We stood looking on with a sense of sad impotence – he had blown it, the doctor turned to go inside – and that was when he reappeared, with a bottle in his hands.
‘It’s only Perrier,’ he said when he reached us. ‘I didn’t drink anything.’
We followed him inside again. This time he stayed.
Afterwards I reflected on how uncomfortable it had been, filming Joe in the depth of his crisis. The awfulness of his addiction and not knowing how to help. I thought about how much easier it would have been if he’d had a girlfriend or parent with him who would have been the lightning rod for his emotional outreach. I wasn’t sure how to be a friend to Joe in his moment of need, nor whether it was appropriate to try to be one. I was also aware how inadequate my expressions of support sounded. Do you want some more Lucozade?
With Joe Walker, a few months after filming Drinking to Oblivion.
And yet, later when I watched it, I realized my discomfort and impotence were what gave the scene its power. My awkwardness, the Lucozade, were both embarrassing and ludicrous but also eloquent expressions of what many feel when confronted with addiction.
When the film came out, titled Drinking to Oblivion, it seemed to touch people in a different way than other documentaries I’d done. I wondered if it was because it took place in Britain. It was – literally and figuratively – closer to home. But my deeper secret was that it had also meant something more to me. As a British person, a south Londoner, I’d come home and been able to make a programme close to where I’d gone to school; where my Mum had grown up; where my grandparents had met and married.
It felt like a very personal sort of vindication. I’d served out a sentence. My farts were forgotten after all.
Chapter 30
Programme Six
The idea of a programme revisiting the subject of Jimmy Savile – so long deferred, so feared at the channel, and so fraught with difficulty for me – became real in late 2015.
It was now year four in the Savile Disclosures Calendar, and the cultural landscape bore the imprint of everything that had followed from Jimmy’s unmasking. An investigation had been set up by the police – Operation Yewtree – and a host of beloved, and not-so-beloved, TV and radio personalities had been rounded up. There would, in the end, be nineteen arrests – of DJs, actors, musicians – with around half resulting in prosecution, and seven eventual convictions. Most saw it as a necessary rectification of a historic injustice – the failure to listen to and hear victims and reassure them that their accounts of abuse and assault would be taken seriously – though there were also increasingly elements in the media and in the country that viewed the entire process as a witch hunt, an attempt to apply a present-minded moral framework to a more louche and free-spirited era, fuelled by compensation claims and a frenzied tabloid culture, whose resources would be better spent chasing up-to-date cases.
Either way, the post-Yewtree reality was the new normal. Rolf Harris, Stuart Hall, Gary Glitter were all in prison; the DJ Dave Lee Travis had received a three-month sentence suspended for two years. The world had moved so fast that it was hard to recall that as recently as 2005 Rolf had painted a portrait of the Queen, from life, as part of her eightieth birthday celebrations. The BBC had filmed it for an hour-long documentary, called The Queen, by Rolf, and the portrait had been lampooned for its rendering of the royal smile, which showed her teeth on display in a rictus that recalled a silverback readying for battle.
Such painterly misdeeds were once the worst Rolf could expect in the way of publicity. Now he sat in HMP Bullingdon for historic sex crimes.
It had been a strange cultural moment to live through: exciting, salutary, a little voyeuristic, in certain respects confusing, and occasionally – for those, like me, cursed with a tendency to worry over moral wrinkles and hypocrisies – troubling. Certainly I took the view that it could only be a good thing for men and women who’d been assaulted to finally get some measure of justice; that a more enlightened and clear-sighted attitude to the reality of sexual exploitation was now prevailing.
But I also had concerns about the erosion of due process. Ageing politicians and civil servants had been hounded on flimsy or non-existent legal pretexts. Some stars had been kept in legal limbo for months while the police chased paper-thin allegations. At the apex of the panic about sex pests in high places, the police had announced that the allegations of a man known pseudonymously as ‘Nick’ were ‘credible and true’. ‘Nick’ turned out to be Carl Stephen Beech, a shameless compensation hunter and paedophile, who – as I write this – has just been sentenced to eighteen years in prison for perverting the course of justice. But in 2015 his tales of stabbings and stranglings of children involving Leon Brittan and the MP Harvey Proctor were – unbelievably – being taken seriously and used as the basis for a credulous and expensive police follow-up.
Max Clifford, my old sparring partner, had been arrested only a few months into the new era, in December 2012 – Savile Disclosures Year 1.
In the years since we’d made our programme there had already been some surprising revelations. His wife Liz had died of cancer, and afterwards he had outed himself in a profile in the Observer as a long-time frequenter of swinging parties. He’d amplified the account in a ghosted autobiography, Read All About It. He’d been a ‘ringmaster’ at the parties, he wrote, or ghost-wrote, ‘a role I like to have in many aspects of my life.’ If anything it helped to explain why he’d been so quick to believe that the Hamiltons might have attended a sex party in Ilford.
‘I was too greedy to be faithful,’ he continued. ‘Almost anything went, including having two girls at a time. Having sex with girlfriends’ mothers and watching others have sex.’ He described tricking a girl into sex with a friend who was a plumber by telling her he was someone important in show business – seeming to view this as a blow for social justice and a fitting punishment for being over-interested in celebrity. The prank – if you can call it that – reminded me of the same qualities of insensitivity and the need for control I’d noticed during our filming,
Then, after the Savile revelations, he’d gone on TV to make a plea for an indulgent view of stars’ sexual indiscretions. Celebrities were ‘frightened to death’, he’d said.
‘All kinds of things went on,’ he’d gone on. ‘And I do mean young girls throwing themselves at them in their dressing rooms, at concert halls, at gigs, whatever . . . They never really asked for anybody’s birth certificate, and they were young lads.’
Among the ‘young lads’, presumably, Max had included himself, though he’d been in his forties when several of the allegations took place. His fall was precipitous and complete, and because of our association I took a more than usual interest.
At trial, one woman described how as a seventeen-year-old she’d visited him for career advice. Max had told her to remove her dress in his office. The assault took place while Max was on the phone to his wife. Even stranger, he had wanted the victim to accompany him to a dinner so that she could masturbate him under the table as he sat next to his wife.
Several times, according to accounts given in court, he’d impersonated James Bond producer Cubby Broccoli and Stephen Spielberg in order to create an illusion of power and influence.
Max denied everything, writing off his seven accusers as ‘fantasists and opportunists’. Friends from the world of celebrity – Pauline Quirke, Des O’Connor – testified to his tireless charity work, as though good works were incompatible with being a sexual predator. He would still be attempting to have his convictions overturned when he died.
As the Yewtree juggernaut trundled on, with the idea of a Savile revisit apparently off the table due to continuing nervousness at the channel, I’d encouraged the team to explore the general subject area of old-school entertainers and allegations of historic sexual abuse. It seemed a natural subject for us – the queasy cocktail of cold-blooded exploitation, transactional sex, and the lines between the two.
But having put
out some approaches, we got not much back. Surprise surprise. Being – as they saw it – railroaded for dimly remembered gropes decades earlier was not a subject the investigated and arrested stars were in a rush to spill their guts about on national TV.
The only celebrity who showed signs of cooperating was the impresario and sometime TV presenter Jonathan King. King had been convicted of multiple accounts of historic sex offences in 2001. In a way, he’d been the Ur-Savile, a show-business star-maker and eccentric who’d used his celebrity cachet and an instinct for vulnerability to prey on vulnerable boys. He’d been released on parole in 2015. But King had already featured in two documentaries – both of them forensic and compelling, one by Jon Ronson, another by Nick Hornby. In both he’d expressed his view that he’d done nothing wrong, an opinion he was entitled to, but expressed himself with such callowness and lack of introspection that he did his case no favours. The idea of another documentary put me in mind of the fate of the corpse of Oliver Cromwell, exhumed in 1660, two years after his death, so it could be hanged.
Around this time, a new BBC2 controller was appointed – Kim Shillinglaw. It was strange to reflect that she was the sixth I’d served under. When a new one came in, I had the feeling of being seen like a smelly cat that came with the house. One or two people said, ‘She really liked that autism film you did.’ I wondered if that meant it was the only programme of mine she’d seen.
One afternoon I was invited up to the seventh floor of New Broadcasting House, the BBC HQ on London’s Portland Place, to meet her. There was a time when my bosses were from an older generation, I thought when I saw her. But we were around the same age – she was, by the standards of British television, rather glamorous. We talked about some of the ideas my team were working on. Alcohol. Another about brain injury. The perennial subject of celebrities came up, whether there could ever be another When Louis Met . . . I made as if to take the idea seriously. Julian Assange. Blah blah. Nigel Farage. Ha ha! Then, with the same lack of expectation of someone checking the coin return of a random pay phone for loose change, I mentioned the idea of doing something on Jimmy Savile.
‘It’s very strange having known him personally, and realizing this side was hidden from you,’ I said. ‘It feels a little like being friendly with Jack the Ripper. It’s hard to square the two parts of him and I wonder if that’s partly how he got away with it.’
To my surprise she said to go for it.
A slightly weird interim followed. Production on a particular film doesn’t go into high gear until the series producer hires a director. My seniors at the BBC mooted various candidates, including one friend and contemporary whose reaction to the idea when I spoke to him on the phone was resolutely negative.
‘We know how Savile got away with it,’ he said. ‘He intimidated vulnerable people and he charmed those in power. What else is there to say?’
I made my case that he’d become a figure of such grotesquery that we were in danger of making him not quite real, which carried its own risks: firstly, in not telling the whole truth, and secondly, by extension, making it harder to spot Saviles of the future (which, incidentally, would be a good name for an avant-garde band, especially if they weren’t looking to get many bookings). I tried to hint at the need for an understanding of the case that went beyond a simplistic view of perfect victims and perfect perpetrator. I mentioned the existence of victims of Jimmy’s who had, in some cases, been friends or quasi-friends. There were many facets to the case that were less clear-cut and might allow a fuller understanding of how abuse takes place.
And what about the consequences of his crimes on those around him who feel they should have seen more and now are in the position of realizing they spent years of their life with a man unmasked as a sexual predator: his long-term girlfriends – of which there were said to be a couple – how were they to deal with all of this? His family? All of those who knew him, or thought they knew him, people for whom their association with Jimmy Savile and his celebrity and his charity work was one of the defining facts of their long lives – what about them? It seemed to me there were all sorts of awkward dilemmas that we might be able to interrogate.
To all of this, my director friend, making a topical reference to the leader of Isis who was then much in the news, said: ‘Yeah, well, you might have been friendly with al-Baghdadi, but that doesn’t mean you should make a film about what he’s like behind the scenes.’
‘Personally, I think that sounds really interesting. I’d watch it in a heartbeat.’
‘Well, the Isis victims might have other ideas.’
We ended the call in a way that was personable and polite but the clear message was that the documentary was wrong-headed and probably immoral. ‘I really question why Kim has commissioned it,’ he said.
The conversation wobbled me – not regarding the appropriateness of doing the documentary but it made me wonder quite why it was that, when I spoke about ‘the need for nuance and a forensic attitude’, people sometimes heard special pleading or an urge to extenuate and excuse. I thought back to books and films that made an impression on me. Their power and resonance hinged on their uncomfortable details and the awkward quality of the moral ecology they described: victims who couldn’t help but become adjuncts of their predatory conditions; suffering that was in no way ennobling; a strange symbiosis of oppressors and the victimized that ended up immiserating everyone.
Without quite finding the right form of words, I was fumbling towards an understanding of Jimmy’s crimes that did not shame his friends, his colleagues, his family, and most of all his prey for failing to push him off with enough strength, for failing to see more, for failing to cry out, for failing to speak up – for failing to fit into a neat moral category that, for good or ill, is not how many, or even most, people behave.
Embarking in earnest on the second Savile film also meant I could chase down the little clues and leads I’d had about Jimmy over the years and finally answer some of my what-ifs: what if I’d aggressively pursued the little hints that had been shared with me?
One of my first calls was to Noddy Holder, lead singer of Slade, about whom the comedian Phill Jupitus had said ‘He has a folder this thick.’ I made approaches from various angles, via friends of friends and colleagues of colleagues. Word came back that he had nothing to say. I received an email that said, ‘I really never had any time for Jimmy Savile nor knew him.’ Putting myself in Noddy’s shoes, I could see that a call from a strange journalist asking about your relationship with a reviled sexual predator would not bring you pirouetting to the phone. Still, what about the file?
I ended up writing a letter, which was passed on to him. To my surprise he called – Slade frontman, glam-rock icon, ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’ scribe Noddy Holder. He said he’d met Jimmy a handful of times, doing Top of the Pops, and that Jimmy had struck him – as he did many people at that time – as being ‘cock of the walk’, self-important and an egoist, but he couldn’t recall a conversation. More to the point, Noddy had had no inside knowledge of sexual wrongdoing: when the Exposure programme had aired he’d been as surprised as anyone else. The thick files turned out to be a misunderstanding, based on a conversation backstage at Phill Jupitus’s show Never Mind the Buzzcocks. Someone had said they’d heard the journalists on Fleet Street have a file on Savile ‘this thick’ and Noddy had agreed, saying he’d heard the same thing.
Several other calls ended up in a similar place. In a diary from 2001 I’d found a reference to Keith Chegwin describing Jimmy Savile as ‘evil’. I called Keith – he was on his mobile, puppyish as ever, scampering up Oxford Street. He didn’t remember describing Jimmy as evil, though he allowed he might have heard something from another Radio 1 DJ, Tony Blackburn, in the eighties about Jimmy being arrested. ‘One day he’ll have his comeuppance,’ was the attitude at that time, he said. Keith said Tony Blackburn might be someone to contact, which I did. It was an off-the-record chat in his agent’s offices and so lacking in content that
I didn’t bother writing up the notes. There were a handful of other calls that went a similar way and the upshot was oddly unsatisfying. I’d been telling myself that Jimmy Savile’s story was there waiting to be told – like a thread, it just needed one tug to unravel. But the reality was different: the missed opportunities weren’t so missed after all. Either that or there were people who were keen not to be seen as having known more, for fear of being tied into a perceived web of complicity.
Then there was a further more awkward development. I’d been hoping we’d be able to include contributions from friends and family of Jimmy’s. I’d been in touch with a self-appointed spokesperson for an underground network of Jimmy supporters – I’ll call her Sally. ‘They call us deniers,’ she said. She didn’t like the term. Sally had stayed out of the spotlight, for obvious reasons, but had run a campaign of letter-writing and behind-the-scenes organizing attempting to rehabilitate Jimmy. She was also a gatekeeper to various friends and girlfriends of Jimmy’s.
By this time a director and AP had been assigned to the project and we’d shot our first interview, appropriately enough, with Kat Ward, the woman who’d set the whole train in motion by writing an online memoir in which she described his visits to Duncroft and then later by being the first to speak up in a spiked segment for Newsnight.
I’d got in touch with Kat via Facebook and the interview had gone smoothly but Kat, as was her right, had told a friend who happened to be a journalist, and he’d rushed out an article about me doing a follow-up documentary. In its haste to stay ahead of the story, the BBC put out a press release, which I didn’t see until it was too late, that couldn’t have been designed to be more alienating to contributors who already had fears of being tarred as accessories to his crimes after the fact. The press release suggested friends of Jimmy’s were holding on to secrets. There was also a gratuitous reference to Jimmy as ‘the man who hoodwinked’ me – somehow taking a programme that still had a plausible claim to being the most revealing portrait of Jimmy while he was alive and turning it into a testament to failure.
Gotta Get Theroux This Page 34
