Speaker 1: All media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert here and the International Academy of Digital
Speaker 2: Arts and Sciences have announced that three different Cool Zone
Speaker 2: media shows have been nominated for awards at the thirtieth
Speaker 2: annual Webby Awards. You can vote on these now if
Speaker 2: you just google the name of the podcast and the category.
Speaker 2: Behind the Bastards nominated in the Experimental and Innovation Podcasts category.
Speaker 2: It Could Happen Here is in the News and Politics
Speaker 2: Podcasts category, and James Stout's mini series Migrating to America
Speaker 2: A Dream Worth Dying For has been nominated in the
Speaker 2: Podcasts Documentary category. And you can find links to vote
Speaker 2: for each of these podcasts in the episode description and
Speaker 2: in the posts on social media for episodes that It
Speaker 2: Could Happen Here and Behind the Bastards, Thank you. Welcome
Speaker 2: back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very
Speaker 2: worst people in all of history. I'm Robert Evans.
Speaker 3: What were you saying?
Speaker 1: I couldn't hear you.
Speaker 4: I was just so this book.
Speaker 2: Oh is that a copy of Girl Gone Wild by
Speaker 2: Courtney Cosak? Oh man, I'm excited to read that myself.
Speaker 2: I wish we could get Courtney on the show.
Speaker 4: I'm here I'm here.
Speaker 2: Oh. I probably could have told that by looking at
Speaker 2: my screen at any point in time, but I never do.
Speaker 2: Welcome to the podcast, Courtney. How are you doing today?
Speaker 4: I'm good. Thank you for having me excited to be back.
Speaker 2: So your book is coming out.
Speaker 4: That's exciting, it's exciting, it's nerve wracking. Yeah, it's all
Speaker 4: the things. It's really great.
Speaker 3: So I haven't finished it yet, but it's really good
Speaker 3: so far.
Speaker 2: You want to up top here plug what your book
Speaker 2: is before we get into the subject of our episodes
Speaker 2: for this in next week.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: It is an unwitting feminist coming of age about trying
Speaker 5: to make it in Hollywood.
Speaker 4: It's called Girl Gone Wild.
Speaker 5: It's about all the mistakes quote unquote I've made.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, and about like your time working for Girls
Speaker 2: Gone Wild, which you've talked about on our show a
Speaker 2: couple of times in the past, and unfortunately it's gonna
Speaker 2: be kind of relevant to these episodes. Do you know
Speaker 2: who we're doing this week?
Speaker 4: Did Sophie inform you no.
Speaker 2: No good good? What do you know about Jimmy Savill? Oh?
Speaker 5: Okay, vaguely, I thought you were about to say Joe Francis.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, no, no, I was not saying
Speaker 2: anything about Joe Francis, but we're talking about Jimmy Saville,
Speaker 2: who was a I mean he was everything in UK
Speaker 2: pop culture for quite a while, right, Like he started
Speaker 2: out as a DJ, he became like a television star
Speaker 2: and he was ultimately just famous for being extremely famous
Speaker 2: and being the guy who was like always on TV
Speaker 2: if you grew up in the UK from like really
Speaker 2: the mid seventies up through the late nineties, Like he
Speaker 2: was the face of the BBC. Do you know anything
Speaker 2: about this guy?
Speaker 4: Is he raunch?
Speaker 5: The first thing that came to mind was like the
Speaker 5: stories about you know, Robert Plant Sticking or Jimmy Page.
Speaker 4: But did he have any connection with those bands?
Speaker 2: Yes, he was connected to every band that was big
Speaker 2: in the sixties and seventies, pretty much like there are
Speaker 2: very few major pop musicians from that, Like I think
Speaker 2: people tend to call it like the golden era of
Speaker 2: pop music, of rock and roll and whatnot. There's almost
Speaker 2: no one that he wasn't connected to, from like Elvis
Speaker 2: up through the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Like he knew
Speaker 2: all of those guys, and you know it didn't necessarily
Speaker 2: wasn't necessarily in good with all of them, but because
Speaker 2: of his position as like Britain's top DJ, like he
Speaker 2: was connected to all those dudes. We're hearing some stories
Speaker 2: about those people, but this guy, Jimmy Saville is probably
Speaker 2: the number one request I get from British listeners is like,
Speaker 2: you need to do Jimmy Savell. And I've noticed that
Speaker 2: Americans tend to be either completely unaware of this guy
Speaker 2: or they only kind of heard a couple of things,
Speaker 2: and most of what they heard is that after he died,
Speaker 2: it came out that he'd been a massive pedophile for years. Right,
Speaker 2: this is a guy now committed sex crimes on like
Speaker 2: an industrial scale. He's kind of in some ways, he's
Speaker 2: kind of like the British Jeffrey Epstein, or at least
Speaker 2: he's like one of the guys you could accuse of
Speaker 2: being that. But this is you know, when I first,
Speaker 2: because I didn't know much about Jimmy Saville, I think
Speaker 2: I was kind of vaguely aware that he had existed,
Speaker 2: and then you know, he dies in twenty twelve, it
Speaker 2: comes out that all there are all these allegations of
Speaker 2: horrible sex crimes he'd committed. And when I started reading it. Initially,
Speaker 2: it was always framed as like and no one knew
Speaker 2: he kept it a secret his whole life. It was this,
Speaker 2: you know, there was no way anyone could have realized that,
Speaker 2: like the whole time he was this famous powerbroker in
Speaker 2: the music industry and and you know British television, he
Speaker 2: was also abusing women and boys.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 2: And what's really interesting to me is that, like that's
Speaker 2: all bullshit. It was entirely obvious the whole time, he
Speaker 2: like bragged about it. There were numerous interviews where he
Speaker 2: talked about at least aspects of his behavior, Like there
Speaker 2: actually was never any excuse for people to be surprised
Speaker 2: that Jimmy Saffle was a massive sex best. I mean,
Speaker 2: we'll pull up some photos of him later, but I
Speaker 2: hate to be like, oh, that guy looks like a pedophile,
Speaker 2: but Jimmy Savile was the most that guy looks like
Speaker 2: a pedophile pedophile in the history of fucking pedophiles.
Speaker 4: Oh, I can't wait to see.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I feel like, I mean, there was so much
Speaker 5: of that in this era too, Like yep, in Woody
Speaker 5: Allen films where he's like dating a seventeen year olds
Speaker 5: or and that's like not even considered bad.
Speaker 2: Well, no, and it's one of the things I will
Speaker 2: I will be using both the terms like when we
Speaker 2: talk about what he did, like had sex with, and
Speaker 2: the terms molested or raped, because it's often unclear. The
Speaker 2: age of consent in the UK is sixteen, so him
Speaker 2: having sex with a sixteen year old is not inherently
Speaker 2: legally rape in the society that he's doing it, right, Like,
Speaker 2: we can have the opinion it's not that that we have,
Speaker 2: but that's part of what camouflage is this and at
Speaker 2: the start of the pop industry there's a lot of people,
Speaker 2: including probably most of the musicians from this era whose
Speaker 2: music you like, who had sex with teenage girls, sometimes
Speaker 2: illegally because there were a lot of twelve thirteen, fourteen
Speaker 2: year olds got in there, but often very legally because
Speaker 2: again the age of consent was like sixteen, right, And
Speaker 2: you know this is there is an element of at
Speaker 2: the start of his crimes, this was a really different
Speaker 2: time and the moral values around that were a lot different.
Speaker 2: Were part of what happens with Jimmy is that the
Speaker 2: period in which he gets famous and has starts getting
Speaker 2: access to all these teenage girls is also the period
Speaker 2: in which birth control becomes like, like particularly the pill
Speaker 2: becomes normalized. Right. So there's just this explosion in people
Speaker 2: fucking right that's based on Oh, suddenly, there's no consequences
Speaker 2: to it. That doesn't really get like curtailed until the
Speaker 2: AIDS crisis, right. And so part of what's interesting to
Speaker 2: me is that this is not just a guy who
Speaker 2: is this This is part of the story here, is
Speaker 2: this is a guy who kind of comes of age
Speaker 2: as a famous person during that era where it's really
Speaker 2: easy for men at a certain level of fame to
Speaker 2: have access to a lot of teenage girls and quote
Speaker 2: unquote consequence free. It's not consequence free. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of people that he harms permanently, but that's the way
Speaker 2: it's seen widely. And then he has to figure out
Speaker 2: a way once that era ends and wants his kind
Speaker 2: of fame as dj in is to continue having access
Speaker 2: to people of that age, and that's when that's when
Speaker 2: he goes from a really gross guy in an industry
Speaker 2: filled with gross guys who all did very similar gross
Speaker 2: things to a unique kind of predator. Right. And that's
Speaker 2: the story of Jimmy Sapple. Margaret Thatcher is also heavily involved.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, how old is he in this b
Speaker 5: side of the story when he gets really creepy, I
Speaker 5: mean beyond.
Speaker 2: He's pretty creepy the whole time, but like in his
Speaker 2: it's like in his forties and on that like things
Speaker 2: start to get really that he gets that he kind
Speaker 2: of a balls in a unique way. Because a lot
Speaker 2: of what's interesting to me about this case is that
Speaker 2: Savile's not just abusive to individuals, and he is, but
Speaker 2: he he's like he's grooming institutions in including the BBC
Speaker 2: and most of the major hospitals in the United Kingdom,
Speaker 2: in order to get access to victims after a certain point.
Speaker 2: But I'm getting ahead of myself. Yeah, all right, yeah,
Speaker 2: let's let's start the story. James Wilson Vincent Saville was
Speaker 2: born on Halloween night, October thirty first and nineteen twenty six,
Speaker 2: fucking Halloween, like just.
Speaker 4: Perfect.
Speaker 2: Yeah. His hometown was named consort Terrace, which Wikipedia informs
Speaker 2: me is in the Burley area of Leeds in the
Speaker 2: West Riding of Yorkshire. Because for whatever reason, people on
Speaker 2: that island cannot give normal place names to places like
Speaker 2: fucking hey, British people here's a town name for you, Pittsburgh,
Speaker 2: Pennsylvania see williams Aras. That's how place name should sound.
Speaker 2: I don't know what the fuck you guys have been
Speaker 2: doing over there, but it's not just bitches. Yeah, oh no.
Speaker 2: He's in the Burley area of Leeds in the West
Speaker 2: Riding of Yorkshire. To fuck you guys, come on with
Speaker 2: your JR token bullshit here, get out, give it a
Speaker 2: normal name. I'm sorry British people, but also I'm not so.
Speaker 2: In his own autobiography, which was published under both the
Speaker 2: titles As It Happens and Love Is an Uphill Thing,
Speaker 2: Jimmy writes, Yeah, Jimmy writes this of his own birth.
Speaker 2: Some babies are born strong, some weak. Being the youngest
Speaker 2: of seven, it would appear that my father's last effort
Speaker 2: was lacking in the juices of strength. Eyewitnesses habit that
Speaker 2: I was born sound asleep. He's a sickly kid, right,
Speaker 2: and his family members, people who knew the family around
Speaker 2: that time, confirmed that he was you know, ill as
Speaker 2: a child and suffered from regular health problems. He exaggerates
Speaker 2: these as part of his personal mythos and narrative. For
Speaker 2: his part, Sapple claims that he nearly died when he
Speaker 2: was two years old, and was so sick that a
Speaker 2: priest was brought in to administer last rites while his
Speaker 2: mother prayed feverishly to a then unconfirmed saint, Margaret Sinclair,
Speaker 2: and like things were so bad, the doctor just like
Speaker 2: leaves at one point and says, just tell me when
Speaker 2: he dies, and I'll fill in the death certificate the
Speaker 2: rest of the way. I don't want to keep coming
Speaker 2: back here. At one point, his relatives think that he's
Speaker 2: actually passed on, and his grandmother does like the old
Speaker 2: timy thing where you hold a mirror up to his
Speaker 2: tiny mouth to see if he's breathing. And in his
Speaker 2: book and in numerous interviews over the years, Saville took
Speaker 2: great pleasure in delivering the punchline to this joke, which
Speaker 2: is that as she puts the mirror down, he pisses,
Speaker 2: hitting his grandmother in the eye, and this story improving
Speaker 2: He's alive right. This story is a foundational part of
Speaker 2: the Savile myth, and in his own autobiography he follows
Speaker 2: it with this very strange passage, hardened by my urinary
Speaker 2: success of catching my grandmother fair and square, I continued
Speaker 2: in my infancy to pee on anything or anyone who
Speaker 2: unwarily came into range. And my first recorded applause were
Speaker 2: for direct hits on guests, fires, tea tables, priests, and
Speaker 2: other such targets. I wasn't very popular for a number
Speaker 2: of years. That's weird. That's just an odd thing to say.
Speaker 2: It is interesting how early, even in his autobiography when
Speaker 2: he's you know, he's a children's entertainer and to a
Speaker 2: major extent, right, but he's he's writing to such an
Speaker 2: extent about like his penis.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 2: Again, there's a lot of in these in his autobiographies,
Speaker 2: and the things he'll say, he will tell like eighty
Speaker 2: or ninety percent of the truth. He doesn't quite go
Speaker 2: all the way, but you he focuses a lot on
Speaker 2: stuff to where like people should have known this is
Speaker 2: a guy with a weird fascination with his penis and
Speaker 2: like what it's doing. And it'll get a lot more.
Speaker 2: He'll talk a lot more, obviously about actual at least
Speaker 2: obviously he's not talking about sex crimes here. But it
Speaker 2: is weird the degree to which he focuses on this
Speaker 2: in as he's talking about himself as a two year
Speaker 2: old now his mother. Jimmy's mother, Agnes, gives a very
Speaker 2: different account of his infant illness. When she was interviewed
Speaker 2: in nineteen seventy in Plane Sight by Dan Davies. She
Speaker 2: recalled the illness struck when Jimmy was two and a half.
Speaker 2: My oldest daughter had him out in the pram and
Speaker 2: stopped at a shop, leaving Jimmy outside. He was strapped
Speaker 2: in but jumped about so much that the pram overturned
Speaker 2: and the hood caught the back of his neck and
Speaker 2: severed one of the muscles. And that's a completely different story.
Speaker 2: He's not like a sick kid who's dying and you
Speaker 2: in bed or whatever. He's like a kid who has
Speaker 2: an injury, a pretty normal kind of injury. Pram falls
Speaker 2: over and he gets a muscle that's severed, and the
Speaker 2: injury heals badly. Jimmy can't sit up or properly shut
Speaker 2: his eyes for six months, even while sleeping. He was
Speaker 2: admitted to the hospital. Yeah, it's really a scary thing
Speaker 2: if you're the parents he's admitted to the hospital, who
Speaker 2: are like, we don't really know what to do. You know,
Speaker 2: there might be we could try surgery, but we don't
Speaker 2: know if that'll actually work, and his family says, no,
Speaker 2: we don't want to like risk that. On the way
Speaker 2: back from the hospital, Agnes stops briefly to pray at
Speaker 2: a cathedral, and then later that day, Jimmy goes to
Speaker 2: sleep and closes his eyes, which initially I verifies the
Speaker 2: family because they think he's died because he hadn't been
Speaker 2: closing his eyes. But he was actually fine. The injury
Speaker 2: had just finally healed. Right. That's a much less dramatic story,
Speaker 2: where like in we all we were clustered around. Then
Speaker 2: they put the mirror up to see if he was
Speaker 2: still breathing. No, he had a weird injury and they
Speaker 2: were scared because when he closed his eyes they thought
Speaker 2: he was dead, but he was.
Speaker 4: So it's not both. It's one was a lie and the.
Speaker 2: One is a lie.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 2: I can't think of why Agnes would have lied about this.
Speaker 2: I can think of a lot of reasons why Jimmy would. Now.
Speaker 2: Agnes did later write to the Catholic Church urging for
Speaker 2: the beatification of Margaret Sinclair. But again, this is just
Speaker 2: a very different story. His family was very poor growing up,
Speaker 2: although not unusually, they were like the normal level of
Speaker 2: poor for the town that they lived in. So it's
Speaker 2: not like he was the poor kid in town and
Speaker 2: had to watch all of these other kids who had more.
Speaker 2: It was this is England in like the twenties and thirties,
Speaker 2: and he lives in like the north, in a mining town.
Speaker 2: Everybody's broke, nobody has money. Then yeah, now again, he
Speaker 2: was the youngest of seven and he was an accident.
Speaker 2: His mom's like forty when she has him, which is
Speaker 2: I mean, that's an old pregnancy today, especially in like
Speaker 2: the twenties, that's fairly uncommon. And he was dubbed. He
Speaker 2: claims the family's not again child. That's the term he
Speaker 2: uses of like they were like, ah, this was we
Speaker 2: really can't ever let this happen again. And he's going
Speaker 2: to grow up with a chip on his shoulder about this.
Speaker 2: He was never very close to most of his older siblings,
Speaker 2: and he will later become a mama's boy in a
Speaker 2: deeply weird way. We're not really going to talk about
Speaker 2: it enough in these episodes, but he's like veering towards
Speaker 2: Patrick Bates levels of like very strange mom issues. But
Speaker 2: initially he feels like he's ignored, like he doesn't get
Speaker 2: a lot of attention, And he'll write about this both
Speaker 2: as if it frustrated him, and also he'll talk about like,
Speaker 2: and I really like that because I'm a loner and
Speaker 2: this really worked out for me. I like not getting
Speaker 2: a lot of attention. I can't tell which is coping
Speaker 2: and which is the truth. That said, his other family
Speaker 2: members don't seem to agree that he was ignored and
Speaker 2: not given a lot of attention. His sister Joan actually
Speaker 2: says that she and the rest of the family consider
Speaker 2: Jimmy their miracle baby, and that he was kind of
Speaker 2: fond over by all of his older siblings and everyone
Speaker 2: else in the family because he'd had health issues as
Speaker 2: a kid. Right, And Davies points out in his book
Speaker 2: about Savel that while Saville preferred to portray himself as
Speaker 2: the not again baby, as this kid that wasn't wanted
Speaker 2: and was kind of ignored, his family insists that he
Speaker 2: was treated as the miracle child, the chosen one, right,
Speaker 2: which makes a lot more sense based on his subsequent behavior.
Speaker 5: Yeah, some people cannot get enough attention, Like there's no
Speaker 5: an endless hole.
Speaker 2: And it's interesting to me that he feels a need
Speaker 2: to like lie about this, to complain, to be like, oh,
Speaker 2: and they didn't even really they want me. You know,
Speaker 2: I had to deal with the fact that I didn't
Speaker 2: really belong, whereas his family's like, no, we were obsessed
Speaker 2: with him because he nearly died. Now. Jimmy's father, Vince,
Speaker 2: was a tall and gangly man who never made a
Speaker 2: lot of money, but was employed consistently and seems to
Speaker 2: have been like a pretty responsible parent, although not necessarily
Speaker 2: in a what you'd call the reputable industry. His boss
Speaker 2: was the town bookie, a guy named jim Windsor, who
Speaker 2: young Jimmy seems to have grown up admiring Windsor wants
Speaker 2: bragged to a newspaper that he'd been arrested once a
Speaker 2: year for twenty years. So his dad's he's Jimmy grows
Speaker 2: up connected to at least a low level organized crime.
Speaker 2: You know. This guy is running like numbers, rackets and stuff,
Speaker 2: and his dad is kind of his gopher. But his
Speaker 2: dad's also not a big wig. His dad is handling
Speaker 2: like very basic jobs for this guy, like he's so
Speaker 2: Jimmy sees this dude who is like kind of the
Speaker 2: patron of the family who is a criminal and who's
Speaker 2: doing really really well. But his dad's never doing really well.
Speaker 2: His dad's just.
Speaker 4: Kind of windsor like house of like royalty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but no, he's not royal. It's just also a
Speaker 2: name Windsor I.
Speaker 3: Was like, I was like British windsor the Queen's Corgies.
Speaker 3: What's happening.
Speaker 2: No, he's not. There will be royal family connections later,
Speaker 2: but not at this stage. This is just a guy
Speaker 2: with that last name.
Speaker 3: Got it, got it, got it my bad.
Speaker 2: So from the jump, Jimmy grows up close to and
Speaker 2: comfortable with some of the more mainstream elements of organized
Speaker 2: crime in his society, and he probably grows up aware that, like,
Speaker 2: the people who do best are the people who are
Speaker 2: willing to break the rules. And because my dad is
Speaker 2: kind of scared of going too far, we never had
Speaker 2: a lots as opposed to his boss. Right, it was
Speaker 2: a bolder man was willing to commit crimes and get arrested.
Speaker 2: So the family is like working, lower middle class, but
Speaker 2: he does get to see how the big shots do,
Speaker 2: and he kind of comes to want that for himself. Now,
Speaker 2: despite the fact that Jimmy often portrays his family as
Speaker 2: being quite poor and like unusually poor. It's noted by
Speaker 2: people who knew them that Agnes actually like the family
Speaker 2: owns an unusually large home. His mom makes them buy
Speaker 2: a larger home than they can really afford, so like
Speaker 2: a lot of the rooms are kind of empty. I
Speaker 2: think because she wants a big nice house is like
Speaker 2: a status symbol, right, so she has to budget really carefully.
Speaker 2: But they're able to afford the house, so they're doing okay.
Speaker 2: He goes to school.
Speaker 5: I was gonna ask you if they lived in one
Speaker 5: of those council estates.
Speaker 4: But no, not, no, they're not that poor.
Speaker 2: No, they're not that poor. They're certainly not the bottom
Speaker 2: rung in terms of like poverty. They're not like comfortable,
Speaker 2: I wouldn't say, but they're getting by. And even though
Speaker 2: this house is kind of bigger than they could afford,
Speaker 2: his mom is really good with stretching their money and
Speaker 2: he's able to like, they're able to afford it. And
Speaker 2: this is kind of he becomes like a hand me
Speaker 2: down kid. He's known in town. Is like he does
Speaker 2: he never no one ever buys clothes for Jimmy. He
Speaker 2: wears all of his older siblings clothes, which a lot
Speaker 2: of people you know, grew up with that experience. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 2: He goes to school in town, and the main method
Speaker 2: of discipline in Jimmy's era and the place where he's
Speaker 2: going to school, is that the headmaster will beat you
Speaker 2: with a bamboo cane if you're bad. This is not
Speaker 2: again weird for the time, but ow but ow. Because
Speaker 2: Jimmy is so sickly, he qualifies for free milk and
Speaker 2: a free spoonful of malt at school each day, which
Speaker 2: I think I think they're trying to help him avoid
Speaker 2: getting rickets. I think that's why they get him a
Speaker 2: spoonful of malt. I forget exactly why got in town.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, that's a very.
Speaker 2: Like twenties thirties thing, right, the sick kids get free
Speaker 2: milk and malt. This is also something he writes and
Speaker 2: talks about constantly because it reinforces his underdog narrative. Agnes
Speaker 2: drove the family and they were with Agnes is like
Speaker 2: the wearing the pants in the household. Right. His dad
Speaker 2: is a very retiring and kind of shy figure. He's
Speaker 2: gonna die much earlier than Agnes, and she is She's
Speaker 2: the force to be reckoned with. They are extremely Catholic.
Speaker 2: Jimmy Saville is raised Catholic and is a hardcore Catholic
Speaker 2: his entire life. They almost never miss Mass, and she
Speaker 2: makes sure that even with the family budget as tight
Speaker 2: as it was, they always have money to put in
Speaker 2: the collection plate for arguably the wealthiest institution in human
Speaker 2: history at the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Catholic Church
Speaker 2: couldn't have gone by without that tuppence that you dust
Speaker 2: in there. They wouldn't have been able to afford to
Speaker 2: move all those priests to our molesting kids to different
Speaker 2: places so they can molest more kids. Of his mom's faith,
Speaker 2: Saville said she was an old fashioned religioso. She went
Speaker 2: to Mass because she had a guilty conscience. Now that's
Speaker 2: interesting to me because he'll emphasize this a lot, guilty
Speaker 2: over what. Now we don't know. He never says. This
Speaker 2: is one of a number of very vague, never directly
Speaker 2: stated bits of Jimmy lore that could be seen as
Speaker 2: supporting the idea. Some people have suggested that he was
Speaker 2: probably molested as a child. There's not evidence of this.
Speaker 2: He never talked about it. I've never heard anyone come
Speaker 2: up with any like clear factual allegations based on a
Speaker 2: firsthand narrative that he was molested. However, he has a
Speaker 2: deeply weird relationship with his mom, and he goes on
Speaker 2: to molest hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, potentially thousands of kids.
Speaker 2: So people naturally wonder, was Jimmy a victim has himself? Now,
Speaker 2: I don't have a satisfying answer on this. This is
Speaker 2: going to be one of those things where I just
Speaker 2: have to shrug and say, like, I don't know. But
Speaker 2: he is like he never has a long term relationship
Speaker 2: with an adult woman in his entire life. He never
Speaker 2: has a real girlfriend, he never gets married. I don't
Speaker 2: think think he's ever close to having a long term
Speaker 2: relationship with a woman other than his mom, who he
Speaker 2: will like go on dates with and hang out with
Speaker 2: as a young man, like he she is like he's
Speaker 2: a major part of his social life while he is
Speaker 2: like famous in the early years of fame to an
Speaker 2: extent that a lot of people have wondered, was it
Speaker 2: did something go on there? And I could I will
Speaker 2: tell you people wonder that I don't have any evidence.
Speaker 2: I'm not aware of any evidence. It's just kind of
Speaker 2: a thing people wonder because his relationship with his mom.
Speaker 5: He romanticized him in some way, like that's kind of
Speaker 5: damaging enough.
Speaker 2: But yeah, it may not have involved actual molestation. Sorry
Speaker 2: I cut you off. Yeah, no, there's no priest, not
Speaker 2: that we know of. Like, obviously there are priests who
Speaker 2: were around the area he grew up in who molested kids,
Speaker 2: because that's true everywhere there were Catholic churches, but I
Speaker 2: haven't there's he never alleges that, and I don't have
Speaker 2: any and of it, right, so we can ponder this.
Speaker 2: And obviously it is not uncommon for people who wind
Speaker 2: up being child molesters who have been molested or to
Speaker 2: have had like very early traumatic sexual experiences. But that
Speaker 2: doesn't have to happen for someone to be a child molester.
Speaker 2: Sometimes people are just child molesters because they suck, right Anyway.
Speaker 2: His childhood is interrupted by World War II, the Big
Speaker 2: Dub Dub dose, although not in a way that was
Speaker 2: particularly traumatizing to him. A lot of British kids in
Speaker 2: this era have really trauma because they're bombed to rite,
Speaker 2: kids in London and stuff are getting bombed and hiding
Speaker 2: in shelters, and he gets a bit of that, but
Speaker 2: he's in a really good area to avoid. Like the
Speaker 2: worst of that. He recalls when he was eleven or
Speaker 2: so and the war started, that he and a bunch
Speaker 2: of local kids were taken out of the city to
Speaker 2: this rural camp where they did minor manual labor in
Speaker 2: order to keep them away from bombs. Basically, it's a
Speaker 2: long term summer camp where you know, you're working on
Speaker 2: projects and stuff, you're helping to build things out in
Speaker 2: the woods, and they're just trying to keep you away
Speaker 2: from where the Germans are targeting. Now, just based on
Speaker 2: when things happened, we know Jimmy was thirteen and nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty nine, so he can't have been eleven when the
Speaker 2: war started, because that just is doesn't work. One of
Speaker 2: the difficulties here is Jimmy gives ages for where how
Speaker 2: old he is when a bunch of different stuff happens.
Speaker 2: That absolutely cannot be true. And I don't know why
Speaker 2: he'd lie about it. This may have just been honestly
Speaker 2: him forgetting, because once you get to a certain age,
Speaker 2: it's hard to be like, was I ten when that happened?
Speaker 2: Was I twelve? Like I can't tell for myself on
Speaker 2: some things that happened to me.
Speaker 4: Check your damn memoir though.
Speaker 2: Come yeah, yeah, yeah, but it is a little you
Speaker 2: do have to like kind of go back and be like, no,
Speaker 2: he couldn't have been eleven. He was thirteen. We know
Speaker 2: when he was fucking born, right, he wouldn't have been
Speaker 2: worried about getting bombed by the Germans in nineteen thirty seven.
Speaker 2: That would have been crazy, and they had started bombing
Speaker 2: the UK in nineteen thirty nine. But I can believe that,
Speaker 2: you know, maybe that like that era, they were getting
Speaker 2: worried about it and stuff. So anyway, whatever, how, whatever
Speaker 2: age he is when he gets to this fucking summer camp,
Speaker 2: he's only there for a few months before his parents
Speaker 2: borrow a car to visit him. I think he's there
Speaker 2: for like six months, and then they come to visit him,
Speaker 2: and his mom sees that his camp where he's camping
Speaker 2: is directly underneath like a massive gasoline tank, and she's like, well, fuck,
Speaker 2: he could get blown up here. I'm not gonna let him.
Speaker 2: Just all take him home, right. I feel like the
Speaker 2: odds aren't any worse that he gets blown up in
Speaker 2: leads than sitting underneath his gas tank. So his mom
Speaker 2: takes him back home, and this is the moment that Jimmy,
Speaker 2: you can tell Jimmy says, this thinks this is the
Speaker 2: moment that his life really begins, because once he gets
Speaker 2: back home, all the men are away at war. At
Speaker 2: this point, this probably would have been like forty forty one, right,
Speaker 2: all of the men are away at war, and a
Speaker 2: bunch of the older teenage boys who aren't old enough
Speaker 2: to have been like drafted yet are working. Right. They're
Speaker 2: taking over jobs that the grown men have are no
Speaker 2: longer able to do, as are a lot of the women.
Speaker 2: And there's shortages of everything. So first off, he is
Speaker 2: kind of one of the only quote unquote men because
Speaker 2: he's thirteen or fourteen. Now, that's in this era a
Speaker 2: child starting to become recognized as a child. But if
Speaker 2: you think back to it, if you go back a
Speaker 2: generation or two, a fourteen year old is basically a
Speaker 2: man in Western society. That's when you start working full time.
Speaker 2: That's when people you are old enough to like run
Speaker 2: a job and be living your life, and the concept
Speaker 2: of a childhood doesn't sort of descend evenly upon society.
Speaker 2: It is starting to at this period of time, but
Speaker 2: it's also not very it's not weird that he's going
Speaker 2: to be treated by a lot of adults as a
Speaker 2: grown man, as a fourteen year old or as close
Speaker 2: to a grown man, because all of the bigger grown
Speaker 2: men are gone, right.
Speaker 4: Including his dad or is his dad still around?
Speaker 2: No, his dad is still around. His father's like old
Speaker 2: enough that he's not going to get drafted. But he's
Speaker 2: like working all the time and shit. Right, So because
Speaker 2: the shortages of everything, a vibrant black market opens up
Speaker 2: and Jimmy rushes straight to the middle of it. You know,
Speaker 2: he was because of sort of his upbringing. I think
Speaker 2: he was primed to be willing to get into a
Speaker 2: business like that, and because everyone else is kind of gone,
Speaker 2: he's able to start making money by, as he puts it,
Speaker 2: we were all in the racket business then, which is
Speaker 2: likely true. So he's he's hustling one way or the other.
Speaker 2: He's finding things that people need, he's selling them for
Speaker 2: high prices. He's like probably nicking stuff to resell. You know,
Speaker 2: this is kind of the birth of him like starting
Speaker 2: to become and live as an independent person. And he
Speaker 2: gets into it basically as a war profiteer. You know,
Speaker 2: as a fourteen year old war profiteer, which is interesting.
Speaker 2: You know who else is a war profiteers and services?
Speaker 2: Very possibly, we have no way of knowing. I would
Speaker 2: say there's like a solid forty percent chance that whoever
Speaker 2: is advertising this podcast right now is a war profit here.
Speaker 2: And hey, somebody's got to make money off of wars.
Speaker 1: Okay, we're back.
Speaker 2: So Jimmy is making spare money hustling until one day
Speaker 2: he decides to go buy the one of the big
Speaker 2: local ballrooms, the Mecca Locrno Ballroom, which is like a
Speaker 2: dance hall, right, and he sees that they need work
Speaker 2: because again all the men are gone. He turns himself
Speaker 2: into a gopher for the adults in leeds vibrant entertainment industry.
Speaker 2: The city had recently been nicknamed Britain's City of Sin
Speaker 2: by one Sunday paper, and working at the Mecca is
Speaker 2: what gave Jimmy his real education. One that quote, and
Speaker 2: this is from his autobiography, qualified me for every a
Speaker 2: level that ever existed in hell. He is not really
Speaker 2: hiding the fact that he's a scumback. Jimmy continues, not
Speaker 2: yet five feet in height, as thin as a drumstick
Speaker 2: with big eyes, ears and nose. I was everyone's mascot,
Speaker 2: pet runner, holder of mysterious parcels and secrets because I
Speaker 2: didn't understand the first thing about anything. I was the
Speaker 2: confidante of murderers, whores, black marketeers, crooks of every trade,
Speaker 2: and often of the innocent victims they preyed on. I
Speaker 2: also played the drums. And he's you know, dressing that
Speaker 2: up to make a better story, But this is probably
Speaker 2: pretty accurate as to like what he's doing is he
Speaker 2: is hanging out with a very bad crowd who are
Speaker 2: making their living. Like there's a lot of prostitution that
Speaker 2: gets run through this ballroom. There's a lot of like
Speaker 2: sketchy stuff happening here. And because he's this kid, everyone's
Speaker 2: kind of fine with him being in the room. Now.
Speaker 2: He is also doing like a formal job there. The
Speaker 2: Mecca was short on members for the bands because of
Speaker 2: the war, so as Jimmy tells it, he became the
Speaker 2: relief band for the whole establishment, getting paid ten shillings
Speaker 2: a week to fulfill a fifty pounds a week job
Speaker 2: and scrounging for cigarettes under the seats to make extra coin.
Speaker 2: This was a very different time. That's like a good
Speaker 2: way to make an extra money is let's find some
Speaker 2: half smoked SIGs to sell to people. That tells you
Speaker 2: how bad the Warriors were. That there's a good there's
Speaker 2: a vibrant industry and cigarettes. People didn't finish, not.
Speaker 4: Even just for him yet to sell.
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh my god, yeah, to sell. He would finish
Speaker 2: school at four and then rush to the Mecca to
Speaker 2: perform for their afternoon shows. Then he'd have a couple
Speaker 2: hours break, and then he'd do a second half hour
Speaker 2: spot in the evenings. The relief band was just him
Speaker 2: and a girl who played piano, and even in the
Speaker 2: thirties and forties, this was not a legal arrangement. Quote
Speaker 2: being hopelessly underage and therefore highly illegal. There were times
Speaker 2: when I was persona non grata on stage. Don't come
Speaker 2: in tomorrow, the manager would hiss, the directors are coming.
Speaker 2: When the visiting boss asked where's the second band, the
Speaker 2: suave reply never failed. There's a big air raid going
Speaker 2: on in Hole or Doncaster or Halifax, and the relief
Speaker 2: band is made up of fireman There were always lots
Speaker 2: of fires.
Speaker 5: So he is.
Speaker 2: Illegally doing this and it's being justified as like, oh no,
Speaker 2: the band's not here right now because they're putting out
Speaker 2: fire from the bombs. Don't notice that it's like a
Speaker 2: fourteen year old day.
Speaker 4: They're totally adults.
Speaker 2: They're totally adults, and it's a whole band. Now. That
Speaker 2: is a fun, old timey tale of child labor, and
Speaker 2: we love a good It is, honestly, as child labor
Speaker 2: stories go. I don't know they have an issue with that.
Speaker 2: I don't think it hurts a fourteen year old kid
Speaker 2: for them to play the drums for an hour or
Speaker 2: two and night. Right, that's not really that bad as
Speaker 2: things go. But you can see what's happening here.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 2: From almost the beginning of his life, Jim is drawn
Speaker 2: towards entertainment, and from his first gig, he gets used
Speaker 2: to the idea that your age doesn't matter, even if
Speaker 2: there were laws against it, and that he's kind of special.
Speaker 2: He's not subject to the rules, and that's bad for
Speaker 2: a kid to learn. Right, that's going to have consequences.
Speaker 2: Right now, Again, the adults around him don't find this
Speaker 2: too strange because of the time that this is happening
Speaker 2: in right, and Sapville also credits the way he's treated
Speaker 2: the fact that he remained small and sickly. I was
Speaker 2: like a chair or a table. People used to talk
Speaker 2: in front of me because I didn't exist anybody who
Speaker 2: had done anything wrong. I knew who had done it,
Speaker 2: but nobody ever asked me. And one of Jimmy's great
Speaker 2: strengths here is knowing when to keep his mouth shut
Speaker 2: around crimes, a skill he would only master further as
Speaker 2: an adult. Right knowing how to cover up when he's
Speaker 2: aware that something illegal is going on. This is again,
Speaker 2: a very very early thing that he learns how to
Speaker 2: do now. He claims that his first date is at
Speaker 2: age twelve, based again because he's also saying that this
Speaker 2: is happening while he's working at the dance hall. That
Speaker 2: can't be accurate based on when he was born and
Speaker 2: when all of this happened, right, But he claims that
Speaker 2: he goes on his first date when he's twelve with
Speaker 2: a twenty year old and even if he's fourteen, a
Speaker 2: fourteen year old and the twenty year old's pretty messed up,
Speaker 2: Right with a twenty year old who worked at the
Speaker 2: box office, He takes her out to a movie and
Speaker 2: the two made out to some extent afterwards. If this
Speaker 2: story is true, and again he's the only source on this,
Speaker 2: and he's telling the story because he thinks it makes
Speaker 2: him look cool, then Jimmy was molested as a child. Right.
Speaker 2: But also he clearly if this happened at all, he
Speaker 2: clearly didn't view it that way, and wrote proudly in
Speaker 2: his autobiography that he learned based on this fooling around
Speaker 2: in the dark. Quote, the ninety percent you can't see
Speaker 2: is just as important as the ten percent you can.
Speaker 2: These days, the percentage is reversed, but the principle is
Speaker 2: the same. Right, this is his first lesson about girls.
Speaker 4: Oh my god, you can totally see how it started.
Speaker 4: This is crazy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's crazy how much how open he is about this, right, totally.
Speaker 2: So young, jim finds himself drawn to entertaining people, right,
Speaker 2: particularly to performing on stage and to women, basically from
Speaker 2: the time that he's a preteen up to the time
Speaker 2: that he's like in his early adolescence. The other thing
Speaker 2: he develops early on is a fascination with death, specifically corpses.
Speaker 2: In his autobiography, immediately after describing his first date, he
Speaker 2: discusses a time of great excitement for me when one
Speaker 2: of the Mecca's lady patrons was discovered in several carrier
Speaker 2: bags in a ditch. This woman had been chopped to
Speaker 2: pieces and had murdered and chopped to pieces. Right, oh
Speaker 2: my god. He talks about this grisly murder in a
Speaker 2: way I've never heard anyone write about a murder. He
Speaker 2: writes that quote. This was a whole new scene for me.
Speaker 2: I could never work out why it was necessary to
Speaker 2: cut her into bits. All right, well, that's an unhinged
Speaker 2: way to describe. That's fucking wild.
Speaker 4: That's one of the most.
Speaker 3: Fucked up things I've ever heard.
Speaker 2: What you mean, what do you mean? It's way worse.
Speaker 2: Jimmy Savile's relationship to dead bodies does not get healthier
Speaker 2: after this point.
Speaker 3: What jesus, he's what like twelve thirteen?
Speaker 2: You said he's made. He's like fourteen, probably maybe something
Speaker 2: like that. It's a little hard to tell. Again, yeah, young, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's fucking.
Speaker 3: Some fucking sick o. Shit.
Speaker 2: What's even weirder is this next bit Again, he's talking
Speaker 2: about a woman being cut up after getting murdered. It
Speaker 2: was all part of a strange adult world that I
Speaker 2: never tried to understand, and even though I had a
Speaker 2: good idea who'd done it, no one ever asked me. Besides,
Speaker 2: I was far too excited about leaving school the following month.
Speaker 4: He didn't see this body cut out? Did it?
Speaker 2: He did? He's yeah, he did, and he's fascinated by it.
Speaker 2: He really likes he witnessed them finding the corpse.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, okay, yeah, God, or at.
Speaker 2: Least that's what he how he describes it. It's a
Speaker 2: little unclear, but I think so. And this must have
Speaker 2: happened when he was fourteen, because he says he left
Speaker 2: school the following month and that fourteen is when he graduated.
Speaker 2: Right Again, you are kind of in some ways childhood
Speaker 2: is start to be more kind of formalized understood. But
Speaker 2: there are ways in which you're kind of an adult
Speaker 2: at fourteen in this era, right, and he's going to
Speaker 2: be treated like one in some ways. So after the
Speaker 2: Dunkirk evacuations, everyone in his town had to put up
Speaker 2: soldiers for a few days because there was no quartering
Speaker 2: Act in the UK, right, which Savill describes as totally bizarre.
Speaker 2: And both of his parents become like major activists in
Speaker 2: terms of like supporting the war effort. His mom and
Speaker 2: dad help organize this big fundraiser in Leeds where they
Speaker 2: like gather a bunch of money from the local community
Speaker 2: to help pay for the military to build bombers. And
Speaker 2: there's a you know, they eventually they raise enough to
Speaker 2: build two hundred and fifty bombers. And this is like
Speaker 2: a huge story in the local papers. His parents are
Speaker 2: in the newspaper and being praised for raising money for
Speaker 2: this charitable cause. And that's going to stick with him too, right,
Speaker 2: this is a big deal to Jimmy. His two older
Speaker 2: brothers were both overseas serving by this point, and one
Speaker 2: of them actually got trapped during the Siege of Malta.
Speaker 2: Families all over town were receiving telegrams notifying them of
Speaker 2: their dead sons and husbands with some regularity. Jimmy watched
Speaker 2: all of this happen, but wrote later that quote, I
Speaker 2: wondered why people wept during the war when their relatives
Speaker 2: had been killed. I didn't even know what killed was.
Speaker 2: I was much more inquiring than I was affected. And
Speaker 2: that can't be true, right, because, like, you're not a
Speaker 2: tiny kid at this point, bro. You were born in
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty six, you're like fourteen or fifteen when this
Speaker 2: is going on. You know what death is.
Speaker 4: Also, you just saw that lady chopped up, like you
Speaker 4: totally know.
Speaker 2: It's greird to be like, I didn't understand why they
Speaker 2: were sad that their son was killed. You know what
Speaker 2: death is. You're fourteen, you're not like a four year old,
Speaker 2: and he was writing about like being a six year
Speaker 2: old and I didn't understand why. Well, yeah, that's not weird,
Speaker 2: but this is weird. That's a weird thing for you
Speaker 2: to say. And he does this a lot. He writes
Speaker 2: and talks about the war years often and about his
Speaker 2: cognition of what's happening as if he was a small
Speaker 2: boy then, and he's not. He's a lateeen like young
Speaker 2: adult while the war is going on. So that part's
Speaker 2: really weird to me. I don't know what to say
Speaker 2: about it other than he does that, and it's kind
Speaker 2: of strange that he does that to me. In March
Speaker 2: of nineteen forty one, he and his mom have to
Speaker 2: run for cover during an air raid. A cop near
Speaker 2: them was killed by the bomb, and after the raid,
Speaker 2: Jimmy claims that he picked up a black glove with
Speaker 2: a hand still inside it. In Davy's book In Plain Sight,
Speaker 2: he writes, it is a morbid detail and one that's
Speaker 2: savile savored. He's going to tell this story a lot
Speaker 2: with a degree of relish, Like he's excited by this,
Speaker 2: and you get the feeling that he's excited at the time. Again,
Speaker 2: this is all going to be important much later on. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he's not well, that's not a healthy reaction. From age
Speaker 2: fifteen to sixteen, he just keeps working at the mech
Speaker 2: and taking on odd jobs, mainly to provide his mom
Speaker 2: with money for food, both of which earn him praise.
Speaker 2: Right the fact that he's making money and the fact
Speaker 2: that he's like an entertainer. He gets a lot of
Speaker 2: praise early on from this. He also starts training with
Speaker 2: the Army Air Corps because he's expecting he's got to
Speaker 2: be like eighteen when the war ends. He's expecting to
Speaker 2: be called up to the RAF in another year or
Speaker 2: two when he's like sixteen or seventeen. Like, his expectation
Speaker 2: is that he's going to serve. And many people would have,
Speaker 2: no doubt been better off if he'd gotten sent to
Speaker 2: the front and died some measureshment, but Jimmy had the
Speaker 2: dubious luck instead to become a Bevin boy. So in
Speaker 2: the early years of the war, British Minister of Labor
Speaker 2: Ernst Bevin decreed that one in ten men between the
Speaker 2: ages of eighteen and twenty five would be conscripted to
Speaker 2: work in the coal mines rather than to fight at
Speaker 2: the front. And it says eighteen to twenty five younger
Speaker 2: boys got conscripted all the time, as happened in the military,
Speaker 2: or not, or got got one way or the other
Speaker 2: got in. And Jimmy not eighteen. I don't think when
Speaker 2: he gets called in to be a bev And boy.
Speaker 2: Although it's a little hard for me to say what
Speaker 2: age he is, but he does this. This happens to him,
Speaker 2: and this is a foundational part of the Jimmy Savill saga.
Speaker 2: Although I can't actually tell you that this one hundred
Speaker 2: percent happened, but we'll get to that. Here's a representative
Speaker 2: sample of how this is usually described from a see
Speaker 2: in an article. He was one of the surviving Bevin
Speaker 2: Boys who received an award from the then British Prime
Speaker 2: Minister Gordon Brown in two thousand and eight for helping
Speaker 2: to keep the mines operational during the conflict, Saville suffered
Speaker 2: serious spinal injuries in a mine explosion and left the colliery. Right.
Speaker 2: And so that's the standard version of the story that
Speaker 2: he does his duty to his country as a mining
Speaker 2: boy when he's a teenager, and he eventually after a
Speaker 2: couple of years gets horribly injured and you know, has
Speaker 2: to leave. And this is a big part because he
Speaker 2: he can honestly say when he's like a big entertainer,
Speaker 2: I was a coal miner, right, Because a lot of Jimmy's,
Speaker 2: a lot of Jimmy's appeal as an entertainer later will
Speaker 2: be that he's a he's an authentic voice from the north.
Speaker 2: He's a real man of the people, a common man.
Speaker 2: He worked as a coal miner as a boy. Right now.
Speaker 2: For his part, Jimmy simultaneously claimed to have enjoyed the
Speaker 2: work in the minds and to have been haunted by it.
Speaker 2: Quote the noise, the dark and dust, and the torn
Speaker 2: fingers created an impression of hell that I will carry
Speaker 2: to the grave. But he also writes that this is
Speaker 2: the period of time in his life where he learns
Speaker 2: quote the power of sheer oddness, because he's the weird kid,
Speaker 2: and he's notably weird, like other people are kind of
Speaker 2: weirded out by young Jimmy. And so he gets a
Speaker 2: job most of the time that he's a Bevin boy.
Speaker 2: He gets a job where he's basically alone in an
Speaker 2: isolated chunk of the mine that periodically coal trucks will
Speaker 2: come through and sometimes they get derailed, and so he
Speaker 2: has to put them back on the tracks if they
Speaker 2: get derailed. And so every day he just goes there
Speaker 2: and he's sitting alone for like twelve hours or whatever
Speaker 2: in a coal mine, like that's his job. And this
Speaker 2: gives him a lot of time to read. This is
Speaker 2: kind of when he claims he got his education basically,
Speaker 2: because every day he'll come down and he'll turn on
Speaker 2: his light and he'll read books all the time while
Speaker 2: he's sitting alone in the coal mine. He spends he
Speaker 2: claims three and a half years doing pretty much this.
Speaker 2: He rarely socialized with his coworkers, and they seem to
Speaker 2: have been repelled by him. In fact, Jimmy recalled one
Speaker 2: specific moment where this became clear to him quote instinctively
Speaker 2: regarded as strange by my mates. There came a day
Speaker 2: when they drew apart from me, and I started to
Speaker 2: draw apart from the normal world. It all started as
Speaker 2: a joke on my part. And this is interesting. The
Speaker 2: way he describes that is like, this is when I
Speaker 2: drew apart from the normal world. Is really compelling to me.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about this joke that he plays that
Speaker 2: he thinks severs him from normal society. So one day
Speaker 2: he shows up late for work, still dressed in his
Speaker 2: best suit that he'd been wearing the night before. I
Speaker 2: think he'd been out at the club or something like that,
Speaker 2: and he had no time to change. So he goes
Speaker 2: down wearing a suit, which perplexes his peers, right, because
Speaker 2: you're going to ruin whatever you're wearing if you take
Speaker 2: it into the coal mine. Now, because he doesn't want
Speaker 2: to destroy his best suit once he gets into his
Speaker 2: position down there, because he's spending the whole day alone,
Speaker 2: he just strips naked and he wraps the suit in
Speaker 2: newspaper and he works in the nude all day. Then
Speaker 2: at the end of his shift, he like cleans his
Speaker 2: face and his hands off and he puts the suit
Speaker 2: back on, and so it appears as he walks out
Speaker 2: that he's leaving the mine wearing a clean suit, looking
Speaker 2: like he had when he'd gone down the start of
Speaker 2: the day. Quote in the history of coal mining, no
Speaker 2: one had spent eight hours underground and emerged clean, not
Speaker 2: a smudge on the collar or cuffs. Witchcraft it may
Speaker 2: not be, but unnatural it certainly was. And I was
Speaker 2: branded from that moment, right, So, what's so weird, dude,
Speaker 2: that's really odd? Jimmy madd shit. So Dan Davies, the
Speaker 2: author of Endplane Sight Inner, asked him about this decades,
Speaker 2: like sixty something years later, and when he asks Jimmy
Speaker 2: about this moment and like why he did this, Saville responded,
Speaker 2: I wasn't sure what it did, but it did develop
Speaker 2: my out of the box thinking. I didn't do it
Speaker 2: for any reason. I just realized that going back clean
Speaker 2: would freak people out, and it did. I realized that
Speaker 2: being a bit odd meant there could be a payday
Speaker 2: that's going to be super important.
Speaker 4: That's so strange. I thought he was just trying to
Speaker 4: save his suit.
Speaker 5: It's also weird that like he wants the body is
Speaker 5: described in but then hell is coal mining.
Speaker 4: When he's reading a book, it's like, yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, some of that I think is just because he
Speaker 2: wants to really judge up how difficult and even though
Speaker 2: he seems to have had basically the best job you
Speaker 2: could have now there, he really wants to like play
Speaker 2: up because it's good for his later reputation. But I
Speaker 2: don't think he's playing this bit up where he's talking
Speaker 2: about this why he did this, that he just feels
Speaker 2: a compulsion to freak people out and get a reaction.
Speaker 2: You look as an entertainer, I get that that kind
Speaker 2: of kid in some ways, right, Sometimes you did things
Speaker 2: just to see how people react or just because you
Speaker 2: wanted to get everyone.
Speaker 1: Laughing, right yeah, I mean jad Gas made a career
Speaker 1: of it, right Yeah.
Speaker 2: And it's interesting that he's his goal is not to
Speaker 2: make everyone laugh. He wanted to freak people out, Like
Speaker 2: you could see how a different person could have made
Speaker 2: this a funny bit and like brought everyone in and
Speaker 2: like this is something that could make your pals laugh
Speaker 2: and could like have an impact on them. He wants
Speaker 2: to scare them kind of. He wants to make them
Speaker 2: to be upset with him and to feel like because
Speaker 2: then they won't pay attention to him if they think
Speaker 2: he's really weird. They'll give him a wide berth and
Speaker 2: he'll get to continue doing his own thing alone. That's
Speaker 2: something Jimmy is going to take from this experience, and
Speaker 2: it's going to be with him his whole life. So
Speaker 2: the war ended and the Bevin boys started deserting the
Speaker 2: Minds because they didn't want to work in a mine anymore.
Speaker 2: It sucks Davy's. His biographer, suspects that Savill was a
Speaker 2: repeat work skipper even before the war ended, and basically
Speaker 2: that he was never working as much as he should have.
Speaker 2: He was kind of skipping out a lot of the time,
Speaker 2: even from the jump. Now this is important because every
Speaker 2: version of the Jimmy Savile story includes him being horribly
Speaker 2: maimed in a mining accident, which is why he stops
Speaker 2: doing the work. You know, However, I can't say that
Speaker 2: this really happened or when it would have happened. He
Speaker 2: gives different dates for when this mining accident happened every
Speaker 2: time he talks about it. He claims to be a
Speaker 2: different age when this happens every time he talks about it,
Speaker 2: and he gives kind of differing accounts about how it happened.
Speaker 2: His initial claims about how bad this injury was and
Speaker 2: when it happened simply can't have been true because the
Speaker 2: age he claims to have been when he was and
Speaker 2: he says this is serious enough that he's basically unable
Speaker 2: to move right for months, this can't have happened because
Speaker 2: the age that he does that, we know that he
Speaker 2: was participating in like a bike race through France, like
Speaker 2: there was a postwar like a big bike marathon basically,
Speaker 2: and we know he's in it, so it can't have happened.
Speaker 2: Then it's really it's unclear to me what actually went
Speaker 2: down here. I found a c in an article that
Speaker 2: describes him as having suffered a serious spinal injury. And
Speaker 2: Jimmy did keep a surgical support jacket that he said
Speaker 2: he was made to wear as he was recuperating from
Speaker 2: the injury, so he probably got hurt to some extent.
Speaker 2: But again, the timelines he give us just doesn't work
Speaker 2: with the things that we know that he was doing,
Speaker 2: like participating in the first Tour of Britain cycle race
Speaker 2: in nineteen fifty one. If he's injured when he claims
Speaker 2: he was, and it was as bad as he claims
Speaker 2: he was, it can't have happened. The way he said
Speaker 2: it did because of the other things we know that
Speaker 2: he was doing. So I don't know was he actually
Speaker 2: hurt in a mining accident, did it was it a
Speaker 2: minor injury or did he just stop going to work
Speaker 2: one day and later lied about having been badly injured
Speaker 2: in order to like, because that's a better story than
Speaker 2: I just kind of abandoned mining. He said in two
Speaker 2: thousand and eight that he'd been hurt after working for
Speaker 2: seven years as a Bevin boy. And that's impossible. You know,
Speaker 2: that's impossible because in nineteen forty eight he was in
Speaker 2: a movie. He's like an extra in a film, and
Speaker 2: that movie still exists, so you can see that he's
Speaker 2: physically healthy. He's visibly very fit in the movie, Like
Speaker 2: we know he wasn't in like traction from a spinal injury. Then,
Speaker 2: during an interview in the nineteen eighties, Jimmy gave yet
Speaker 2: another different story and claim that a chest cold got
Speaker 2: him out of the pits in nineteen forty eight. I
Speaker 2: think that's a lot likelier, right, just that like, oh,
Speaker 2: I just kind of had the flu and stopped coming
Speaker 2: into work and started doing other shit. That's a lot
Speaker 2: more believable to me, there are some people who suspect
Speaker 2: Jimmy Light entirely about being a Bevin boy. I think
Speaker 2: that's unlikely, but he definitely didn't do the job as
Speaker 2: long as he claimed. We know this because by the
Speaker 2: late forties, after the war is over, he becomes an athlete.
Speaker 2: He gets into really good shape. He's cycling all the time,
Speaker 2: and he's eventually going to be like a professional athlete.
Speaker 2: He's also on the side selling scrap with somebody. He's
Speaker 2: got like a scra business. He's probably working with his
Speaker 2: dad right before his dad passes on, and he does
Speaker 2: some odd bits of agricultural labor. There's this like post
Speaker 2: war government scheme where they're paying kids to like work
Speaker 2: on farms to help get the country back up and
Speaker 2: running after the war. Per Davy's book in Plain Sight quote,
Speaker 2: it was on one such camp that he discovered his
Speaker 2: talent for hypnotism, surprising him in those watching by persuading
Speaker 2: an unsuspecting female victim out of her clothes. A sign
Speaker 2: of the unpermissive times was that the room emptied. In
Speaker 2: a second, he wrote, that's kind of the first story
Speaker 2: Jimmy gives us of him doing something really sexually questionable
Speaker 2: that like both he's studying hypnotism to get ladies to
Speaker 2: take their clothes off, and that everyone else in the
Speaker 2: room is really uncomfortable with what he's doing, right, and
Speaker 2: he's like, ah, it's a sign of the times. We
Speaker 2: were more repressed back then. No, Jimmy, that's just weird,
Speaker 2: just like really uncomfortable, fucking weird dude.
Speaker 5: Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: You know what else makes people uncomfortable?
Speaker 4: Products of services?
Speaker 2: Sometimes sometimes so. By the late nineteen forties, Jimmy's dad
Speaker 2: is ill and dying, and that makes Jimmy increasingly the
Speaker 2: breadwinner and emotional support for his mother, and he begins
Speaker 2: to slip noticeably into the role of caring for her
Speaker 2: beyond all of her other children. It was his mom
Speaker 2: that tipped him off about one of the most significant
Speaker 2: moments in his life. Some neighborhood kid had wired a
Speaker 2: gramophone up to a radio, allowing you to basically get
Speaker 2: kind of a proto DJ set going. This is like
Speaker 2: the birth the early birth of like the turntable systems
Speaker 2: that like DJs use now. Is like a gramophone we
Speaker 2: hooked up to a radio to make it louder. So
Speaker 2: Jimmy falls in love with this. He buys this thing
Speaker 2: and he starts. He holds an event and sells tickets
Speaker 2: to it. He has his mom make refreshments. He like
Speaker 2: rents out a room at a social club owned by
Speaker 2: the Catholic Church, and he's like doing what one of
Speaker 2: the first DJ sets anyone would have ever done, right
Speaker 2: where he's like putting on records and like picking what
Speaker 2: songs are gonna come on at what time. This is
Speaker 2: like very prehistory of DJing. DJing. Only about twelve people
Speaker 2: show up, but Jim was electrified to see people dancing
Speaker 2: to music that he picked for them. Quote. I felt
Speaker 2: this amazing. Power is the wrong word. Control is the
Speaker 2: wrong word. Effect could be nearer. What I was doing
Speaker 2: was causing twelve people to do something. I thought, I
Speaker 2: can make them dance quick, I can make them dance slow,
Speaker 2: or I can make them stop. That one person, me
Speaker 2: was doing something to all these people. And that's really
Speaker 2: the thing that triggered me off and sustained me for
Speaker 2: the rest of my days. That's really important.
Speaker 5: His ego is entirely too inflated for being a DJ.
Speaker 2: Are you kidding me? But it's interesting you talked to
Speaker 2: I've had a lot of friends who were DJs. You
Speaker 2: talked to most people who are into this, and they
Speaker 2: he asked, what appeals to you, It's like the music.
Speaker 2: They love music, they like dance, like there's something about
Speaker 2: the art. Jimmy is always very clear he doesn't care
Speaker 2: about the art. He is not at all interested. And
Speaker 2: this is a creative endeavor. He likes being a DJ
Speaker 2: because you get to make people do stuff. You are
Speaker 2: controlling the emotions and mood and to an extent, the
Speaker 2: movements of a group of people. The control is what
Speaker 2: appeals to him about being a DJ. That's very upsetting.
Speaker 4: That's so strange. Yeah, take a hypnotist kind of continue.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly exactly as Davis notes, and I
Speaker 2: think is as obvious from that quote. Jimmy like the
Speaker 2: art of what he's doing is kind of lost on him.
Speaker 2: He's purely in this for power and control. So he
Speaker 2: starts hosting more of these record dances, renting whatever venues
Speaker 2: he could find, and occasionally running out halfway through a
Speaker 2: set when his equipment broke. Because this isn't None of
Speaker 2: this stuff works very well at the time. Now, this
Speaker 2: is also the first time when he starts to write
Speaker 2: about taking birds home from shows with him. He almost
Speaker 2: exclusively in his autobiography and in his personal writings refers
Speaker 2: to girls and women as birds. Right, that's the term
Speaker 2: he uses, and he uses it constantly.
Speaker 4: Well, it is common at the time.
Speaker 2: Very common at the time, very common. He keeps doing
Speaker 2: it through the seventies and eighties, nineties, which is weird,
Speaker 2: but at the time. Again, that's part of the story
Speaker 2: is when this starts, it's not so weird. He's a
Speaker 2: teen young adult at the time, when he's seventeen eighteen.
Speaker 2: The fact that he's taking sixteen, seventeen, sometimes fifteen year
Speaker 2: old girls like home from the club at night isn't
Speaker 2: the weirdest thing in the world, right, Like it, it's
Speaker 2: not considered too strange by any of the people because
Speaker 2: he's right in that age bracket more or less, right,
Speaker 2: he is a teenager too at the start of this,
Speaker 2: and so it's not seen as super odd. And part
Speaker 2: of what's interesting to me is that Jimmy never kind
Speaker 2: of gets out of that mind state, right of like
Speaker 2: the one that he has when he's like an eighteen
Speaker 2: year old, right, And it's a poortant you know that
Speaker 2: he goes down this road very early. Now, we don't
Speaker 2: actually know when this starts to happen, when he starts
Speaker 2: DJing and you know, fucking taking girls home from these
Speaker 2: shows that he's doing, because by realistic calculation, it should
Speaker 2: have been around nineteen forty eight, forty nine or fifty
Speaker 2: maybe even fifty one, but Jimmy would sometimes say these
Speaker 2: shows took place in forty three or forty four, So
Speaker 2: I can't take any of the dates here too, Seriously,
Speaker 2: it's just impossible for me to know. But by his
Speaker 2: late teens to early twenties, Jimmy is playing shows as
Speaker 2: a DJ. He's not making a lot of money at
Speaker 2: this though, but like he gets obviously he's interested in
Speaker 2: it because of the benefits that it brings him. That said,
Speaker 2: because it's not making money for him, he decides to
Speaker 2: try his hand at being a pro cyclist. He'd always
Speaker 2: liked cycling, he'd been into it as a kid, and
Speaker 2: this is when cycling started to take off as a
Speaker 2: competitive sport in the post war period, and he gets
Speaker 2: really into that, and he was actually pretty good at
Speaker 2: cycling for a while. He competed reasonably well. He never
Speaker 2: wins any major races, but he fit second in a
Speaker 2: big one in nineteen fifty.
Speaker 3: I just like, I'm sorry, I have to say it.
Speaker 3: It's like, Okay, I was like seventeen, I worked as
Speaker 3: at a restaurant.
Speaker 4: I carried theod to the tables, but like that's.
Speaker 3: Not what I was into. And so I it's like
Speaker 3: it's like if I was just like and I became
Speaker 3: a professional basketball player, Like what, yeah, Like what I.
Speaker 2: Mean, it's it's not it's a It's a part of
Speaker 2: what he's doing here is in this post war period,
Speaker 2: there's a bunch of open places, right. Cycling has just
Speaker 2: started becoming a competitive sport. So it's just some dude
Speaker 2: you can kind of slide in and if you're okay
Speaker 2: at cycling, maybe make a life of it. And it's
Speaker 2: going to be the same in the music industry, the
Speaker 2: same as a DJ. Like he is looking for places.
Speaker 2: He's looking for things that where there might be money
Speaker 2: and where it's not. It's a new thing, so like
Speaker 2: it's not really been ironed out how this business is
Speaker 2: supposed to work. It hasn't ossified yet, so it's easy
Speaker 2: for him to get in, and it's easy for him.
Speaker 2: Was like, yeah, I'm a professional cyclist and then I.
Speaker 3: Walked into a room and I got my first job.
Speaker 4: I had experience.
Speaker 3: That's the and now I'm a pajillionaires of the post.
Speaker 2: War experience for a lot of assholes in a nutshell. Now,
Speaker 2: Jimmy's never super committed to the competitive side of racing.
Speaker 2: I think he likes it because there's a lot of girls,
Speaker 2: right uh. In fact, he loses one race because he
Speaker 2: and his buddy, as they're cycling passed, see some girls
Speaker 2: having lunch by, like you know, in a park or something,
Speaker 2: and they decide to stop and flirt with them, and
Speaker 2: so everyone else passes them. He regularly flexs the power
Speaker 2: of his oddness here too. He starts doing that. In
Speaker 2: his cycling days, he would do shit like he would
Speaker 2: show up for races wearing a full tuxedo and he
Speaker 2: would hire someone to like run up for everyone else's
Speaker 2: pre race. He's got his tucks on, and he hires
Speaker 2: someone to run up with like a tray in a mirror,
Speaker 2: so he can like freshen up and get like make
Speaker 2: himself look nice while everyone is like prepping for the race.
Speaker 2: He's doing this as a bit, and he's doing this
Speaker 2: because it makes him stand out. One of his buddies
Speaker 2: later said of him, he was a good writer, but
Speaker 2: he was never a great writer. He was a real character. However,
Speaker 2: some of the other writers thought he was a bloody fool,
Speaker 2: and he was a buffoon at times. In fact, his
Speaker 2: buffoonery is gonna be what takes him further than the cycling,
Speaker 2: because he's never good enough to really make a living
Speaker 2: as a professional cyclist. But he does. He does become famous,
Speaker 2: even though he's never one of like the guy's winning races.
Speaker 2: He's one of the most famous cyclists of his day
Speaker 2: because of his bizarre behavior. He gets his first nickname,
Speaker 2: Oscar the Duke Seville. He registers as Oscar Seville for reasons,
Speaker 2: or Oscar Savill for reasons that I don't know. But
Speaker 2: he gets his nickname the Duke because he finishes the
Speaker 2: race while smoking a cigar, imitating Winston Churchill. As Jimmy
Speaker 2: later said, I was forever with the gimmicks before gimmicks
Speaker 2: had ever been invented, and someby's gonna show you a
Speaker 2: shirt from not too much later in this period of time,
Speaker 2: there's Jimmy with a cigar. He's always got his hair
Speaker 2: like that. It's he's this is a young British man
Speaker 2: with a cigar in his mouth and like long shock
Speaker 2: white straight hair, like clearly like bleached white hair. It's
Speaker 2: really strange. No one else looked like Jimmy Saville, like
Speaker 2: at any real point in his life. And he dies
Speaker 2: like again, I hate doing the Wow, that guy looks
Speaker 2: like a pedophile thing. But that guy looks You wouldn't
Speaker 2: trust that guy with you kids, right, that's again there's
Speaker 2: something dangerous about that.
Speaker 3: It's a very off putting looking person. One thing's for
Speaker 3: sure is our colleagues, James Stout, former cyclist, also British.
Speaker 3: This is like opposite day. James Stout is evil James, Yes,
Speaker 3: evil James and like and one thing I know about
Speaker 3: James is James fucking hates this guy.
Speaker 2: We've never spoken about it. I mean you really hate
Speaker 2: this guy. Oh yeah, got started with the evil. He
Speaker 2: hasn't even done anything all that evil yet. He's just
Speaker 2: done some really weird and upsetting things photo deeply bad.
Speaker 2: Sorry yeah, like fucked up bangs. I don't know how
Speaker 2: to describe it to you other than fucked up.
Speaker 4: Man.
Speaker 2: So Jimmy's proud appeal vastly exceeds his actual skill on
Speaker 2: a bike, and race promoters noticed this, and after a
Speaker 2: match in which he showed up hungover and collapsed mid race,
Speaker 2: he's offered a job. They're like, look, Jimmy, clearly cycling
Speaker 2: isn't going to work out for you, but everyone loves you.
Speaker 2: You're like one of the maybe the most popular cyclist
Speaker 2: we have. How about trying your hand at being a
Speaker 2: race commentator? Do you want to be the guy who like,
Speaker 2: like talks about what's happening basically right? And as Jimmy said,
Speaker 2: it turned out I was a natural ad lib broadcaster
Speaker 2: and this is going to be his the big break
Speaker 2: that leads to everything else that we're going to talk
Speaker 2: about in these episodes. But that is the end of
Speaker 2: part one. Courtney Kosak, how are you feeling?
Speaker 4: Who? What an exciting episode?
Speaker 2: Yeah, we've just kind of got the Jaws music going.
Speaker 2: You know something? Really, you know this is going to
Speaker 2: a terrible place.
Speaker 5: I do recognize him based on that photo that you showed.
Speaker 2: He is a very and if you did, you see
Speaker 2: the sequel to twenty eight years later, The Bone Temple. No,
Speaker 2: oh man, there's a reason so all of the bad
Speaker 2: guys in that movie are dressed like and aping Jimmy's savile.
Speaker 2: And there's a reason for it because that movie. You
Speaker 2: haven't seen it. I love it. The whole film is
Speaker 2: an extended critique of Thatcherism, and there's a very good
Speaker 2: reason why the psychotic like murderous villains are dressed like
Speaker 2: Jimmy Savill. But we'll talk about all that later. Courtney,
Speaker 2: you want to plug anything before we roll out here?
Speaker 5: Well, I want to plug Sophie's facial expressions during this episode.
Speaker 2: Excellent, they were.
Speaker 4: So good, such a good compliment to yours. And also, guys,
Speaker 4: by my fucking book.
Speaker 2: You'll like it.
Speaker 4: It's called Girl Gone Wild?
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah? What else are you doing nothing? Buy
Speaker 2: your book? Wow? Mm hmm.
Speaker 3: I don't know should we should we continue, should we
Speaker 3: record part two? Or should we just take a break
Speaker 3: and just like I'll read Girl Gone Wild?
Speaker 2: I don't know, I'm going to take a break. I'll
Speaker 2: read the entirety of Courtney's book and then we'll come
Speaker 2: back in like four minutes. How's that sound perfect?
Speaker 3: Great?
Speaker 2: Great? Great? All right, everybody, We'll be back Thursday with
Speaker 2: some stuff that's really going to upset you.
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