Jimmy Savile with Vera Lynn in central London on September 18, 2005. Photo / AP
OPINION:
I only met Jimmy Savile twice, for a total of maybe four hours, but he has a nasty habit of coming back into my life. This time, it's the new Netflix documentary Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story. How many Savile documentaries can the world ever need? I think there have been three in the past year, and even rumours of a musical (aagh!) – but let's hope that particular horror show has been forgotten.
Anyway, the Netflix one is actually rather good in that it bothers to establish why Savile was once popular, which hardly anyone under 50 can be expected to know. Nowadays, he's only remembered as the evil paedophile predator in the shiny shellsuit, straw hair and bling, but he was once a quite good-looking young man and a brilliant presenter of Top of the Pops and Jim'll Fix It. Before that, he was a miner, a professional wrestler and a DJ. He also, even at the height of his fame, worked two days a week as a hospital porter at Leeds Infirmary.
Mrs Thatcher loved him; so did the Royal family. Prince Charles asked his advice about speeches, and urged him to counsel Sarah Ferguson on presentation (much good that did). Princess Diana loved him, too, and made many private visits to Stoke Mandeville Hospital. And we should never forget that Stoke Mandeville's National Spinal Injuries Centre is almost entirely the fruits of Jimmy Savile's efforts. When he heard that the hospital was so run down that one of the ceilings had collapsed, he launched a fundraising campaign that raised £10 million in three years. The medical secretary there says simply: "I never knew anyone who did that much good."
The first time I met him, in 1982, was at Stoke Mandeville. I wanted to interview him for the Sunday Express magazine, and he insisted I should come to the hospital. I found it harrowing because so many of the patients were young – they had fallen off a horse or a motorbike and suddenly they were paraplegics. As we passed the bed of one very young, very pretty, paralysed girl, he stroked her hair and said: "Now I can have my evil way with you, my dear!" At the time I thought it was a joke in poor taste, but now I shudder.
Apparently, he enjoyed our interview because he agreed to see me again in 1990, when he had just been given a knighthood and was hot news. This time, he invited me to his London base, a horrible little service flat opposite the BBC. He was "over the moon" about his knighthood and immediately handed me a folder and said: "Have a little dwell on that." It contained the letter from the prime minister offering him a knighthood (and the envelope it came in), and telegrams of congratulation from Charles and Diana and Prince Philip, and a sweet, homemade card from the Duchess of York. He was bursting with pride.
My interview was for The Independent on Sunday and, as was my wont, I'd mentioned round the office that I was seeing Savile. At least half a dozen colleagues told me: "You know he likes little girls?" But when I pressed them for details, they never knew any; it was just "a well-known fact". But if it was such a well-known fact, why had it never been published? The Sun or the News of the World would hardly pass up such a juicy story. I knew I must ask him about it, but couldn't think quite how.
In the end, he more or less handed it me on a plate. He said it was a "ginormous relief" to get his knighthood because the tabloids had been sniffing round him for years, thinking he must have a serious skeleton in his cupboard not to have got a knighthood by now.
So I told him: "What people say is that you like little girls." He went into his "Now then, now then …" patter, before delivering what seemed to me a perfectly plausible reply. He said he was often surrounded by young girls because he worked in the pop industry and they thought he could get them access to their idols. They weren't interested in him, but in a possible introduction to Wet Wet Wet or whoever. I believed him, and dropped the subject.
Nevertheless, it caused a frenzy at the time, because apparently it was the first time anyone had put the rumour in print. I got a vitriolic postbag from readers who said I had gratuitously slurred the reputation of a saintly philanthropist, and what a nasty-minded person I must be.
But, luckily, according to the Netflix documentary, my comment aroused the interest of an investigative journalist, Meirion Jones, whose aunt had run a girls' approved school called Duncroft Youth Detention Centre. As a teenager, he'd often seen Savile there and thought it was odd that he was allowed to take these girls out on drives. Now he tried to track some of them down.
At first, he was unsuccessful, but in 2000, the new networking site Friends Reunited started, and he found several Duncroft girls talking about their dealings with "JS". Meanwhile, the Sunday Mirror was also on Savile's trail and found two girls who claimed to have had sex with him when they were 14, and were willing to talk about it. But they chickened out when told they would have to give evidence to the police, which meant the paper had to drop its exposé.
It did, however, hand its files to the police, who were now finally forced to take an interest. In 2009, they brought Savile in for questioning, but he denied everything and warned them that he was very litigious. After he died in 2011, some 2000 people attended his funeral.
Savile was only finally exposed the following year, by which time his victims were queuing up to talk to the press, because you can't libel the dead. The Independent had the bright idea of reprinting my 1990 interview. This time, I was told off by readers for letting Savile off the hook. If I knew he was a paedophile, why hadn't I said so? But of course I didn't know, and even to mention the rumour, as I did, was skirting quite close to the libel laws.
Before I was filmed for the new documentary, director Rowan Deacon said I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement. I said that being a journalist meant I was not in the business of non-disclosure, rather the reverse – and, anyway, what was I supposed to be not disclosing? There followed one of the most bizarre, circular conversations I have ever had in my life, but it turned out the great secret I wasn't to disclose was that she was making the documentary for Netflix.
Anyway, it's a good documentary, and goes some way to explaining how Jimmy Savile fooled so many people, including me. But the fact that he could have survived so long was, as another contributor, Andrew Neil, says on camera, a terrible failure by the British press.
• Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story is streaming now on Netflix
Ebony Lamb performs Successful Feelings. Made with funding from NZ On Air. Video / Locals Only