LATE into Jimmy Savile: The People Who Knew (Discovery+, now streaming), a woman who agreed to appear in the programme on condition her name wasn’t revealed says: “I thought I was the only one.”
t’s a quietly devastating moment, aching with pain and sadness, and it comes after she’s described what Savile did to her 40 years ago, when she was just 17.
She’d been in Stoke Mandeville Hospital to have her appendix out when Savile, who’d raised millions for the hospital through his high-profile charity work, made one of his regular rounds of the wards.
He had his own en suite bedroom on the premises, a key to every room and the freedom to come and go as he pleased at any hour.
She was so dazzled by Savile that she decided to become one of his fundraising volunteers and gradually came to think of him almost as an uncle. One photograph she took – of a fully-clothed Savile clowning around in an empty bath in his room – holds a terrible significance for her. “That was the day he raped me,” she said.
She didn’t tell anyone. She thought she was the only one.
Many of the estimated 450 people, 328 of them children, some as young as six, Savile raped or otherwise sexually abused across 60 years must also have thought they were the only ones. But the residents of Duncroft approved school, a facility for young girls with mental health issues, knew better.
They were all too aware of what Savile, who haunted the place like a malignant ghost and was allowed to stay overnight, was like.
“He was like a kid in a candy store,” said one of his victims, Karin (Savile made her fellate him). “He went through girl after girl after girl.”
Savile brought gifts to these fragile, damaged young people and expected “little favours” in return, said Karin.
His victims weren’t limited to Duncroft, Stoke Mandeville or Leeds General Infirmary – another recipient of his charity funds that permitted him carte blanche to indulge his revolting appetites. Dee was 14 and on holiday in Jersey with her mother when Savile sexually abused her and another girl, having lured them to his camper van behind the hotel. She recalled how he laughed maniacally while it was happening, then flipped to extreme rage.
Another victim, Dawn, spoke about being groped by Savile in a train carriage when she was 17, while he simultaneously masturbated and carried on a conversation as though everything was normal.
This is the first wholly new documentary about Savile since the 2012 ITV Exposure report that dragged his monstrous behaviour into public view. As well as victims, it featured several whistleblowers whose attempts over the years to expose Savile were either ignored or shut down.
Naomi Stanley was a nurse at high-security psychiatric hospital Broadmoor. Savile, who was appointed to a hospital task force, had a key to every room and ward, she said, and was permitted to watch female patients taking baths and being strip-searched.
Former BBC journalist Meirion Jones’s Newsnight investigation, due to air two months after Savile’s death, was shelved when the BBC decided to show Christmas tributes to Savile.
This latest documentary makes it clear that while the general public were ignorant of Savile’s true nature (although watching creepy footage of him openly mauling young girls on Top of the Pops and Clunk Click, in one case with fellow paedophile Gary Glitter, you wonder how), it was common knowledge at all levels inside the BBC and among the staff and management of the hospitals.
Savile’s preference for underage girls was no secret. A former manager at Leeds General Infirmary says Savile was casually referred to as a “kiddie fiddler”.
And yet, he got away with it for decades. He was the BBC’s biggest star – despite, as Andrew Neil puts it, being “a man of no talent, weird and slightly sinister” – and treated like royalty.
The hospitals, meanwhile, desperately needed the money he pulled in.
The one thing this documentary can’t do, and the upcoming Netflix two-parter probably won’t either, is expose the other people who knew: the hundreds who enabled this bling-bedecked monster.