Read In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile Online
Authors: Dan Davies
‘Bob kept a little eye on Jim,’ recalled Janet Cope. ‘Jim used to ring Bob if a Procter & Gamble or some such rang wanting him to do something. Jim always used the same phrase: What’s in the bin?
In other words, how much money were they going to pay him. I used to pass these messages on to Bob Brooksby or Harold Gruber, Jim’s accountant.’
The next major milestone in Jimmy Savile’s career would see him go into business with Brooksby, lining their pockets on the back of children’s dreams.
42. A PARTICULARLY RELIGIOUS MOMENT
T
he programme that transformed Jimmy Savile from a star into a national institution came about as the result of a chance meeting in a corridor at the BBC. At least that’s the way Jimmy Savile always told it. ‘Bill Cotton said to me, “Listen, you’ve been fixing it for people all your life. Why don’t we do a programme where we fix it for people on film?” [I said] “Yeah, alright then. We’ll call it
Jim’ll Fix It
.” He said, “Jim Will Fix It?” I said, “No, J-I-M, apostrophe, double L.
Jim’ll Fix It
. It comes easily off the tongue.” And that was it. That’s how it started. We didn’t do a pilot. Straight in – bang! Twenty years.’
Bruce Forsyth’s
Generation Game
and
That’s Life
were both examples of popular contemporary British television programmes that hinged on the participation of the general public. Their success helped pave the way for a trial 10-week series of the BBC’s new wish-fulfilment show in the summer of 1975. As its host, Jimmy Savile was invited to appear on the early evening news magazine show
Nationwide
to explain what the new programme was about and, more importantly, to appeal for letters.
The response was huge. For three months, producer Roger Ordish and his production team sifted through bulging mailbags to whittle the 9,000 letters down to a longlist of 200 requests. It was agreed that wherever possible, ‘Fix It’ items would be filmed in the studio in front of a live audience. The new show was given a Saturday evening slot starting in early June.
For the title sequence of
Jim’ll Fix It
, it was decided to film Jimmy Savile leading a train of children round Shepherd’s Bush in
the style of a modern day Pied Piper. Roger Ordish recalled a very specific memory from that day: ‘We stopped somewhere and there was a mother and daughter leaning out of a top window. ‘[Jimmy said to the mother] “Who’s that with you? Is it your sister?” … She said, “No, it’s my daughter.” He asked her how old she was and the daughter said 16. Jim turned to us and said, “Legal! Legal!”’
The Osmonds were at the peak of their popularity in the summer of 1975, and the family pop group were the subject of many hundreds of letters written by adoring fans. Fortunately for the makers of
Jim’ll Fix It
, The Osmonds were in the UK to film a series for the BBC over two intensive weeks at the Television Theatre on Shepherds Bush Green. The recording of the first episode of
Jim’ll Fix It
was scheduled for the same venue on the group’s one day off.
In a major coup for Roger Ordish, America’s favourite toothy, singing Mormons agreed to take part, filming an item in which Jimmy Savile appeared at the stage door and invited in three teenage girls who had been waiting in the rain for a glimpse of their idols. After sitting them down on the set and asking them what they’d been doing, Savile asked them to turn round. The trio of bedraggled 15-year-old girls were stunned to find The Osmonds lined up and ready to play.
It was the highlight of an opening episode that also included studio segments with a young girl dancing with Pan’s People and, bizarrely, Jimmy Savile’s erstwhile girlfriend, Gussy van Geest, learning how to apply clown make-up.
Jim’ll Fix It
badges were hung round the necks of a boy who got his wish to drive a train and a girl who attempted to start the Channel tunnel with mechanical diggers on Ramsgate beach. But for Bill Cotton, the BBC’s head of Light Entertainment, the most memorable item of them all was the very first ‘Fix It’: a girl called Mhairi Read who swam with dolphins at Windsor Safari Park. ‘As I watched it,’ Cotton said, ‘I thought, “We have a hit show here.”
1
The sheer scale of
Jim’ll Fix It
’s success took everyone by surprise, not least its host. The viewing figures started high and then just kept on climbing. Added to that, as Ordish recounted,
‘The feel-good factor engendered by the programme was considered very high, particularly by advertisers.’
The result was payola. In the first season, a boy who wanted to steer a ship was filmed at the helm of a Townsend Thoresen ferry. ‘Yet more massive publicity,’ confirmed Bob Bevan, the company’s PR man at the time. ‘As we were getting quite closely linked with Jim, our advertising agency decided it would be a good idea if he featured in our TV commercials.’ A fee of £10,000 was agreed with Savile for a single day’s filming.
2
‘[Jimmy] was very, very good at that,’ Ordish conceded. ‘He was quite brilliant, in fact. One time we [covered] the introduction of the 125 train and we had Sir Peter Parker, the head of British Rail, come to the studio to give the badge. Jim did the “SOS” [Same Old Shit] to him and he finished doing several years of TV commercials for British Rail. It netted him a fortune.’
I asked Ordish whether Jimmy Savile ever pulled rank and insisted that a company he was associated with or being paid by was featured over another. ‘Not directly,’ he replied. ‘But he’d be very clever and say, “I’ll only be able to film those links for the compilation programme [while I’m] on a cruise liner.” He’d know he could then say he was on a P&O cruise liner or Cunard.’
Not everyone was so smitten with the new show, though. Having savaged
Clunk Click
, the
Mail
’s TV critic had clearly not mellowed on the subject of Jimmy Savile: ‘[His] personality worries many people, making them feel as an antique dealer might when forced to sit on a genuine, simulated plastic Hepplewhite chair, complete with a cushion that makes rude noises.’
3
In a separate article, the psychiatrist and children’s author Catherine Storr described
Jim’ll Fix It
as ‘intolerably patronising’ and ‘an insult to the dignity possessed by a child in his natural environment’.
4
From the outset, Ordish recognised that the format for
Jim’ll Fix It
placed Jimmy Savile outside his own natural environment. He reasoned that the show’s host was ‘never really comfortable with children’. But rather than being a problem, this was something
Ordish used it to his advantage: ‘I tried to structure the programme so that he really didn’t have much to do, just being this mystery figure in the middle of it all. I don’t think
Jim’ll Fix It
would have worked with anyone else, say a showbiz person or a comedian. It wouldn’t have been this strange, aloof character. I think he would have loved to have been a
mafiosi
.’
‘Jim hated children,’ Janet Cope told me. ‘He made no bones about that; he called them “little brats”. They were a nuisance and annoying to him. He used to watch people cooing over a pram and he’d give me this look.’
As an aside, Ordish also revealed that his young daughter couldn’t stand Jimmy Savile: ‘She couldn’t bear him talking to her. He spooked her, I think.’ She was not the only one.
*
After the massive viewing figures for series one, a
Jim’ll Fix It
Christmas Special was duly commissioned. The highlight was to be a film of nine-year-old Gary Merrie from Liverpool who had written in requesting to visit the place where baby Jesus was born. It was a rare example of a ‘Fix It’ item in which Jimmy Savile appeared, chiefly because he arranged it to coincide with a 10-day trip he’d been invited on by the Friends of Israel Educational Trust.
In the days after Savile’s death, John Levy, who organised the trip to the Holy Land, described him as ‘a real philosemite’
5
who was generous in his fund-raising for the Women’s International Zionist Organisation and the British Friends of the Laniado Hospital in Netanya.
Savile had once boasted to the
Jewish Telegraph
newspaper that the Friends of Israel connection and the filming for
Jim’ll Fix It
were merely a cover for the real purpose of his visit. He claimed he had been invited by Israeli president Ephraim Katzir to advise on matters of national security.
When I asked him about the purpose of his trip, Savile chuckled. ‘It’s a professional secret,’ he said, before confirming he was dealing with ‘the president and the entire cabinet of the Israeli government’. On another occasion, he said that he ‘went over and
did a favour for the Israeli prime minister’. On his return, he received a gift from the Israeli embassy in London.
It sounds outlandish, even if one of Savile’s friends, a Jewish businessman from Manchester, swore that the reason for his trip to the Middle East was to sound out a possible meeting between Israel’s prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Savile was chosen, the man said, because of his Jewish connections and his friendship with Gladys Cottrell, the mother of Sadat’s wife, Jehan.
6
Jimmy Savile did meet officials during his ten days in Israel, including General Moshe Dayan, Israel’s hero of the Six Day War. At a reception in Jerusalem hosted by the city’s mayor Teddy Kollek, he also met President Ephraim Katzir. He told me he arrived at the function wearing a pink suit with short sleeves. ‘I was such a freak that nobody wanted to talk to me,’ he said.
The president was guided around and introduced to guests. ‘He didn’t know who the fuck I was,’ Savile claimed before describing how offended he’d been that Katzir kept looking over his shoulder during their brief chat. When the President asked him how he was enjoying Israel, Savile took his chance: ‘I said, “I’m very disappointed because you’ve all forgotten how to be Jewish and that’s why everybody is taking you to the cleaners.”’
Now that he had Katzir’s undivided attention, Savile said he decided to give him chapter and verse: ‘You won the Six Day War, you took all that land, you give it all back and you give the only oil well in the area back and now you’re paying the Egyptians for the oil that you had.’ He claimed Israel’s President asked him to step into another room whereupon he invited the strange Englishman with the white hair and the short-sleeved pink suit to repeat what he had just said to his colleagues in the Knesset.
‘Send a car for me in the morning,’ Savile replied. The next day, he insisted the cabinet was called in and ‘they did what I suggested and it worked out 100 per cent successful’.
‘That is a typical example of how everything got twisted,’ scoffed Ordish, who was on the trip to produce the segment for
Jim’ll Fix It
. ‘He said that to other people in my presence, surely knowing that I knew that was not what happened. We met the president of Israel but the president of Israel is not a powerful person, he’s a figurehead. It’s the prime minister who is the important one. They way he talked about it made it sound like he was mediating between Palestine and Israel.’
Ordish put it down to Savile’s rampant ‘egotism’. ‘He’d never tell a story in which he’d have a red face or look foolish. Everything was always a triumph. That’s how he saw his life progressing.’
So the idea of Jimmy Savile being a secret peace envoy was what he himself described as ‘SOS – Same Old Shit’? ‘It certainly was,’ Ordish replied.
Whether or not he had any part in the historic 1977 meeting between Begin and Sadat – and he did later claim to have attended the Egyptian embassy in June 1975 to discuss ‘a VIP invitation to meet President Sadat in Cairo’
7
– something truly momentous happened on Jimmy Savile’s trip to the Holy Land.
Colin Semper, who was also on the trip to produce a discussion programme for
Speakeasy
, recalled Savile telling him how the image of Jesus wandering in the wilderness held enormous significance for him. ‘He got totally obsessed by the desert,’ Semper said of their time in Israel. ‘Whilst I was visiting the shrines, the churches, the mosques, the ruins, he was refusing to enter the tourist spots; he preferred the wilderness.’
8
In
God’ll Fix It
, a series of conversations between Savile and Semper about Savile’s relationship with God, the chapter titled ‘Have I Had Any Religious Experiences?’ contains Jimmy Savile’s recollections of being alone in the wilderness by the Dead Sea, ‘at the place where the Good Samaritan looked after the chap who had been set upon by the robbers’.
9
He described his experience in this place as ‘a particularly religious moment’.
He talked about setting off early in order to be able to stand alone. ‘I was mightily pleased at that moment,’ he said. ‘I was able to be in the same area where Jesus Christ had walked and lived and worked out his mental application to the world. That gave me
a chance to work out my mental application to the world in exactly the same way as he did. I weighed up form as he must have weighed up form; and I came to certain decisions.’
Given what else was happening in his private life, it is telling that Jimmy Savile likened it to ‘totting up the score of life’. He said that he tried to see whether he had ‘gone right’ or ‘gone wrong’, concluding that while he might have gone wrong in ‘specific instances’, overall he felt he was going in the right direction. ‘I was wobbling about in between the white lines a little bit and sometimes crossing over the line,’ he admitted, ‘but coming back, as it were.’
During his time alone in the wilderness he said he ‘felt God very close by me’.
While in Israel, Jimmy Savile caroused in the lively university town Be’er Sheva, camped near the Sea of Galilee and recorded an episode of
Speakeasy
at a kibbutz. On another occasion, he dragged the camera crew to the Judean hills because he wanted to be filmed with John Levy and his friends walking from Jerusalem to Bethlehem.
‘I wanted a staff,’ Savile said, ‘and saw this branch on a tree, which looked to me just as I imagine Jesus’s staff. I tore it off and used it myself.’
10
The walking aid wasn’t the only connection he felt with the Son of God; Jimmy Savile also grew a beard for the first time in his life.
So did he really see himself as a Messiah figure? Ordish thought he did. Semper, though, was less convinced: ‘He talked a lot about his work in hospitals in a way that he thought he had a pastoral gift towards people, and especially people who were ill,’ said the reverend. ‘Whether he described it as messianic, I’m not so sure. I think he did have a kind of exaggerated self-worth – “I can do this, I can do that”. He did that quite a lot.’