, I'm going to interview this young lady
for a job. That's all. He'd say. I don't know
what went on behind those doors, but I do know
that he was a man. I we know what was

(21:29):
going on behind those doors.

Speaker 5 (21:30):
Right.

Speaker 1 (21:31):
And again, while a lot of these girls are legally
of age, a lot of them aren't. And we know
a lot of them aren't because people talk about him
hitting on them when they were fourteen or fifteen or
even younger. Right, And I don't have an exact list
of And here's the age and number of the girls
that he molested and the girls who you know were
of age and maybe consent to I don't know how

(21:52):
that breaks out as a ratio. But none of this
is okay because none of this, all of this is
even in the case when they're legally of age. He
is making them have sex with him to get access
to famous musicians. And that's bad. Like it may not
have been a prime at the time, but it's bad.

Speaker 5 (22:11):
Now.

Speaker 1 (22:11):
Jimmy's making good money now and despite the fact this
is something that will be within most of his life,
despite the fact that he now makes good money, he's
always driving around like fancy sports cars, rolls, royces and stuff.
He lives in Squalor. His apartments are always disgusting and
like the cheapest place he can possibly get his house
in this period of time is this gross, mold covered

(22:32):
flat nicknamed the Black Pad because he painted the walls
and everything else black to disguise the grime so that
like it wasn't as obvious how gross it was. Rent
was a pound fifty per week. He's just cheap, okay,
and he doesn't I don't think he spends a lot
of time in his apartment too, so he doesn't see
the reason to spend much money on it. At this point.

(22:53):
He spends a lot of money in his cars, and
usually if he's not having sex in his office, he's
having sex in his car. Now he does bring people
back to his pad to party too, and he's lit
the space with red light bulbs to further hide how
disgusting it is. But it was it's gross.

Speaker 2 (23:13):
Did you get a better place with like a bullpit
or something?

Speaker 1 (23:16):
We probably don't need to be giving him notes, but
it is like weird. It's kind of a noteworthy thing
about how he does this. You know who else lives
in Squalor, Well, that may not.

Speaker 2 (23:29):
This is behind the products and services.

Speaker 1 (23:31):
They're death right, they're living in Squalor, living in living
in mold covered apartments and trash pads. Uh and weird
back so uh. In public, Jimmy always wore expensive, ostentatious

(23:53):
clothes and drove luxury cars, particularly Rolls Royces, and these
also helped to draw teenage girls and his orbit, and
by the time they got back to his disgusting pad,
he'd usually done a good job of roping them in, promising,
I can get you backstage at this show. You can
beat your heroes and get you to come in when
you know we're gonna have Elvis in or whatever the
studio and you can meet him, you know, if you

(24:14):
just do something for me right now. Jimmy is as
good as his word usually when he makes these promises
for a very good reason, right, this isn't He's not
fulfilling the promises he makes these girls, who he then
molests because he cares about being as good as his word.
He is also providing pop stars with groupies who are
quote ready to go. That's the term he uses, and

(24:37):
that's part of his job. He is a fixer for
these musicians who are traveling all over the world. They're
coming past, you know, they're doing part of their tour
in London, so they're going on the radio to talk
to Jimmy. He's talking to them about, you know, the
show they're doing, and it's expected. Hey, you know, you
guys are going to be in town for just like
two nights. Jimmy can hook you up with some girls
who are ready to go, you know, like that's that's

(24:57):
what he's doing. We don't know, specif scifically who he
did that for, but he does it a lot and
it's part of the appeal. It's part of why you
go to Savil's parties. Is if you're famous, he'll get you.
He'll gee up with some groupies. Right, it's very normal.
At the time, it's very bad.

Speaker 2 (25:14):
It's very bad.

Speaker 5 (25:15):
And yeah, you asked me at the beginning of the
first episode how I knew him, And it's those stories.
It's like the story of the girl who gets like
a fish put inside her or like whatever that are
like likely underaged girls with these famous musicians.

Speaker 1 (25:30):
Yeah. Yeah, And you know, even when it's they're not
legally underage at the time, it's still bad. Jimmy Donnelly,
who attended the Plaza starting at age sixteen right around
this time, was interviewed about Davies for his book, and
his recollections of Savel helped get across something important. Quote.

(25:51):
We didn't have this word pedophile in them days. We
had the word weirdo. And Savill was a weirdo. He
always had the Bobby Socks girls, the young girls in
his car. He'd always pull up with the girls in
his car going home. He'd always have the girls in
his car. Right. So, again, as normalized as aspects of
this were, it's weird. Jimmy is a weirdo for the time,

(26:13):
and people are using the term weirdo to refer to
the fact that he's a pedophile.

Speaker 2 (26:16):
Right, that's known.

Speaker 1 (26:17):
It's not a secret. It's just not seen as as
big a problem as it's later going to be seen.
But it's not a mystery. Nobody doesn't think he's doing
this now.

Speaker 5 (26:29):
Words important though, because weirdo can mean a lot of things.

Speaker 1 (26:32):
It can, and that's what Jimmy understands is that his
very oddness, the fact that he is so strange and
so so purposefully strange, is a cloaking device. It helps
to hide the fact that he's a predator. Jimmy dressed,
and it's not just that, it's that Jimmy dresses in
a way. Because he's dressed so weird and ostentatiously, he

(26:52):
regularly gets called a poofter or various other slurs for
a homosexual person. Right, And he's fine with this because
if people think he's queer or just off in general,
then the fact that he's always surrounded by teenage girls
is just another mark of his eccentricity. Right. Yeah, And
in fact, part of his strategy is he deliberately doesn't
have sex with or group most of the young girls

(27:15):
that he's hanging out with, the majority of the girls
that he's surrounded by at any given time, he is
not molesting because that provides further cover. Right, most of
the girls who were out there will say nothing happened,
you know, And that makes him seem safer and it
makes it seem less worth paying attention to. Dan Davies

(27:35):
relates the story of Penny Anne Rolls, who met Savill
when she was a teenage girl working at a coffee
shop that was also a concert venue which Jimmy part owned.
She recalled quote, one Sunday night, he used to take
a few of us to a restaurant, an Indian place
in the Curry center of Manchester. We used to go
there for curry and he would park his Rolls Royce up. Afterwards,
he would take us home with the roof down on

(27:57):
his car and we'd all be singing our heads off.
She remembers there were three or four girls that Savill
took out regularly, but insists he never tried it on
with her. I never saw him in a relationship with anyone,
she maintains. Between you and I, I don't know whether
he was gay. And tactics like this were very much
in line with Jimmy's repeatedly elucidated approach to life. He
talked about this as a strategy. I'm going to quote

(28:20):
from one specific interview he does near the end of
his life, but he repeats this sentiment in numerous places
over half a century. You see, I never ever thought
that I was clever. Tricky. Yes, I'm a very tricky fella.
But tricky is much better than being clever. If you
are clever, you can slip up because you're clever. But
if you're tricky, you don't slip up. You never slip up.

Speaker 6 (28:42):
If you're tricky, Fuck off, Fuck off Jimmy. Unfortunately it works, yea,
but he talks like he's talking. This guy is being like,
I'm tricky. I'm always around teenagers. No one ever has
noticed what's wrong with me?

Speaker 1 (28:55):
What a mystery? This guy was molesting people for decades.
We couldn't have known.

Speaker 4 (29:00):
What a sperry little fuck a little uh huh.

Speaker 5 (29:05):
Because like people expect less of the trickiness versus the cleverness.

Speaker 1 (29:11):
I don't know, right, yes, exactly now. In books and interviews,
reporters would always note that Jimmy never talked about his
inner life.

Speaker 5 (29:20):
Right.

Speaker 1 (29:20):
You can go through all of the he wrote books
about himself, multiple ones, and you don't get anything about
what he actually does on his own or who he
is as a person. And in fact, Jimmy claimed not
to have an inner life. He would talk about this regularly.
It Yeah, I kind of do too. He keeps incredibly busy,
not just with work but with sporting events. He continues

(29:43):
to be an athlete of varying kinds this whole period.
And while he's rising to fame during this time when
he's he's you know, m seeing events and running all
these dance halls and stuff and this popular DJ and
on the radio, he's also a prominent wrestler. And in fact,
he tried to use his he gets into wrestling, and
he tries to use his fame, the fact that he's

(30:05):
kind of famous as a broadcaster to jump start his
wrestling career, and the fact that he is so well
known does make him popular to promoters. Like promoters love
having Jimmy savalon because people will show up to watch
him wrestle. But other wrestlers hate it because he's not
really a wrestler, right, and he's kind of like he's
kind of like stealing his way to the top.

Speaker 2 (30:25):
He's like logan fucking Paul and ww.

Speaker 1 (30:29):
Right.

Speaker 4 (30:30):
Yeah, real WWE fans hate that guy.

Speaker 1 (30:33):
Yeah. The website Pro Wrestling Stories notes his toe was
broken in his very first match. After one bout, he
visited the hospital after his testicles had been kicked up
into his body.

Speaker 2 (30:44):
Hey, thank god. Yeah love that.

Speaker 1 (30:47):
Yeah, there's a couple of good bits here of him
getting hurt. Saville claims to have fought in over one
hundred bouts and proudly lost all thirty five of his
first matches. Despite this, and despite his appearance, he was
very popular with female fans. One wrestler who did not
like Savile and beat him brutally in the ring recalled
years later that Savill bragged about girls lining up to

(31:09):
see him after fights. He would tell them, I'll take
you and you and you the rest of you. Come
back another time. You might get lucky. Ew bro.

Speaker 5 (31:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:19):
Now for reference, here's how Jimmy looked back then as
a wrestler. And just what an upsetting looking man. I
don't know, like he looks like one of the like
in this at least his hair isn't shock white. It's
a bit shorter and black. He's like shirtless, Like he's
in good shape, you can tell, but again he just is.
He's so his face is so upsetting always to me.

Speaker 4 (31:42):
Yeah, he's got like real potato shaped face.

Speaker 2 (31:46):
And then just yeah, crazy hair the bangs again.

Speaker 4 (31:55):
Not sure, I mean, I'm not I don't want to
harp on his appearance, but also fuck him.

Speaker 1 (32:01):
Yeah he's I mean, but also his appearance is a
big part his conscious His appearance is a performance, right,
So there is you know, it's not totally.

Speaker 5 (32:09):
Question on the wrestling, because did you say at the
beginning that he also messed with boys?

Speaker 2 (32:15):
Is there any evidence? Yes, we're getting there.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
I don't know when that starts. I don't know that
anyone does. But yes, he molests a shitload of boys,
very young ones, as we'll be talking about. I don't
know when he begins doing that. We really don't. I
will we will be talking about it later. I have
kind of the earliest point that we know he was by,
but I don't know how far back that goes. Okay,

(32:39):
I should also know the kind of wrestling Saville did
was a mix of like the pure entertainment pro wrestling
that we Americans know and love today in actual competitive grappling.
So these are real fights, right, like where there's like
a winner and a loser that's not decided ahead of time.
And I will talk about one of those fights much later.
At the end of these episodes. You're gonna need it
as a palette cleanser, but that's getting We'll do that

(33:02):
later because again, it's going to be necessary However, it's
important you know that the fact that he's bad at
wrestling doesn't mean that his time as a wrestler was
a failure for Savil. In fact, it's one more thing
that makes him seem terrifying and impossible to resist to
his victims. The fact that he's a pro wrestler helps
helps ensure that when he's molesting someone, they don't fight

(33:23):
back because he's scary. He's in really good shape, and
he's huge. He is a big man. He's physically dangerous.
This is not a This is a guy who is
in fights. This is a guy who knows how to
hurt people, and who knows how to uses body to
hurt people. He even told one wrestling magazine, if I
arrive at the gates of Heaven and Saint Peter says,
you've been a very tricky man. You can't come in here.

(33:44):
I'll break his thumbs because I'm qualified to do that,
because I've earned a living being a wrestler, and I've
not had a problem yet with anyone who's thumbs I've broken.
No one could have known, impossible to know this guy
was preying on kids. There were no signs.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
Don't even think of that scenario in your head.

Speaker 1 (34:03):
Also the fact that again he's periodically in his life
being like, I'm not clever, I'm tricky, and no one
can catch you if you're tricky. And then in this
he's like, Saint Peter wouldn't let me into heaven because
I'm tricky. Really, let you know what he means when
he says he's tricky exactly. In nineteen sixty four, the
BBC asked Jimmy Savill to be the first host of
a new television program. Well, I think it's a radio

(34:26):
program that becomes TV later, but well, I think it
is TV at this point in time. It's a little
because a lot of media, it's kind of hard to
find from nineteen sixty four, so I think this is
a TV program at the time. It's called Top of
the Pops and it's a video showcase of the hit
bands of the era that becomes this massive hit. And
Jimmy's not the only host. They rotate DJs, so like

(34:48):
every episode you'll have somebody different, right, but Jimmy is
like the first one to host the show, and he's
like one of the most regular people that they bring
back to host Top of the Pops during this period
of time and throughout the sixties and I think into
the seventies, he's repeatedly voted Britain's favorite DJ, like he's
the top DJ in the country by pretty much any

(35:09):
person's like standards. And so he also gets the job
regularly when these huge bands that are honestly probably bigger
in a lot of ways than any popular musician is today.
When you talk about the Beatles or the Stones at
their height, he's the guy on stage introducing them whenever
they play in England, right, and he continues he'll dress

(35:30):
in bizarre costumes. I saw one video where he's like
opening for the Stones and he's dressed as like a
stereotype of a Japanese woman, wearing like a kimono and
like waving fans to cool himself down. As he approaches
the microphone, he's got his catchphrases like now then, now
then and now how about that then? Because catchphrases were

(35:51):
easier to have back then, more than anything, Jimmy had access.
This is a guy who talks to the Beatles repeatedly.
He's in like a top of the Pops they do
like a TV skit with the Beatles, where Jimmy, because
he's so huge and tall, is like he's like the
abominable Snowman, and they're all out like hiking, and he's

(36:11):
like one by one like eating the Beatles basically. And
I don't think they're actually friends. I don't think they know,
Like they're certainly not hanging out socially the rest of
their lives. But he knows them. And if you're a
teenage girl, all you see is that, like, wow, he
knows the fucking Beatles. You know. On stage, when Jimmy
wasn't surrounded by pop stars, he was often quite literally

(36:34):
buried in girls, which further helped to normalize and disguise
his behavior. Here's one example from an episode of Top
of the Pops in the nineteen seventies, that Sophie's gonna
play for you here, I thought.

Speaker 2 (36:45):
Something I fought like the very souls.

Speaker 1 (36:48):
I said, I'm too going to come.

Speaker 3 (36:49):
Get used to it. So ladies and gentlemen, all can
say is good night from all of the certain Top
of the Toops, and it's number one time, and of
course he's believed me. Now it's from the one and
only she can go.

Speaker 4 (37:01):
I'd think there's to do so.

Speaker 1 (37:04):
For those of you who couldn't see that, Jimmy is
surrounded by like a dozen young, very young women, I
can't tell their age, and one of the girls, the
girl next to him, keeps like jumping and making like
oh sounds. I think because he's grabbing her the whole
Oh no, this is the most popular show in the country,
one of them at the time. He's just on stage

(37:25):
with a bunch of teenage girls groping one of them
on video. This is so normalized, This is not hidden,
This is not like I have to really emphasize there
was no reason not to know what Jimmy was doing here.
While I was looking for that clip, I accidentally came
across another clip from a nineteen sixty five episode of

(37:47):
Top of the Pops, and Jimmy's only on for the
first second, but once I heard the words to the
song he's introducing, I had to include this too, just
because it's just a very I had a funny bit
of irony Sophie's to play that clip to you now
from the sixty five episode. The song is called little Children, Jay,

(38:13):
little Children, You dare not tell on me? You tell
what you Why was that a song I Know, just
to kind of talk make the point about how like
some of this is that things were fucked up at
the time. Why is that a song? Yeah, just Jimmy

(38:37):
sat the Pedophile introducing a song about telling kids not
to tell on adults. Great. So by this point, by
the time, and again we're in kind of like the
mid sixties. In this era, Jimmy's moved on from the
Mecca he's hosting, he's running things at a new thirty
three hundred person dance hall called the Top Ten Club,

(38:59):
which promised music by famous pop stars and top international
DJ Jimmy Saville. On ads for the club, Jimmy was
pictured with a chimpanzee for some reason, and the text
it's a gas, it's a ball, It's like crazy man.
The club only allowed people sixteen and up, which was
again the age of consent, but numerous people who attended

(39:20):
in those days have made it clear that lying about
your age was so easy as to be essentially encouraged.
No one's checking or cares if you're not actually sixteen, right,
And in fact, there's some evidence that, you know, the bouncers,
the people like at the gate are specifically trying to
bring in younger girls for reasons I probably don't need
to elaborate on here. Now, the Top ten Club becomes

(39:43):
Jimmy's primary like hunting area, and he, in order to
maintain sort of this h like his kind of specialness,
he forbade none of the other DJs were allowed to
play Top twenty hits, right because Jimmy knows his popularity
is based entirely on his perceived closest to fame, and
this further helps to make him seem special and make

(40:03):
it seem like he's got access. Jimmy Donnelly, who we
heard from earlier, recalled that Savill always left with girls
from their mid to late teens and that it was
well known Jimmy Savill liked him young. Now the Top
ten Club is going to become probably his most reliable
hunting ground in this period of life. That's the term
Davies uses for it through the mid to late sixties,

(40:25):
and both he and the BBC are recruiting girls from
the Top ten Club right. Saville is recruiting them because
he wants to molest them, and the BBC is recruiting
them for the studio audience of their hit new TV
show Top of the Pops because they have just teenagers
come into dance, right, Like these girls are bringing brought
into like dance on stage to be in the background.

(40:46):
It's like in that clip I've shown you, you just
have them as set dressings, right. And so you've got
like Cecil Korr, who's the assistant producer for the show
and a twenty nine year old man. He'll go talent
spotting out at club nights at the Top ten club
and he'll hand out tickets to girls. And he had
said later, I was looking for girls aged thirteen to seventeen, right,

(41:08):
that's who he's handing out tickets to be on TV too,
said one Top of the Pops director. If they were
dancers or were attractive, obviously they got on. So again,
both the BBC and Savile are preying on underaged girls.
The BBC because they the BBC recognizes that they have
sex appeal quote unquote to the audience, to the musicians,

(41:32):
to the DJs, and they want there to be girls
younger than sixteen.

Speaker 5 (41:35):
Here.

Speaker 1 (41:36):
The BBC makes that decision too. This is not just
Jimmy deciding to molest kids. The BBC wants to put
kids in a position where they will be molested. That
is a choice made by the people running the BBC,
and it is a choice they keep making for decades.
That is a very important part of the story.

Speaker 5 (41:53):
Surely they're not getting paid like no, no, no, they're
getting paid in the ticket to get They're.

Speaker 1 (41:59):
Getting paid in the ticket. You know that, and maybe
you'll get you know, with your favorite pop star or whatever. Right,
that's there. I think what draws a lot of these
kids in right, because obviously they're kids. Jimmy maintained his
reputation as Britain's oldest teenager by speaking like kids, knowing
their lingo and their music. But his larger appeal was
the simple fact that he represented access to the pop

(42:20):
stars they idolized. Savell was constantly on the air on
TV or in concerts introducing the Beatles, Manfred Mann and
of course the Rolling Stones, and while the kids perceived
him as having a close relationship to all these guys,
the reality was often uglier. Let's take the Stones as
an example. Savill was an early advocate of the band,
even when the record company Deco wasn't sure they had

(42:41):
what it took to outshine the Beatles. Savill had seen
the way audiences went nuts for the group. He described
it as rioting, and he supported them in his he
gets a newspaper column, so he's writing newspaper articles about
the pop industry at this dime and in his discussions
with industry insiders. This does not mean that he was
friendly with or liked by the band members. In nineteen

(43:01):
sixty four, after their first number one record, the Stones
were booked to play at the Top ten club. The
crowd that night was, for lack of a better word, insane.
Fights broke out constantly and the police even had to
show up. And the Stones, to an extent, part of
like what they're doing in this time is playing up
how crazy their concerts get. This is what's going to
kind of culminate and the like there's a like somebody

(43:22):
gets killed at one of their concerts by a Hell's Angels,
like back in the US, not crazy long after this
period of time, because that's part of what makes the
Stones famous, is how nuts their shows go, how crazy
their fans go for them. But things get so bad
this night that the Stones refused to play when their
time came up, and part because like they've lost their instruments,

(43:43):
like the instruments they were supposed to have didn't show up,
and they didn't want to play with like the venues,
like backup set of instruments. They didn't think they were
good enough. And that's just going to make the fans
even crazier, which makes them less want to go on stage.
So Jimmy, who's out DJing to try and calm the
crowd down, gets called up by an aid and he
goes backstage to see what's wrong, and he's told that,

(44:05):
like you know, the band isn't going to play. These
instruments aren't good enough, Like they're just going to leave.
And I'm gonna quote now from the book In Plain Sight.
Saville's response was characteristically blunt. He pointed to where three
of his largest minders were standing and growled, you've got
the time it takes this stage to revolve to make
your mind up. If you're not going to play, you're
going to be unconscious because my minders are going to

(44:25):
chin all of you. I'll accept drummer Charlie Watts, that
is Saville claimed that Watts looked him up and down
before speaking. You would, wouldn't you, he said? No, Danger
replied Saville, and I'll throw you to the fucking audience.
I guarantee you that. And the Rolling Stones agreed. They
take their preferred audience instruments and they play on there
and they go play their show. Right, this is a

(44:47):
he does this with other people. This is just one
example of like the way he is. He is very
comfortable threatening violence even on these big pop stars. Right,
that's going to be fair. That's that's wild, Like, that's crazy.

Speaker 4 (45:03):
That's unhinged behavior. That that level of aggression. Like I'm
sorry to make to make Jagger.

Speaker 1 (45:10):
To Mick Jagger. Yeah, and again Mick Jagger. They're young, yeah, yeah,
they're kids at this point too. They're not that much
older than their teenage fans, whereas Jimmy Saville is now
pushing like thirty something, like he's a mature adult. Yeah,
Like you can't think of the Stones as like these
massive figures that they are today. At this point, they're

(45:31):
a lot less sure of themselves.

Speaker 4 (45:33):
That's great context. Thanks.

Speaker 1 (45:36):
Yeah. Yeah, So the Stones agree, they play the show,
and Saville later told an interviewer that had they refused,
I would have had the bastards chinned and slugged to
the crowd. If they lived or died, it wouldn't have
mattered to me. He's very open about all this stuff.
What a maniac. What a fucking maniac. By this point
in the late sixties, he's a well known MC and

(45:57):
public figure. Saville got hired to host shows all over
the country. In nineteen sixty seven, the town of Otley
hosted their annual civic Ball and named it the Pop
Civic Ball to attract youngsters. Of course, Jimmy Savill was
asked to attend as chief guest, and he responded with
a list of conditions for his appearance. The first was
that his normal two hundred pound fee had to go

(46:19):
to a local charity. Right, So that's what you start.
Your first demand is, don't pay me, send the money
to a local charity, right, because that deflex suspicion, particularly
it to flex suspicion. Before his second and third condition,
I wish to sleep the night on the Chevin, which
is like a park or something nearby, in a tent
which you will organize plus sleeping bag and a large torch.

(46:41):
And this is the answer that the venue gives. I
will personally organize a tent plus sleeping bags in a
large torch for you to sleep overnight and moreover, will
hold you to it. And his third demand is a
guard of honor of six young ladies in another tent,
of course, to keep me safe. And the venue answers,
I'll organize a guard of honor of six young ladies,
but I won't be held to their comple alliance or
your safety. Get it. The town, you know, whatever representative

(47:06):
of the town is like, I'll make sure there's the
six young ladies for you, but I won't make sure
you don't bless him. Haa.

Speaker 4 (47:14):
This is called sex trafficking.

Speaker 1 (47:18):
This is in writing that.

Speaker 4 (47:20):
Yeah, that's that's horrific. That's deeply horrible.

Speaker 1 (47:25):
That's repub Oh, it gets so much worse. This happens
all the time.

Speaker 4 (47:30):
And again I've been angry with the entire episode, but
that is absolutely just I'm disgusted.

Speaker 1 (47:40):
Yeah, and this is public at the time. He talks
about it to the media, that he made the town
provide him with sixteen aged girls, and they did. Everyone
knows this, it's not hidden. His fourth condition is that
he'd be given a tour of the local hospital, because
he likes volunteering at hospitals. We'll talk about that a
lot more. But he loves going on, you know, doing

(48:00):
his good charitable work at these hospitals. Right, And so
you see, you Sandwich, I want teenage girls and privacy
so that I can molest them in between money to charity,
volunteer at a local hospital.

Speaker 6 (48:13):
Right.

Speaker 1 (48:13):
You see what he's doing here. You know, now all
of these becomes standard demands for him in the years
to come. Whenever he's asked to do something like this.
He is constantly hosting events and he will always say, Okay,
I need you to provide me with this number of
girls as an honor guard or whatever, you know, sometimes
to camp with, sometimes to hang out with, sometimes to
like wake him up in the morning. Right. And I'll

(48:35):
always open with a charitable donation and then in the
middle is the girls, and then at the end is
some other like good cause, volunteering at a hospital or something.
All of these demands, particularly for the honor guard, were
publicized at the time. Local press wrote about this. Jimmy
wrote about this in his autobiography. In his autobiography, which

(48:57):
is published after he has awarded the o or Order
of the British Empire, which is a step below knighthood.
In his autobiography, he describes the teenage girls that this
town provided with him him with as looking good enough
to eat. Now, I don't know precisely what this is
not a hidden.

Speaker 2 (49:17):
What year are we in Robert here?

Speaker 1 (49:19):
Sixty seven? Sixty seven?

Speaker 2 (49:21):
And how old would he be?

Speaker 1 (49:22):
Roughly, he's like he's got to be he's like twenty
nine pushing.

Speaker 4 (49:26):
Thirty and has the face of that is it looks.

Speaker 1 (49:31):
Like Jimmy Saville. Yeah, I don't know precisely how old
the girls were, but they all seem to have been
under eighteen. In the book in Plain Sight Davy's Rights,
and he's talking about a woman who told it, who
was one of these girls and talked to him years
later about it. Right. The woman recalled that it was
bitterly cold when the girls got into their sleeping bags
and the separate tenth that had been set up for

(49:51):
them in that clearing. It was at this point, in
the early hours of the morning, that Jimmy Saville, who
had been playing them with vodka all night but not
drinking himself, came in and tried it on with each
of the girls. Although the woman refused to elaborate on
what had happened on the grounds that she didn't think
it fair on the others in the tent that night.
She did describe Jimmy Saville as a disgusting old man
and a pervert. Her version of events was that they

(50:13):
were saved when youths from the rugby club shot out
the paraffin lamps with air rifles. They had followed us
up there, she said. She described the girls huddling in
the tent while a fight broke out between Savel and
the youths. Saville was violent, really nasty. Once he turned,
she added, thank god the salute to those teenagers shooting
in tent with an air rifle. Thank God for you.

Speaker 2 (50:35):
The honor guard term is like so ironic and disgusting. Yeah,
and also.

Speaker 1 (50:41):
One of the grossest things I've ever heard.

Speaker 5 (50:42):
Yeah, I was gonna ask you. You said the vodka thing.
But like, is he is this a common thing that
he's like applying them.

Speaker 1 (50:51):
He does not seem to have been very much of
a drinker or much of a I'm sure he did some,
but he doesn't seem to be much of a drinker
or march into drugs. But he lies girls with them.
He does a lot of that in this period of
time and later, so we'll talk more about that. But
this is as good a time as any to go
to ads.

Speaker 3 (51:10):
I guess.

Speaker 1 (51:20):
We're back. So the same year that Jimmy Saville helped
host the oughtly pop civic Ball, a magazine called People.
I don't think this is the People magazine we have today.
I think it was a different magazine called People launched
an investigation into Savill's predilection for young girls, based on
numerous complaints by underaged girls that he had raped or
otherwise abused them. This is happening as early as nineteen

(51:43):
sixty seven. The investigation was never published, though, because the
editor of the magazine, Sam Campbell, had hired Jimmy Saville
as a columnist because he's going to draw on young readers,
and so basically he's like, we're not going to publish
an investigation over the whether or not this guy molesting girls.
He's one of our most popular columnists, you know. In

(52:04):
January of nineteen seventy two, after receiving the Obe People,
this magazine published a four part series with Jimmy titled
Me and My three Thousand Birds At Last, Jimmy Savill's
own story, give you a guess as to what that's about.

Speaker 2 (52:19):
Disgusting, Oh my god, yep.

Speaker 1 (52:23):
Now, when you're in three thousands of very realistic I
don't know, maybe not at this point in time, but
his victim's number in the thousands.

Speaker 2 (52:32):
And when you're amusing a pedophile of distinction with his ob.

Speaker 1 (52:37):
With his ob yes, yes, pedophile ob. Now, when you're
abusing women and girls at the rate Jimmy was during
this period, you're going to need a close circle of
cop friends if you want to avoid trouble. And from
the start of his period of major fame in the
late sixties through the early seventies up to the end
of his life, the adult men that Jimmy Savills primarily

(52:59):
social with appear to have been police officers. When he's
hanging out with other adult men, they are often, if
not mainly, cops. Those are his best friends.

Speaker 2 (53:10):
Is because they would all the cops. Yeah, they would
be bastards.

Speaker 1 (53:15):
During the height of his dance hall days, Manchester police
officer Lewis the Lion Harper was Per Davies Jimmy Savile's
eyes and ears. He's watching to hear if there are
any complaints he needs to take care of Harper was
the chief superintendent of the City Center and a prominent
member of the Vice squad. As a note, when Harper died,
he left more in his will than he had earned

(53:36):
in total during his time on the police force. Not
cricket at all, not getting bribed by Jimmy. Yeah, I
gave him that nickname.

Speaker 4 (53:44):
Fucking yeah, like the lion Taiwan land Master asked, shit.

Speaker 1 (53:47):
What the One of my sources for these episodes was
an article in the UK Tribune by Ferrell Kenney. He
notes that in Sable's out of print nineteen seventy four autobiography,
As It Happens, Jimmy referenced a female Manchester police officer
who attempted to bring charges against him for harboring a
teenage runaway. That means a girl ran away from home

(54:10):
and Jimmy was keeping her in one of his houses, right, Yeah. However,
this officer was, in Saval's words, dissuaded from going through
with this by her colleagues. Quote because it was well
known that where I to go, I would probably take
half the station with me. Now does that mean that
if Saval were charged, half the station would quit because

(54:31):
they were his friends, or does that mean that if
Savile were charged, he would tell stories about half the
station because he was providing half the Manchester Police force
with teenaged girls to molest. What do you think is
more likely?

Speaker 2 (54:47):
That's so shape.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
I know what I think is more likely the finest
Manchester's finest. Yeah, good guys. Now we know that during
this period where Jimmy was managing his dance halls, doing
Top of the Pops and starting with the TV show
he's going to start, we'll talk about in part three
jim Will Fix It, he impregnated at least two teenaged girls. Now,

(55:09):
I'm only going to give you one of these accounts,
and I'm sure there were more. I'm going to only
give one of these accounts in the interest of just
not breaking everybody's spirit. But you should know this is
happening more than the one time we're talking about.

Speaker 4 (55:21):
My spirit's pretty broken before you even got to this part.
This is just like yeah, yeah, christ.

Speaker 1 (55:28):
Now, this particular allegation that I'm going to relate came
out in October of twenty twelve, which is after Saville's death,
But the alleged crime occurred in nineteen sixty four, when
the woman in question was sixteen years old and a virgin.
She had started an Elvis Presley fan club, and Savill
invited her on his Radio Luxembourg show to talk about
the fan club she had, and he tells her afterwards, well,

(55:50):
I'm flying to America soon and I'm going to visit Elvis.
I'll be hanging out with him, So why don't you
send me a picture of you that I can give
to the King. Right, So she does, and I'm going
to quote from Endplaine Sight as to what happened next.
According to the woman, who did not want to reveal
her identity, on returning from the States, Savile phoned her
house and told her he had a present for her
from Elvis. She was understandably thrilled and recalled walking to

(56:13):
the London hotel where Savill was staying. She said he
met her in his pajamas. He then took her into
his room, pinned her to the wall, and started kissing her.
The man said she pleaded for him to stop. He whispered,
You're an angel, before pushing her onto the bed and
raping her. Afterwards, when he's done, he tosses her some
badges from the new Elvis Presley movie kissing cousins and

(56:33):
leaves that's the present from Elvis, So she goes home.
After this, she misses her next two periods, and she
realizes that she's pregnant. She attempts to induce a miscarriage. Eventually,
her father takes her to receive an illegal abortion, which
she endures without painkillers. This was physically damaging enough that
she endures multiple miscarriages as a young woman in her twenties. Again,

(56:56):
not the only story like this, And again to a
point of even when someone's technically legally of the age,
he is still often raping the people who are legally
of age. It's just that who's gonna charge him with rape?
The cops he's friends with.

Speaker 5 (57:10):
Yeah, wow, Robert, Yeah yeah, I wasn't quite ready for that.

Speaker 1 (57:15):
Yeah, that's what we're We're only going to relate one
of the that the stories of girls that pregnant. But
there's more than one. There's more than one. I don't
know how many there were. Could have been hundreds, to
be honest, Yeah, it could have been hundreds.

Speaker 4 (57:31):
It's hard to hear, but it happened, and like we
can't ignore, yeah, that these types of things had to happen.
To so many people.

Speaker 5 (57:40):
But wow, I'm the euphemism of honor guard or whatever,
there's a lot of that.

Speaker 1 (57:46):
There's a lot of real bleak stuff behind these euphemistic terms.

Speaker 4 (57:51):
Yeah, just to say I'm so fucking glad that guy's dead.

Speaker 1 (57:54):
I really, he's for sure dead.

Speaker 5 (57:57):
Yeah yeah, but he had to pay for it a
little didn't ever pay for it.

Speaker 4 (58:01):
And so many such cases where this has happened, which
is why it's important that we talk about horrific things
that have happened in history and today so that like
people know.

Speaker 2 (58:13):
What to look for.

Speaker 4 (58:14):
But this is, like, there were so many people where
I think.

Speaker 1 (58:19):
That's only gonna be more of it as this goes on.

Speaker 4 (58:22):
Yeah, I think that's part of what's really hard to
stomach for me, because so many people are aware and like,
honestly hearing that you know, not that you know, any
cop isn't a bastard, but hearing that a woman knew
about this.

Speaker 1 (58:37):
And a woman and tried to do something, try to.

Speaker 4 (58:40):
Do something, but honestly, girl didn't try that hard, and
like that's heartbreaking.

Speaker 1 (58:44):
Well this, I mean, you know, she may have been
threatened with murder, Like, yeah, a bunch of her fellow
cops may have said, well, fucking kill Like, I don't
know what you know, I'm like not to not to
hold water for a cop, and I literally don't know,
and I can imagine it pretty brutal.

Speaker 4 (59:01):
All these people are responsible for his crimes, Like you knew,
you fucking knew what he was, and like he one
of the most vile people to ever live.

Speaker 1 (59:15):
Oh yeah, well and one of the At this point
in the story, you do you can still say the
thing that, like this is all happening within this subculture
pop music and the people who are like presenting it
to the nation where this kind of behavior is extremely
common and normalized. That's true up to this point in
the story. It is not going to be true for

(59:36):
most of Jimmy Savile's life as a sex offender. When
I tell you at this point that people implicated in
his behavior are some cops and other DJs and like
BBC people working at the time. By the end of
this story, the entire royal family, including Princess die are
implicated in degrees of his crimes. In addition to the

(59:59):
In addition to Margaret Thatcher, the whole ruling class of
England is implicated in what Jimmy Savile did. So that's cool.
We'll talk about that in part three and four next week.

Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
God, I love Princess Die. That ruined him?

Speaker 1 (01:00:13):
Yeah yeah, I mean maybe she didn't know anything. I
don't know. Prince Prince Charles shere did, King Charles sure did. Absolutely,
we'll in the subsequent episodes. I don't know. I know
that Die was a good friend of Savile's for the
for a chunk of her life. I don't know what
she knew, but we know what Charles knew and Prince Andrew.

Speaker 5 (01:00:37):
Is so funny is when I saw your Epstein episode,
I was like jealous of the guest and I manifested
too hard because look what episode I wound up.

Speaker 1 (01:00:47):
Yeah. Yeah, because he's very much in some ways is
kind of like the English equivalent, right, you know, in
some very different ways. And we'll talk about all that
in part three and four. But yeah, you want to
up plug your book before we roll out here.

Speaker 2 (01:01:02):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 5 (01:01:03):
You guys, Girls Gone Girl Gone Wild. Girl's Gone Wild
is similar to this but different. But Girl Gone Wild
is a feminist manifesto.

Speaker 2 (01:01:13):
So if you need something to just.

Speaker 5 (01:01:16):
Wash out that gross taste in your mouth after that
brutal rape scene we just heard.

Speaker 2 (01:01:22):
Order yourself a copy. That's the best plug I have.

Speaker 1 (01:01:25):
Cool Well, sorry for these episodes being so bleak, folks. Yeah,
it's not going to get better, but hey, we'll get
to you know, we will get to talk about Jimmy
Savile experiencing some degree have come upance, not unfortunately if
the legal variety. But I am saving a good story

(01:01:47):
for the end of this just as a palette cleanser.
So I'll promise you all.

Speaker 2 (01:01:50):
That can't wait.

Speaker 4 (01:01:51):
Well, shit, thanks.

Speaker 1 (01:01:53):
Until next week. Everybody you know touch grass I had
a dog. If if you know a BBC executive, sock
them right in the teeth, you know, I mean it.
Probably at this point all those guys are gone, but
probably still deserve it.

Speaker 4 (01:02:14):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
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You don't miss an episode for clips in our older

(01:02:35):
episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube
dot com slash at.

Speaker 1 (01:02:40):
Behind the Bastards.

Speaker 4 (01:02:42):
We love about forty percent of you, statistically speaking,