Read In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile Online
Authors: Dan Davies
41. WE ALWAYS LINE OUR ARTISTS UP
D
espite the lukewarm reviews, a second 13-week run of
Clunk Click
was commissioned, beginning in February 1974. The show was a product of its time and it allowed Jimmy Savile to embellish his reputation as an incorrigible flirt. Nothing was thought of the fact he walked onto the set at the top of one programme and regaled the audience with how one group of ‘young ladies’ on the beanbags had tried to rip his trousers off. Or that later in the same show, after interviewing Pan’s People, the scantily clad, all-female dance troupe from
Top of the Pops
, he introduced a video sequence in which he chased them around a tree like a grotesque, groping Benny Hill.
In another episode, girls from Duncroft Approved School were to be found sitting on the beanbags. The star guest that week was Gary Glitter. ‘Do young ladies go to great lengths to get next to you, as it were?’ Savile asked the glam rocker.
‘Yeah, and I go to great lengths to get next to them,’ leered Glitter, real name Paul Gadd. He then peered into the darkness: ‘I’m having a look round the audience now to see if there’s anyone I fancy.’
Savile guffawed and pointed over to the teenagers on the beanbags. ‘We always line our artists up,’ he said. It was after this episode of
Clunk Click
that Keri claims she encountered Gary Glitter in Jimmy Savile’s dressing room.
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Another former Duncroft girl alleges that Savile offered cash incentives to sit on the beanbags at
Clunk Click
. BBC files released following a Freedom of Information Act request contain evidence
that if he did bribe his victims, he made sure to claim the money back. The following passage is taken from a letter to Jimmy Savile from the BBC’s Contracts and Finance department, dated 18 April 1974: ‘We understand from London that during the above programme [
Clunk Click
] you dispersed £10 each to the following young people’.
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The three names are redacted; the money was reimbursed.
Roger Ordish, the show’s producer, admitted he had heard the rumours that Jimmy Savile ‘was interested in young females’ but remains adamant that he never witnessed anything that made him suspicious or gave him cause for concern. ‘How this could have happened in a dressing room, I don’t quite know,’ he protested. ‘There wasn’t time for that sort of thing. He turned up at two and if he wasn’t in his dressing room he’d be in the studio rehearsing. If he was in his dressing room, he’d be with me or a researcher or with wardrobe or with people from the press.’
The newspaper columnist Jean Rook was one of Jimmy Savile’s more regular and vocal critics, which might explain why he made a point of inviting her on to the show. In the article she wrote about the experience, Rook painted a rather different picture of scenes in his dressing room at
Clunk Click
: ‘He moves everywhere in a throng of worshipping spastics, and for all I know, even lepers. His dressing room at the Beeb is crammed with every sick, lame, down-at-heel youngster who wants to get near enough to The Master to touch the hem of his long blond hair.’
Rook pressed Savile on his constant publicity seeking, to which he responded: ‘What good would it do these handicapped kids? Why should I need to see another picture of myself in the papers, except that it could raise another £2,000 for charity?’ He maintained nothing mattered ‘as long as I’m trying to do the right thing by these kids and The Governor Upstairs’.
Rook concluded by reporting being up close and personal with Jimmy Savile left her feeling ‘slightly sick’. She likened it to being ‘too close for too long to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel’.
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It is clear from reading a letter Rook wrote to Savile in 1984, however,
that her opinion of him changed over time. Describing herself as ‘your loving and ill organised friend’, she explained how ‘overwhelmed’ she was by his ‘royal doings at Stoke Mandeville and the Royal Variety Show’, before adding, ‘nobody in the world but you could have got away with it and yet made it look so easy and natural that the royals were bound to go along with you.’
I put it to Roger Ordish that Jimmy Savile had developed a Messiah complex. ‘He did, you’re absolutely right,’ Ordish responded. ‘We used to laugh at him a bit, particularly when [we went to see him] in the radio studio. He’d bring along these rather pathetic hangers-on – they’d be disabled or blind or emotionally disturbed. I used to say that these people just wanted to touch the hem of his raiment. It was like that.’
Savile’s popularity continued to grow. He was someone the major political parties clearly viewed as a potential vote-winner, and in the run-up to the snap election called for late February 1974, he appeared in party political broadcasts by both the Conservatives and the Liberals.
When pressed about where his allegiance lay, Savile replied: ‘I’m an individual, you see, so for an individual really there’s only the Conservative Party, because that’s the freedom touch, isn’t it?’
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He revealed he’d only spoken out for the Liberals because his brother Johnnie was standing as the party’s candidate in Battersea North.
It is remarkable to reflect on the fact that the endorsement of a long-haired disc jockey represented currency in political circles of the time. A confidential Whitehall report commented on his appointment as honorary assistant entertainments officer at Broadmoor, while among a series of recommendations sent to ministers by civil servants within the Hospital Advisory Service, mentions were made of the work Jimmy Savile was doing at the maximum-security institution. They included his fund-raising for a new minibus and disco equipment for his Thursday evening sessions with patients.
‘Apart from the undoubted pleasure the hospital gains from having him around, he has pioneered outings for patients and has overcome
opposition from outside and inside the hospital to these ventures,’ stated the report. ‘His energy, enthusiasm, sincerity and devotion to Broadmoor and its patients and staff are infectious and he performs the function of an unofficial but very successful public-relations officer outside the hospital, which can only be of great benefit for Broadmoor as a whole.’ Health Minister David Owen and Secretary of State for Health Barbara Castle were among the recipients.
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Jimmy Savile was happy to put his name to just about anything, as long as the terms were agreeable. He was the well-paid and familiar face of the government’s seat belt campaign, the next phase of which was designed to shock the public by showing him talking to a brain-damaged victim of a road accident. He persuaded a construction firm to build a patients’ lounge at Stoke Mandeville in return for a 10-minute personal appearance at the Ideal Home Show at Olympia, and made £10,000 for charity while advertising Daz and Fairy Liquid. He was also awarded the Commando Medal for his fund-raising for the Royal Marine Museum, found time to devote four days to doing a series of sponsored walks in Dublin and Belfast, and began writing his autobiography in a series of exercise books, a task that earned him a handsome advance of £15,000. For every penny he made for charity, though, there was some form of personal remuneration: publicity, payment in kind or kickbacks via sponsorship deals.
It was a peculiar form of alchemy. Joan Bakewell identified it in August 1974, in one of the first heavyweight newspaper profiles to be published about Jimmy Savile. ‘Today [he] is famous simply for being famous’,
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she wrote. ‘[He] seems to have created a fantasy life. The reality of his own life is the acting out and living out of that fantasy.’
As part of her research, Bakewell spoke to some of the people who worked with Savile. ‘He certainly likes the hero worship he gets from young girls,’ commented one.
The piece went on to reveal some of the questions being asked about Jimmy Savile at the time. One concerned his insatiable hunger for publicity. Bakewell reported that he worked hard ‘at
keeping his fame bright with a series of publicity stunts. These things are never done entirely for their own sake: each feat is sponsored for some good cause, usually, and with full media fanfare.’
Bakewell chaired a religious quiz show that Savile appeared on, and commented on how he had been in a rush to get away afterwards. ‘I should make the hospital by one a.m.,’ he told her. ‘They don’t start dying till two.’
When she inquired whether anyone had ever tried to take him for a ride, Savile replied that if they had, it had taught him a valuable lesson: ‘If you help people in a little way they will thank you. In a big way, they won’t. And if you set out to help people in bulk they’ll kill you. Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, John Kennedy and the good one of them all, Jesus Christ. You must never look for a reward. There isn’t any.’
If Jimmy Savile now bracketed himself alongside some of the greatest figures in history, he also alluded to his basest instincts. ‘I’m no saint. I want it to be known I’m a great crumpet man,’ he told a reporter from the
News of the World
. He reckoned wealth no longer guaranteed success when it came to seducing girls: ‘I’ll be out on a charity walk and I’ll say to a girl, “I’ll call tomorrow and take you out in the Rolls! Often that will make her run up the nearest tree in fright.”’
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Like so many others who knew and worked with him, Dave Eager claimed that he never witnessed Jimmy doing ‘anything untoward’. But when I outlined the allegations made by former Duncroft girls, Eager did recall a comment Savile once made: ‘He [said] to me, “You’ve always got to be careful with your image. I’ve been going to a school and I’ve been taking kids for a ride in my Rolls-Royce, and I’ve got to be careful not to do that again.”’
Such discretion was in short supply in Savile’s autobiography, which was published in the autumn of 1974. The headline splashed across two pages of the
People
as part of a major serialisation blared, ‘Why I Never Married – I can have my pick of 25 dollies any night’. Below, Savile regaled readers with how ‘in my game the girls abound like summer flowers’.
He talked about one lucky escape when an attractive teenage girl knocked on the door of his flat in Manchester. ‘Normally such manna would be consumed,’ he confirmed before explaining that on this occasion, and by sheer luck, he had gone out and left the girl on the step. A short distance from his flat, he was pulled over by a police car. The officer told him the girl who had just gone into his block was an absconder. Savile denied all knowledge of her. ‘Lucky boy’,
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replied the officer before driving off to collect the runaway.
The reference to ‘his block’ suggests the girl had gone to his 10th-floor flat in Ascot Court on Bury New Road, while the ‘Lucky boy’ remark from the police officer indicates that he was known for keeping such company. That he was confident enough to play the situation for laughs not only in his autobiography but also in a national newspaper only confirms that Jimmy Savile felt untouchable.
Three days after the extract ran, a journalist asked Savile why his extraordinarily prolific love life wasn’t plastered all over the papers. ‘Perhaps that’s just because it’s all so normal,’ he lied. ‘What is the worth of a tale of a two-hour seduction? By what stretch of the imagination could that be considered news?’
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*
Bob Bevan had just returned from a trip to Belgium with Jimmy Savile when the book serialisation began. As the PR man for ferry company Townsend Thoresen, Bevan had contacted Ted Beston, the producer on
Savile’s Travels
, to propose a stay in a holiday village owned by the company during which it was hoped they could record some material for the show. Savile duly wrote back, inviting Bevan for a meeting in his studio at the BBC.
‘When I entered the basement studio it was full of people,’ wrote Bevan. ‘Most were handicapped, some were in wheelchairs, and others were just hangers-on.’ Savile told Bevan of his relationship with P&O and about how he had just come back from another free cruise to Gibraltar. Then, once the studio had emptied, Bevan was furnished with further details: ‘Jimmy boasted how he kept
[the Gibraltar minister of tourism] waiting on the quay while he seduced a girl in his cabin. He left nothing to the imagination.’
Savile agreed to the trip to Belgium on certain conditions: one, that he could take a Rolls-Royce, a driver and a few friends, and two, he would not be required to spend a penny of his own money. Bevan recalled the ‘friends’ Savile took were ‘an attractive girl’ and ‘another guy called Bob’.
The former, he remembered as ‘a well-spoken, bluestocking charity worker’ who Jimmy Savile proceeded to have noisy sex with in his chalet. ‘To my mind, he didn’t have a great deal of respect for women,’ said Bevan, who stayed in the next door chalet and heard everything through the wall. ‘He used them for his own ends and would be fairly indiscreet.’
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The other member of the party was almost certainly Bob Brooksby, who Bevan described as ‘a member of Jimmy’s entourage and a feature of his life’.
Brooksby worked for an advertising agency called the London Press Exchange, although his primary purpose was acting as Jimmy Savile’s fixer. In 1972, while working for Wilkinson Sword, he had been spotted passing a brown envelope to Bob Monkhouse, then the presenter of the TV game show
The Golden Shot
. When a Wilkinson Sword item appeared among the prizes on the following week’s show, ATV’s production controller suspected collusion. Monkhouse was called in and fired.
Brooksby had won favour with Savile by organising the design and construction of the special performing chair he sat in for
Clunk Click
, a prototype of the chair later immortalised on
Jim’ll Fix It
. In time, Brooksby would become instrumental in setting up the sponsorship deals and payments in kind that greased Savile’s wheels, confounded the taxman and ensured he evaded censure from the BBC. Savile would describe Brooksby as ‘Uncle Bob’ and as one of his ‘honorary personal assistants’.