A sickening tale of a dead man living

Dan Davies has assembled a great deal of material, nearly all of it sickening
Lacking normal human emotions: Savile is thought to have molested up to a thousand young people (Picture: Dezo Hoffmann/Rex)
Rex
David Sexton17 July 2014

In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile by Dan Davies (Quercus, £18.99)

Do we really want to know more about Jimmy Savile? If so, why?

Whether we like it or not, we do need to know how he got away with a whole lifetime of abuse. The failings of the BBC, the police, the NHS, and the media too — all the institutions he so successfully exploited — have to be exposed. Dame Janet Smith’s independent review of the BBC’s involvement, begun in October 2012 and expected to say that he may have abused up to a thousand young people on the corporation’s premises, will not now be published until after the trial of Dave Lee Travis, probably this autumn.

In the meantime, here is a long, odd and peculiarly inconclusive book about him by a journalist much too close to his subject.

In 1980, Dan Davies, then aged nine, was taken by his mother to watch an episode of Jim’ll Fix It being recorded at a television theatre in Shepherds Bush. He was hoping for magic but left the show feeling, he now says, ambivalent about Savile. “For someone we all felt that we knew so well, there was something remote and cold and untouchable behind the façade.”

In his teens he came across a copy of Savile’s autobiography, As It Happens, published back in 1974, and became fascinated by his oddity, “his evident pride in lacking normal human emotions”, his obsession with death, his frequent references to teenage girls. Davies started keeping a dossier of cuttings on Savile. “Looking back, As It Happens was my Rosetta Stone, a text that reawakened and then put flesh onto the skeleton of a dormant bogeyman,” he writes, one of many off-notes.

In 2004, the editor of a magazine commissioned Davies to interview Savile at home in Leeds, the first of what turned out to be a series of meetings, resulting in him staying with Savile as a guest and even joining him on a cruise. Davies planned to write a book about Savile to be called Apocalypse Now Then, which would be an exposé but much more besides. “I naively believed that Jimmy Savile’s story might work as an alternative history of popular culture in postwar Britain… I hoped too that the journey might also end in some kind of understanding of how he’d come to assume such a central place in my life.”

He had, he says now, “always planned to confront him in a final climactic encounter with what I hoped would be the truth”. But in 2011 Savile died, an event Davies somehow hadn’t anticipated. “So when the news broke, I felt not only sad but angry. Angry he had robbed me.” At the auction of Savile’s belongings in 2012 he bought “a Stetson hat that Savile told me Elvis Presley had given him”.

The biography Davies has now published has an over-complicated structure, interweaving three timelines, one recounting Savile’s life, one his meetings with him, one the inquiries launched since his death. If he has not given his book satisfactory shape — perhaps because he has not wholly resolved his own feelings about Savile — Davies has nonetheless assembled a great deal of material, nearly all of it sickening.

Davies’s key observation is this: “What’s staggering is how little Jimmy Savile tried to conceal what he was doing.”

So here Savile is, saying: “I hate kids … All kids should be eaten at birth.” And: “I’m a great crumpet man.” And: “I have got a great way with sub-normals.” And: “I’ve got an aptitude for dead people.”

To Davies himself, he explained all too clearly that he despised any sort of living relationship. “If you have a dog you’ve got to walk it; if you have a cat you’ve got to give it a litter to shite in; even if you have a plant you’ve got to water it. Those are all things that live. If you don’t have anything that lives, 99 per cent of your problems are gone.”

He was a horror. Yet, working his charity reputation, he became a mentor to Prince Charles, Cardinal Hume proposed him at the Athenaeum and Thatcher finally got him a knighthood against all advice. “If nothing else, it was a ginormous relief when I got the knighthood because it got me off the hook,” Savile told Lynn Barber.

Nobody comes out of this story well, certainly none of our institutions. There’s one exception. In 1978, on a cruise on the Cunard liner SS Canberra, Savile, then 51, molested a 14-year-old girl. The captain actually took action. “I told him he disgusted me and I wanted him off my ship when we reached Gibraltar. I detailed an officer to make sure he remained in his cabin until we reached the Rock. He was to take all his meals in his cabin and was not allowed to leave it under any circumstances short of shipwreck.”

But then this man, unlike the fools, lackeys and criminal collaborators at the BBC, was captain of his own ship.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £15.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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