Gotta Get Theroux This

by Louis Theroux

  The friends and family – Sally, lines that were out to one of Jimmy’s long-term girlfriends, other long-time friends who could have shed light on his nature – quickly evaporated. A lightly amended press release went out a few hours later but by then the damage was done. The four or five of us working closely on the project were called into a meeting with the executive producer and a BBC2 executive at Broadcasting House to sift through the wreckage. The channel executive made the case that we should see the press release as a positive, since it had forestalled the need for an awkward conversation with contributors about what was in the programme. He missed out the fact that such a conversation would only have been awkward because the contributors would have featured in the programme, which they now wouldn’t.

  It is hard to overestimate the amount of paranoia and anxiety that surrounded our Jimmy Savile film. By this time another documentary was already in the works – this one for BBC1, designed exclusively to honour the victims. The other film was to be so victim-focused that Jimmy’s face would be deliberately obscured throughout out of a sense of respect for their feelings. My hope was that the existence of this other film might take the pressure off us and free us up to make something more – I suppose – perpetrator-focused. But it was also clear that the wounds were still raw – BBC brass were both keen to be seen to be treating the crimes with their proper gravity but also, behind that, there was a fear that the subject was so radioactive that it should be locked away in a lead-lined box and buried in the deep bosom of the ocean.

  As a way of preserving some privacy, the BBC had procured us some quiet offices in Maida Vale away from the hubs of TV-making. We were also taking the precaution of referring to it as ‘Programme Six’.

  By this time – late 2015, early 2016 – there were numerous reports in the public domain: novella-length accounts of the findings of in-house investigators. They were published online and had the look and layout of actual books. The police ones came first – the Met, Surrey, West Yorkshire, North Yorkshire, another by the Crown Prosecution Service to determine why the 2009 Surrey Police investigation had gone nowhere. Several NHS reports followed – Leeds General Infirmary, Broadmoor, Stoke Mandeville. Others came later – any school or children’s home Jimmy had been known to have visited was required to conduct an investigation, and the Department of Education supplied an online template for how their published write-ups should be organized. In the final tally, there were a total of thirty-two hospitals, ten local authorities, plus several charities including Barnardo’s and Action for Children. There was also the magnum opus that was the Janet Smith Inquiry.

  It has occasionally struck me as odd that these reports aren’t better known, especially given how much money and effort must have gone into writing them. It is true that the local government ones are thin gruel. There are quite a few in which, having been alerted by an ex-pupil that Jimmy may have made a visit to a school sports day or fete, the investigators appear to have spent weeks making enquiries without managing to find a victim while being under an obligation to record every remembered detail from forty years previously. Jimmy lifting up a teenage girl’s skirt ‘by a few inches’ with a hockey stick in 1971 or 72 in a spirit that the person had regarded at the time as ‘insignificant’ was the subject of an entire twenty-five-page report from Saxondale Hospital in Nottingham.

  Yet the reports from the hospitals – and Leeds General Infirmary in particular – are another matter. If there was a moment when I felt I took on board the full import and enormity of Jimmy’s crimes, it was when I set a few hours aside to read them, finding myself oppressed with sadness and guilt and foolishness. At the same time there was a weird tension as I struggled to resolve the image of the person I knew with the person being described in the incident reports. It may be that television and newspaper accounts can’t do justice to the crimes of Jimmy Savile. All the sensationalism disappears amidst the accumulation of forensic detail from victims who, with the candour afforded to them by anonymity, can share their accounts of incidents that – in many cases – affected them for life. There is something in the colourless prose of the reports that gives an added power to the stories.

  For the LGI report, sixty-four people shared accounts of abuse – incidents spanning nearly four decades, from 1962 to 1999 – and involving men, women, boys, girls. Most were in their late teens and early twenties, but plenty were outside those ages. What is striking reading them – other than the sheer numbers of victims – is the effrontery of his offending, its shameless and almost incontinent quality. Many accounts involve him touching the victims’ genitals, under clothes, under bedclothes, when a mother has left the room or sometimes with a nurse or doctor close at hand. ‘The doctor told me to do this.’ ‘Has the pain gone away now?’ ‘Uncle Jimmy will sort it.’ ‘Uncle Jimmy will look after you.’ Or just as often it is a wordless act, an intrusion so bizarre and unexpected that the victim doesn’t know how to react. In my own work, having interviewed paedophiles who preyed on children, their own and other people’s, I am well aware of the grooming techniques that allow abusers to confuse their victims and lower their defences. But the odd thing about Jimmy was that he didn’t groom much of the time – or he did some version of speed-grooming, based on his celebrity, projecting a sense of authority and, above all, permission – so that, even on those occasions when he was sworn at, pushed away, shouted at, there is no sense of his having been chastened, just a comment: ‘He scurried away’ or ‘He left quickly’.

  Many of the victims describe being in pain, being on their way in to surgery or coming out of it, coming round from unconsciousness, confused, dazed, completely off-guard. In this vulnerable state, they were assaulted by a white-haired man in a porter’s outfit or scrubs, someone many didn’t recognize as Jimmy Savile but assumed was a hospital employee. But it’s also the case that his offending was so indiscriminate that it’s hard to generalize about its qualities. Many incidents were opportunistic, relatively fleeting, taking place in corridors and on wards; but some involved a level of forethought and planning, meetings with parents, rendezvous, invitations to the porters’ offices, or in at least one case his mother’s flat, followed by what sounds like a massive physical overwhelm, Jimmy using his considerable physical strength to overpower and rape his victim. Some – especially the later ones, the ones that took place after his peak offending period of the sixties and seventies – were seen as relatively trivial, simply annoying or creepy, at the time and then reconsidered in hindsight. Given the overall impression of compulsivity and predation, one tends to be struck by those handful of occasions when Jimmy is fended off – a young woman who spent the night at his flat, having been invited back to a fictitious party, while wearing her ball gown, and successfully kept him at bay while sleeping in bed with him. One reads the less serious accounts and imagines the Savile deniers holding on to them as their scintilla of evidence for his forbearance and kindly behaviour.

  Reading the reports was anguish-inducing but also felt salutary for me personally – a long-overdue inoculation against whatever residual sense of fondness I’d felt towards Jimmy. I discovered I had perhaps felt more attachment than I’d realized, some sense of investment in his not being an indefatigable sex offender. Otherwise why was there so much distress and guilt? Or was it perhaps a normal reaction to the accumulated sense of violation, the pain and distress all those people – adults and children – carried with them? And was it normal, too, to resist believing the worst about someone until faced with the incontrovertible truth? In the reports’ accumulation of clinical detail, they provided a breathtaking portrait of the relentless predatory behaviour of a man who appeared compulsively dedicated to grabbing, groping, fiddling, and intruding.

  It was also a shock to see cruelty arising from actions that had almost nothing in them that was reminiscent of good faith – not even the cousin of good faith that is honest selfishness or greediness. Over the years, I’d come to see how much wickedness was a by-product of a k
ind of self-deception: sincere fascists working towards a bright Aryan utopia or zealots dictating intolerance on the basis of God’s holy word. Even the paedophiles at the mental hospitals I’d visited had, for the most part, persuaded themselves that the children they abused were capable of consent, that they ‘enjoyed it’, and they cited passages from Ancient Greek texts or practices in Papua New Guinea to suggest that it was a modern peculiarity to fetishize the innocence of children. ‘All great deceivers . . . in the actual act of deception . . . are overcome with belief in themselves,’ thus spake Nietzsche. To persuade others, you first have to drink your own Kool-Aid. But how had Jimmy – with his rampant grabbings and rapes – ever imagined that he was being anything other than vicious?

  Chapter 31

  Horrible Stuff

  When the time came to speak to the victims myself, I made it my habit on the way to the location to re-read passages from the reports, to make sure the gravity of the offences was in my mind during the conversations.

  In selecting contributors, we were – as ever – at the mercy of who was willing to go on camera. We’d been in contact with Liz Dux, the lawyer at Slater and Gordon who was handling compensation claims. It was around this time that the figure of over a thousand victims was being bandied around in news reports. Liz Dux said, with regard to claims she was dealing with, it was closer to a couple of hundred. She wasn’t sure where the larger figure had come from.

  She sent out a form letter from the production to alert people to our project should they wish to speak. We’d been keen not to obscure victims’ faces, which limited our pool even further – the idea being that it can look shady and unsatisfying to hear testimony from people whose faces you can’t see.

  For me, the second Savile film represented a new way of working. One of the axioms of my programmes, going back to my TV Nation days, had been that I looked at contributors who were making questionable decisions: the Klansmen, the Westboro Baptist Church members. Even in those later shows about addiction and mental illness, the subject of enquiry was people facing impossibly difficult choices, of how best to support troubled loved ones. To speak to victims of sexual assault was new ground for me and, especially given my history with the man, I was trepidatious.

  Alongside the new interviews with victims, we would be drawing on the abundance of archive from the original show, the forty-odd hours of rushes, the material shot in the years afterwards, the DVD ‘Jimmy Links’ rushes, the rushes from the tongue-in-cheek mini-doc When Jimmy Met Louis. Ancient battered boxes were brought down from an old storage facility and combed through. All of this was different to our normal way of working. It was also felt that, given my different role in the story, I should be interviewed on-screen by the director, instead of simply voicing the programme.

  Early on in the process, I watched some of the rushes from the original documentary. I had always wondered whether there might have been clues that I missed. Possibly in a bid to salvage my image of my own acuity, I recalled that I had pushed him harder at various points, in particular, in the scene at his mother’s flat in Scarborough about his sexual interests and his relationship with the Duchess.

  The rushes had been transferred onto DVDs and I watched them at my desk in the open-plan BBC offices in White City.

  [From Roll 022, filmed in the Duchess’s bedroom]

  LT: Did the Duchess not give you ‘brain damage’?

  JS: No. I was fifty-five when she died. We were more like pals. Duchess and me were best pals.

  LT: Did the closeness to the Duchess mean you didn’t get married?

  JS: No. Nothing. Every day Christmas day, every night New Year’s Eve. Rock and roll, baby.

  There followed the conversation, which we’d used in the film, about his ‘girlfriends’. Some had been friends for forty years. ‘I was a pirate,’ he said, who had never wanted exclusive relationships.

  LT: Do you think your relationship with the Duchess was anything like a marriage?

  JS: That is a non-question. Only a funny fella would ask a question like that.

  [LT: keeps at it, asks JS to explain it.]

  JS: We were the most normal family in the world . . . When you find someone that loves you they’ll do it for you.

  More or less at random, I dug out Roll 74 and Roll 75. Though they were higher numbers, the tapes dated from an earlier occasion – they’d been shot by Will on the toy camera. With just the two of us present, me and Will and no crew, there was a chance this material would be more intimate and more revealing.

  The images showed me and Jimmy wandering around a leisure centre in Doncaster, the one where he’d donated a large cuddly toy bear. ‘JS does a slightly weird lower lip thing on a woman’s hand,’ I wrote. ‘Two blokes. JS says, “You’re better looking than me so bollocks.” ’ I watched on: there was some more wandering; we climbed into Jimmy’s limo; we made chit-chat about charity work. ‘JS says, “Don’t play with the switches, ’cuz it knacks all the business up.” JS begins doing a Souza marching-band song.’

  I don’t know quite what I’d been expecting from watching the rushes. Maybe that his deviant qualities would be more evident. Or maybe I’d just wanted to see him again with the knowledge of his crimes so that I could merge the two people into one, or just so that I could look at him again knowing what he did. But it didn’t happen: the two people refused to become one, and instead of resolving them I was thrown back into a time before the revelations, into a state of mild boredom, enduring the harmless windbaggery of a faintly ridiculous ageing DJ.

  The interviews for what came to be called simply ‘Savile’ took place over several months. It was a far cry from the immersive mode of working I was used to. Instead of the sense of being in a world, we interviewed contributors piecemeal as they became available.

  We featured four victims, all female, and representing a spectrum of his offending. We had hoped to film a male victim, but only one was comfortable coming forward, and he had changed his story in significant ways, which I worried would be an unhelpful distraction in the film.

  Our first interview was with Kat, the ex-Duncroftian. Now in her sixties, and living on borrowed time in the aftermath of bowel cancer, she lived in Gobowen, a village in Shropshire close to the Welsh border. I took a train up. In her front room, with her long-term partner sitting by for support, she recounted the matter-of-fact details of a young teenager, so abused by her mother and her mother’s boyfriends, that being asked to give a blowjob to a forty-something DJ in the back of his Rolls in return for some tickets to a TV show was, as she put it, ‘not that big a deal, really’.

  In subsequent weeks I interviewed others. Cherie lived in Bournemouth, close to the seafront. A talented artist, her home was filled with her oil paintings, seascapes, animal portraits, and numerous pictures of the singer James Blunt. She described how, in 1973, she had been recovering from a breakdown and serious surgery at Stoke Mandeville when he came in through a ground-floor window. He’d stuck his tongue in her mouth – one of the hallmarks of his offending – and, disorientated and with her arms bandaged, she had been unable to fend him off.

  Susan, an optician in Leeds, had been delivering some spectacles to Jimmy’s house. He’d invited her inside, kissed her on the mouth, dropped his trousers, and uttered his catchphrase, ‘How’s about that then?’ She’d told co-workers back in the office, who’d laughed. For years afterwards she’d made no secret of the encounter – processing it as a funny story rather than as an assault, and only after the revelations did she come to see it with clear eyes as abusive and frightening.

  In Aylesbury, not far from Stoke Mandeville, I spoke to Sam. A woman roughly my own age, she had, as a young girl in the late seventies and early eighties, attended Sunday service at the hospital chapel. From time to time, Jimmy – an intermittently observant Catholic – would show up. Sam described being in the vestry, aged twelve or so, having helped with the collection, where Jimmy would grope and molest her, penetrating her with his fingers, b
razenly and almost in view of other church-goers. Sam, too, had been abused by her grandfather, who had raised her. Softened up, her defences scrambled and worn down, she had put up little resistance against Jimmy.

  ‘I never said to him “don’t”,’ she told me, ‘because I knew he could.’

  With all the victims, there was the slightly uncomfortable moment of soliciting their opinions on my original documentary. In my self-involved state, I still imagined there might be a chance they’d recognize the programme’s revealing dimension and give me credit for going as far as I did. Yeah, that didn’t happen. At the same time, it was oddly bracing to feel the force of their unvarnished feedback. ‘I remember thinking “poor Louis”,’ was Kat’s reaction. She said she felt I’d been ‘hoodwinked’ by him. Cherie remarked on how ‘silly’ I seemed, being pushed around by a puffed-up celebrity. But the overwhelming impression they gave was a sense of guilt. They felt bad for not saying or doing more to speak out. Each had thought she was the only one. If only they had known, they said, they would have raised the alarm. They would have tried to bring him to justice.

  Alongside the victims we interviewed others – associates, colleagues – who’d worked with him in a friendly way for many years. One was a BBC producer called Gill Stribling-Wright who’d started out in a junior capacity on Clunk-Click, then moved on to Jim’ll Fix It and stayed in touch as she moved up the TV ladder, doing Parkinson and ITV telethons. My director on the original documentary, Will Yapp, had interviewed her for background back in 1999. At that point she’d described Jimmy as a ‘tarnished saint’, someone with a fascination with what makes people tick, which explained his visits to Broadmoor, and who had an interest in philosophy. ‘I don’t think there’s anyone who really knows him completely, someone who he confides all in,’ she’d said. ‘I think there are various people who know a little bit and all of them participate in the compartments that he’s placed them in.’ Now, sixteen years on, she told me that in the years she worked with him she never saw anything that caused her concern. Had she read the reports? No, she said. ‘Because I don’t know what I’d do with it.’ His private life had been obscure, though looking back little clues stood out. ‘Part of his persona was the fact that he would tread very close to the line, in hindsight.’ She mentioned, when asked if he’d ever shown anything other than a professional interest in her, that she would have been too ‘walnuttish’ for him – a word she’d heard him use, which meant dry and wrinkly. She would have been in her mid-twenties at the time.