In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

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The key task now, Clare argued, was not revealing the repressed and the forgotten, but processing and understanding what was already known. The purpose of the new series, he said, was to cast light on the sources of each guest’s life and values. What motivates them? What sustains them through difficulties and crises? What fuels the notions of excellence that so many high- achievers appear to demonstrate? Above all, why do they do what they do? And how? Feeling deeply uncomfortable about what he had said, I decided that I needed to distance myself from him and the well-polished stories he told, shaped and fitted around his narrative. Instead, I would start finding and talking to people that knew or encountered Savile in the many different compartments of his mysterious life.

He showed me through to his kitchen. It was decorated in tiles of pink and brown, or as he put it, "the colour of sex". He asked me what was missing but I already knew, having read scores of newspaper and magazine interviews over the previous 20 years: it didn't contain a cooker. He liked to boast that none of his many homes had one. "It would give women the wrong idea and that would only lead to brain damage." He said “ hello” to everyone except C23. Then he stood beside her, grabbed her round the waist with his right hand, put his legs round her left thigh (so that her leg was between his two legs) and rubbed his crotch up and down. So far as C23 can remember, he did not say anything. She felt that he was giving a performance. Fortunately Mr Lawson saw what was happening, came over and distracted Savile, then positioned himself between Savile and C23. The interview took place.I am also interviewed by 72 Films, a British production company commissioned by Netflix to make a two-part documentary about Savile. That is a hard decision. I don’t like talking publicly on this subject because it is painful even at my secondary level of exposure, and because some people seem to get jumpy when I do. It is an incredible read; preposterous, unbelievable, utterly damning about the institutions that were taken in and duped by Savile: the NHS, the BBC, the royal family, the government, the civil service, the entire nation. And a cast of characters that spans everyone from Elvis Presley to the Beatles, from the Rolling Stones to the Queen to the pope. It could never have been fiction. Everything about the Savile story strains credibility. The man who dressed like a paedophile was a paedophile. Though this is only one part of it – just as paedophilia was only one of his many crimes. It was the kaleidoscopic aspect of Savile's life that gave Davies the idea to write the book in the first place. He didn't just want to write about Savile but had the idea that the history of the nation's popular culture could be told through him.

What I hoped this would result in was a final, climactic meeting in which I would confront him with what they, rather than he, had told me," Davies said. "His death robbed me of that opportunity." At first, he was fiercely resistant to the idea, claiming that he had written his own autobiography only because he’d got wind that a journalist was planning an unauthorised life story. Controlling the narrative was paramount. Over time, though, he started to come around to the idea, as long as he could, in his words, “correct everything” that I’d got wrong. In an interview with the Sunday People (via the Mirror) he gave some further insight into the dynamic of the relationship with the Duchess. When the news broke I felt ashamed that I’d been unaware he’d even been ill. My wife had organised a surprise birthday party for me in a pub near our home in London. My friends were there waiting for me, but I was in no mood for socialising. Savile’s passing provoked such a storm of conflicting emotions that I cried tears of frustration, anger and, I’ll admit it, sorrow. Jimmy Savile poses with a 'Honorary No.1 Manchester Taxi Driver' medal (Image: M.E.N./Chris Gleave)The interviews began to last for days, not hours. He invited me to stay with him and, on one occasion, I was afforded the “honour” of sleeping in the bedroom he kept as a shrine to his mother, Agnes, who he referred to as “the Duchess”. The room, with its tiny single bed and cupboard filled with her clothes, draped in polythene covers, was a capsule representing what ultimately mattered to Savile. And you, Dan? When you found out about his crimes, did you ever feel that he'd also made you complicit? The publication of the book this week marks what Davies hopes is the end of this "painful process", the culmination of a decade of obsession. He's weary rather than jubilant. It is a relief, finally, to get it out there, though even this he's doing cautiously. He didn't want to sell an extract from it, which is what would usually happen, because "I really didn't want to sensationalise it. I don't want it to be seen as a sensationalist book." Although already well advanced on becoming one of history’s most prolific criminal sex offenders, Savile shows a peculiar proclivity for public near-confession. In his book God’ll Fix It, he admits to being “an abuser of things and bodies and people”, a formula that can in retrospect allude to both sexual abuse and necrophilia (“bodies” and “people” are oddly differentiated).

Work on the production started in early October 2021, and included filming location scenes in North-West England and North Wales. [26] [27] During production, Coogan met with real life survivors of Savile's abuse, and reassured them when they saw him in character. [28] Coogan asked the filmmakers to tone down a scene where Savile is implied to molest an elderly woman's dead body in a morgue, finding it too uncomfortable. [29] Coogan, who later explained he had his head shaved for months during production, said that he was so uncomfortable playing Savile that, along with reportedly cancelling a string of book signings during the broadcast, [30] he eventually was "pleased" when production finished. [31] As an adult, I was sent to interview him for a magazine in 2004. The interview, which took place at his penthouse flat in Leeds, lasted well into the night. He was supremely controlling – both of the people around him and the myth he’d spun. I struggled with my conflicted feelings, both about him and the project, and I had to keep reminding myself that here was a man who had gone to such great lengths to become one of the most conspicuous people in Britain, and yet simultaneously remained utterly unknowable.He went to the funeral but the book languished. Publishers told him no one would be interested to read about the "darkness" at the heart of a national hero, "but I decided I had to keep on going anyway even if I self-published". And then, finally, it all came out. "After Newsnight's investigation was axed, I met with Meirion Jones [ Newsnight's investigations producer], who shared with me what was already in the public domain but only if you knew where to look…" The reality is, though, he was never going to give up that which he'd guarded so jealously and for so long; the things he must have known would lead to his certain fall.

That was in 2004. "And that's when I first had the idea for the book. This interview that was meant to last an hour in his house lasted, I don't know, God, it was about seven hours, something like that. It just went on and on and on." He interviewed him again for another profile in 2006. And another profile again in 2008. Shortly after which he – bizarrely – ended up going on the QE2's farewell Mediterranean cruise with him and began researching his biography in earnest. "I saw myself going up the river of his life and hopefully finding out everything on the way and then having a climactic final confrontation with him. I was going to call it Apocalypse Now Then. The implicit awareness was that it was going to be dark, because even in that first meeting there was a real, dark, underlying subtle menace to him."It also feels insidiously callous and thoughtless that an organisation that played a role in glorifying a sex offender and profiting from him [the BBC], while covering up his actions for many decades, are once again capitalising on his "brand" and the fascination that viewers have with monsters and true crime. [22] This was gripping radio: elegant, erudite, entertaining. It helped that Clare was clearly impressed by Geller and that Geller could bend keys with his mind. But the real magic came from Clare’s openness to Geller’s performance and persona, Clare’s willingness to express his bafflement at what he saw, and Clare’s endless curiosity about people – not only about people who could bend spoons with their minds, but about everyone whom Clare encountered in his media and medical careers. Starkey, Adam (19 October 2023). "Steve Coogan meets Jimmy Savile in chilling resurfaced clip". NME . Retrieved 28 October 2023. Many young people, and indeed international audiences, won’t have known Savile. Any drama that depicts, so clearly, a predator able to groom a nation for decades, and one who was never challenged by those in authority who suspected him, is a hugely valuable warning from history, and a story that should always be told. The closing credits include the statement "Based on extensive research, interviews and based in part on the book 'In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile' by Dan Davies" (56:14 on iPlayer)