In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile (27 page)

In March 1971, soon after accepting a Carl-Alan disc jockey of the year award from Prince Charles, Jimmy Savile set out on his greatest physical test to date: an 876-mile walk from John O’Groats to Land’s End. His
Savile’s Travels
motor caravan followed behind, the driving shared by the Manchester taxi driver he had bought his first Rolls-Royce from, a young businessman from Hull, his brother Vince and the transport manager from Broadmoor Hospital, another hospital employee who had been sucked in and who, like others, would be named as a beneficiary in his will.

Thirty-one days later, a 33-strong Royal Marines band, helicopters and a crowd of hundreds joined him for the last two miles of his epic trek. ‘A fantastic fact is that I’ve never been alone for one hour since leaving John O’Groats,’ he wrote in his newspaper column the next week. ‘I’ve wheeled cripples along in wheelchairs who didn’t want to be left out … I’ve pushed prams with assorted babies in. I’ve slowed down to a shuffle with a 90-year-old lady gripping my arm and sped fleet-footed downhill … with an entire youth club tailing out behind like Halley’s Comet.’
²¹

Walking among his flock, shepherd’s staff in hand, Jimmy Savile’s conviction that he was a ‘chosen one’ had transmogrified into something altogether more terrifying. A self-appointed Messiah figure was now among us.

PART FOUR

35. YOUNG CRUMPET THAT WOULD KNOCK YOUR EYES OUT

A
fter completing his length-of-Britain walk, Jimmy Savile rewarded himself with a short break before starting work on
Savile’s Yorkshire Travels
, a new television series for BBC North. More likely is that he was lying low after the body of 15-year-old Claire McAlpine was discovered by her mother, on the floor, next to her bed in the family home on Bushey Hill Lane, Watford. Empty sleeping pill bottles and a red leatherette diary with a tiny lock and key were found nearby.

The girl’s mother, Vera McAlpine, claimed the diary revealed her adopted daughter had been having sex with BBC disc jockeys she met through
Top of the Pops
after appearing as one of the show’s dancing ‘dolly birds’ under the stage name Samantha Claire.

As the
News of the World
reported, ‘The diary told of one radio disc jockey who took Samantha to his home for the night and gave her a pill which made her feel she was “floating on a cloud” It told of another DJ who asked the teenager back to his sumptuously furnished home and about whom passages in the diary so shocked her mother that she immediately contacted the BBC.’
¹

Claire McAlpine’s suicide was the second controversy to hit the show in a short space of time. Since 14 February 1971, the BBC had been reeling from seven consecutive weeks of stories published by the
News of the World
. They were exposés that promised to lift ‘the lid off the BBC and the glamorous world of the disc-jockey’.
²
Payola – cash payments to obtain plugs for records and appearances of bands on TV shows – was the first scandal. It was one that the BBC hoped would die down after it launched a half-hearted
investigation into bribery and made a token dismissal or two. It was wrong.

The revelations contained damaging details on the use of call girls and sex parties as inducements to ‘well known BBC celebrities’, the deceit of producers and DJs in pushing records in which they had a financial interest, the rigging of the pop charts and female record pluggers ‘working on a bed-for-plugs basis’.

‘There are only two ways to get air-play … money and sex,’ claimed one promotions man in the first instalment of the paper’s sensational scoop. And with the BBC enjoying a monopoly on airplay for pop music in the post-pirate era, the result was ‘a Klondike-style rush from the record industry’.

If payola was the name given to the scandal that engulfed the BBC, the five-month investigation by a team of the
News of the World
’s reporters went a good deal further than the murky practices involved with promoting new records.

Jimmy Savile managed to stay out of the story, other than for a quote he gave in early January when the allegations first surfaced: ‘Pluggers and payola people never bother me,’ he said. ‘What could they give me that I haven’t got already?’
³
It was true that
Savile’s Travels
was not regarded as a prime target for the pluggers; at the Tuesday morning ‘surgeries’ in the Radio 1 Club offices on the fourth floor of Egton House, the holy grail was getting records approved by the producers of shows presented by Tony Blackburn, Tony Brandon, Dave Lee Travis, Terry Wogan and Jimmy Young.

More pertinently, Jimmy Savile was not someone who particularly liked his fellow disc jockeys. He was therefore unlikely to have been caught rolling around the floor with them in a potfuelled orgy at a plugger’s flat.

Things became more uncomfortable, however, when the investigation moved on to
Top of the Pops
, and specifically the activities of one of Savile’s good friends, the show’s in-house photographer Harry Goodwin. The pair had known each other since before the programme’s launch, from their days of knocking around together with Bill Benny in Manchester. ‘We had the best of times; we were
very close and loved arguing the point together,’ Goodwin recalled many years later. ‘We would argue about who was the better with women.’

Undercover reporters listened in as Goodwin boasted of taking pornographic pictures of young girls on
Top of the Pops
and showing ‘blue movies’ in his locked dressing room for production staff. When an ‘internationally famous British male star’ offered to buy one of the films, Goodwin refused, saying, ‘You are not having it because – [another famous TV star] is one of my best customers and he has not seen this yet. He will go mad when he sees this.’
⁴

Goodwin claimed he was ‘shopped’ and went on to relate how three CID officers and a security officer at the BBC ‘inquired into the matter’. He said, ‘They went through every locker – they were all wrenched open – and they never found nothing.’ More telling is that he admitted he was tipped off ‘by friends’.
⁵

Stanley Dorfman confirms that
Top of the Pops
had been the subject of a police investigation in the late 1960s after allegations were made that underage girls were being exploited in the dressing rooms before and after shows. ‘There was a rumour,’ he explained before admitting members of staff were interviewed.
⁶
‘The police came to inquire and we had them in the office for a week,’ he says. ‘Nothing came of it and they went away.’

In Goodwin’s taped conversation with the
News of the World
, he talked of girls in the studio audience posing for ‘porny’ photographs, and recounted a liaison between a male member of a pop group and a girl dancer. ‘The people who see that show don’t know what’s happened [behind the scenes],’ he bragged to the undercover reporter. ‘I think they should start the cameras in the dressing rooms.’ Less than two weeks after the story ran, Claire McAlpine was dead.

Vera McAlpine told the
News of the World
how she had read Claire’s diary a month before her daughter took her own life. She had been horrified to discover entries containing accounts of Claire spending the night with two BBC DJs, one with a show on Radio 1 and the other a presenter on
Top of the Pops
, and had banned
her daughter from ever appearing on the show again. Of the
Top of the Pops
presenter mentioned in the diary entries, she said, ‘Some of the passages were so shocking that I would rather not repeat them … But the police know what they said.’

She went on to recount how she had phoned the BBC to tell them about the second DJ. ‘I gave them the man’s name,’ she said. ‘I asked if they realised [Claire] was a child of 15, and I said something had to be done about it to save other girls from the same sort of thing. I demanded to speak to “the man right at the top” but they said quite abruptly that this was impossible.’

Sometime later, Vera McAlpine said she did finally receive a call from the BBC. It was explained to her that the DJ in question had been spoken to and had flatly denied the allegation so there was nothing more to be done. The BBC did not interview Vera McAlpine or her daughter, who had appeared on
Top of the Pops
on four occasions. Neither, she said, did the BBC contact the police: ‘They simply shrugged it off as though nothing had happened.’
⁷

There are two small but potentially significant details in what Vera McAlpine told a reporter from the Press Association. The first is one of the disc jockeys had offered Samantha a ‘contract which would make her famous’. The second was her daughter had taken part in two television programmes in Yorkshire.
⁸

After her death, two of Samantha’s friends came forward to recount their own experiences on
Top of the Pops
. Donna Scruff was just 13 and yet had appeared as a dancer in the audience on three occasions. ‘We are supposed to be 15,’ she said, ‘but most of the girls are much younger and lie simply to get in.’
⁹

She spoke of how Claire, or ‘Samantha’ as she was known to them, told people she was 23, and her only goal was to be on television. If that meant sleeping with a disc jockey, so be it. Donna Scruff also recalled that Claire was invited back to the
Top of the Pops
presenter’s dressing room and had subsequently gone out with him on a couple of occasions. Of the other man mentioned in Claire McAlpine’s diary, Scruff said he was a disc jockey who picked her
up after a broadcast of
The Rosko Show
on Radio 1, before taking her back to his flat. They’d had sex, but only once; he’d made her do the washing-up while he watched boxing on television.

Samantha had told her that two other girls, both aged 15, also went to the flat from the show, a detail corroborated by 14-year-old Janine Hartwell. ‘I know a group of 15-year-old girls who slept with him after his shows,’ she said of the DJ in question.

Vera McAlpine’s lament is indicative of the prevailing attitudes at the time. ‘I now realise I should have telephoned the police,’ she said, ‘but I thought they would be more severe with my daughter than they would be with the pop stars.’
¹⁰

Officers with Hertfordshire Police took possession of Claire McAlpine’s diary, before passing it on to Detective Chief Superintendent Richard Booker of Scotland Yard. Booker had been chosen to lead the wider investigation into activities at the BBC.

Lord Hill, chairman of the BBC Governors, launched his own private inquiry, headed by Brian Neill, a highly respected QC. The heavily redacted results of his investigation were not publicly revealed until some 42 years later.

On 5 April 1971, the BBC announced plans to introduce a minimum age limit for girl dancers in the audience of
Top of the Pops
, a system of adult chaperones and a requirement for written permission from the girls’ parents. The corporation’s official reaction to the death of Claire McAlpine was typically non-committal: ‘This would seem to be a matter for the police and the coroner’s court and the BBC has no comment to make.’
¹¹

It is interesting to note that it was Jimmy Savile, one of two regular presenters of
Top of the Pops
, who decided to comment on these measures the very next day. In fact, he spoke to a number of newspapers, indicating that the BBC had put him forward as a spokesman.

Savile protested the show was ‘remarkably free of seductions and drug taking but there are lots of dates made by everybody’. After seven years presenting
Top of the Pops
, he claimed, ‘I have lots of girlfriends. I’ve visited their homes and count their parents as
friends too.’
¹²
It was a textbook alibi from a man who had perfected the art of seducing parents before abusing their children.

He went on to liken
Top of the Pops
to a ‘high class discotheque’ saying that ‘with 250 people involved you could always find scandal if you dug deeply enough’. He insisted he could not remember Claire McAlpine, despite the fact she had danced on a show he presented and his admission that he had ‘an eye for a pretty girl’. He said he was ‘upset’ and hoped the inquest would reveal any association with the programme, before stating his understanding that there was a minimum age of 16 for girls in the audience. ‘But it’s not surprising if anybody gets in who is younger,’ he added. ‘Who knows these days if a girl is 14 or 17?’

In fact, Jimmy Savile seems to have treated Claire McAlpine’s death as an affront. He appeared on the popular magazine programme
Pebble Mill
, surrounded by teenage girls, and spoke of the high standards governing everybody who worked on
Top of the Pops
. Then, on the eve of the inquest into Claire McAlpine’s death, ‘bachelor disc jockey Jimmy Savile’, as he was billed in the
Daily Express
, went further still. ‘Many a time I have dated a good looking girl I have met on the show,’ he confessed. ‘But what I say to them is “Ask your folks if I can come round for tea.” I much prefer being with a family, with a pretty girl in the centre, than a session in the back of my car. For one thing, you can’t see how pretty the girl is in the back of my car.’
¹³

What’s staggering is how little Jimmy Savile tried to conceal what he was doing. Even in a culture that had been altered, if not transformed, by the sexual revolution, albeit a culture that still celebrated the leery comedy of Benny Hill and his ilk, it’s impossible not to be shocked by the fact that one of its biggest stars could openly talk about charming a girl’s parents before molesting her in the back of his car. That Savile then spelt out exactly how and where he did this, is even more astonishing.

‘My dressing room at
Top of the Pops
is a weekly meeting place of 20 to 30 people,’ Savile went on. ‘Half of them are teenagers, the other half are parents. The parents are not there to chaperone
their daughters. They are there because they are as interested in me as their children are.’

He said there was ‘a popular misconception’ that young girls were only interested in sex. ‘Well,’ he joked, ‘19 and 20-year-olds with some experience of the world may look at me as a sexual object. But the younger ones, the 14 to 16-year-olds, don’t even think about sex. In fact they would be most offended if you suggested anything sexual to them.’

To the
Daily Mirror
, he explained, ‘I’ve met young crumpet that would knock your eyes out. Fourteen-year-old girls with bodies on ’em like Gina Lollobrigida. I love ’em, but not in the going to bed sense.’ He claimed that girls went to ‘great lengths’ to find out where he lived and often camped out on his doorstep. ‘Once,’ he declared, ‘a big sack arrived at my home with “A present for Jimmy” marked on it. Well there was this chick inside it. She was just seventeen. We had a cup of tea together and whiled away an hour together chatting.’
¹⁴

So here was Jimmy Savile putting it all out there once again, ensuring his unorthodox, high-wire alibi was released into the public domain, while simultaneously reminding the nation of what a trustworthy, family-friendly figure he was. It was becoming dogma, an insurance policy: admit to just about everything, even his modus operandi – charming the parents, taking girls for a ride in his car, having teenagers in his flat. It was now a game, a twisted thrill. Nobody was going to touch him; he was worth too much to the BBC, and too much to the needy of the nation.