Chapter 1: What was Jimmy Savile's early life like?
Hey everybody, Robert here, and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences have announced that three different Cool Zone Media shows have been nominated for awards at the 30th Annual Webby Awards. You can vote on these now if you just Google the name of the podcast and the category. Behind the Bastards has been nominated in the Experimental and Innovation Podcasts category.
It Could Happen Here is in the news and politics podcasts category. And James Stout's miniseries Migrating to America, A Dream Worth Dying For, has been nominated in the podcast documentary category. And you can find links to vote for each of these podcasts in the episode description and in the posts on social media for episodes of It Could Happen Here and Behind the Bastards. Thank you.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. I'm Robert Evans.
What? What were you saying? I couldn't hear you. I was just so enthralled with this book I'm reading.
Oh, is that a copy of Girl Gone Wild by Courtney Kosak?
Oh, man.
I'm excited to read that myself. I wish we could get Courtney on the show.
I'm here. I'm here.
Oh, I probably could have told that by looking at my screen at any point in time, but I never do. Welcome to the podcast, Courtney. How are you doing today?
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Chapter 2: How did Jimmy Savile rise to fame in the UK?
It's all the things.
It's really good so far. I haven't finished it yet, but it's really good so far.
You want to, up top here, plug what your book is before we get into the subject of our episodes for this and next week?
Yeah. It is an unwitting feminist coming of age about trying to make it in Hollywood. It's called Girl Gone Wild. It's about... All the mistakes, quote unquote, I've made.
Yeah, well, and about like your time working for Girls Gone Wild, which you've talked about on our show a couple of times in the past. And unfortunately, it's going to be kind of relevant to these episodes. Do you know who we're doing this week? Did Sophie inform you?
No.
Good, good. What do you know about Jimmy Savile?
Oh, OK. Vaguely, I thought you were about to say Joe Francis.
No, no, no, no, no. Not I was not saying anything about Joe Francis. But we're talking about Jimmy Savile, who is was a I mean, he was everything in UK pop culture for quite a while. Right. Like he started out as a DJ. He became like a television star. And he was ultimately just famous for being extremely famous and being the guy who was like always on TV.
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Chapter 3: What were the allegations against Jimmy Savile after his death?
Yes, he was connected to every band that was big in the 60s and 70s, pretty much. Like there are very few major pop musicians from that like background. I think people tend to call it like the golden era of pop music, of rock and roll and whatnot. There's almost no one that he wasn't connected to from like Elvis up through the Rolling Stones, The Beatles.
Like he knew all of those guys and, you know, didn't necessarily wasn't necessarily in good with all of them. But because of his position as like Britain's top DJ, like he was connected to all those dudes. We'll be hearing some stories about those people. Um, but this guy, Jimmy Savile is probably the number one request I get from British listeners is like, you need to do Jimmy Savile.
Um, and I've noticed that Americans tend to be either completely unaware of this guy or they only kind of heard a couple of things. And most of what they heard is that after he died, it came out that he'd been a massive pedophile for years, right? This is a guy who committed sex crimes on like an industrial scale. Um,
He's kind of ā in some ways, he's kind of like the British Jeffrey Epstein or at least he's like one of the guys you could accuse of being that. But this is ā when I first ā because I didn't know much about Jimmy Savile. I think I was kind of vaguely aware that he had existed. And then he dies in 2012. It comes out that there are all these allegations of horrible sex crimes he'd committed.
And when I started reading it, initially it was always framed as, like, and no one knew. He kept it a secret his whole life. It was this, you know, there was no way anyone could have realized that, like, the whole time he was this famous power broker in the music industry and in, you know, British television. He was also abusing women and boys. And what's really interesting to me is that, like,
That's all bullshit. It was entirely obvious the whole time. He like bragged about it. There were numerous interviews where he talked about at least aspects of his behavior. Like there actually was never any excuse for people to be surprised that Jimmy Saffel was a massive sex pest. I mean, we'll pull up some photos of him later. But I hate to be like, oh, that guy looks like a pedophile.
But Jimmy Saffel is the most that guy looks like a pedophile pedophile in the history of fucking pedophiles.
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Chapter 4: How did Savile's relationships with women evolve?
Oh, I can't wait to see.
Yeah, I feel like, I mean, there was so much of that in this era, too, like in Woody Allen films where he's like dating a 17 year old or and that's like not even considered bad.
Well, no, and it's. One of the things, I will be using both the terms, like when we talk about what he did, like had sex with and the terms molested or raped, because it's often unclear. The age of consent in the UK is 16. So him having sex with a 16-year-old is not inherently legally rape in the society that he's doing it, right?
Like we can have the opinions on that that we have, but that's part of what camouflages this. And at the start of the pop industry, there's a lot of...
people, including probably most of the musicians from this era whose music you like, who had sex with teenage girls, sometimes illegally, because there were a lot of 12, 13, 14 year olds got in there, but often very legally, because again, the age of consent was like 16, right? And
This is ā there is an element of at the start of his crimes, this was a really different time and the moral values around that were a lot different. Part of what happens with Jimmy is that the period in which he gets famous and starts getting access to all these teenage girls ā is also the period in which birth control becomes like ā like particularly the pill becomes normalized, right?
So there's just this explosion in people fucking, right, that's based on, oh, suddenly there's no consequences to it? That doesn't really get like curtailed until the AIDS crisis, right? Yeah. And so part of what's interesting to me is that this is not just a guy who is this.
This is part of the story here is this is a guy who kind of comes of age as a famous person during that era where it's really easy for men at a certain level of fame to have access to a lot of teenage girls and quote unquote consequence free. It's not consequence free. There's a lot of people that he harms permanently. Right. But that's the way it's seen widely.
And then he has to figure out a way once that era ends and once his kind of fame as a DJ ends to continue having access to people of that age. And that's when he goes from a really gross guy in an industry filled with gross guys who all did very similar gross things to a ā a unique kind of predator, right? And that's the story of Jimmy Savile. Margaret Thatcher is also heavily involved.
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Chapter 5: What role did the BBC play in Jimmy Savile's career?
...in a unique way. A lot of what's interesting to me about this case is that Savile's not just abusive to individuals, and he is, but he's grooming institutions, including the BBC and most of the major hospitals in the United Kingdom, in order to get access to victims after a certain point. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.
Jesus Christ, Robert!
Yeah.
All right.
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Chapter 6: How did societal norms impact Savile's behavior?
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Yeah, let's start the story. James Wilson Vincent Saville was born on Halloween night, October 31st, 1926. Fucking Halloween. Like, just... Perfect. Yeah, his hometown was named Consort Terrace, which Wikipedia informs me is in the Burley area of Leeds in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Because for whatever reason, people on that island cannot give normal place names to places. Like...
Fucking, hey, British people, here's a town name for you. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. See? Or William's Arizona. That's how place names should sound. I don't know what the fuck you guys have been doing over there, but it's nonsense.
St. Louis, bitches.
Yeah. Oh, no, he's in the Burley area of Leeds, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Fuck you guys. Come on with your J.R.R. Tolkien bullshit here. Give it a normal name. I'm sorry, British people, but also... I'm not. So in his own autobiography, which was published under both the titles As It Happens and Love is an Uphill Thing, Jimmy writes this of his own birth.
Some babies are born strong, some weak. Being the youngest of seven, it would appear that my father's last effort was lacking in the juices of strength.
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Chapter 7: What were the implications of Savile's actions on his victims?
Eyewitnesses have it that I was born sound asleep. He's a sickly kid, right? And his family members, people who knew the family around that time, confirmed that he was, you know, ill as a child and suffered from regular health problems. He exaggerates these as part of his, like, personal mythos and narrative, but...
For his part, Saville claims that he nearly died when he was two years old and was so sick that a priest was brought in to administer last rites while his mother prayed feverishly to a then unconfirmed saint, Margaret Sinclair. And like things were so bad that the doctor just like leaves at one point and says, just tell me when he dies and I'll fill in the death certificate the rest of the way.
I don't want to keep coming back here. Yeah. At one point, his relatives think that he's actually passed on and his grandmother does like the old timey thing where you hold a mirror up to his tiny mouth to see if he's breathing.
And in his book and in numerous interviews over the years, Savile took great pleasure in delivering the punchline to this joke, which is that as she puts the mirror down, he pisses, hitting his grandmother in the eye. And this story, and proving he's alive, right? This story is a foundational part of the Savile myth, and in his own autobiography, he follows it with this very strange passage.
"'Heartened by my urinary success of catching my grandmother fair and square, I continued in my infancy to pee on anything or anyone who unwarily came into range, and my first recorded applause were for direct hits on guests, fires, tea tables, priests, and other such targets. I wasn't very popular for a number of years.'" That's weird. That's just an odd thing to say.
It is interesting how early, even in his autobiography, when he's, you know, he's a children's entertainer to a major extent, right? But he's writing to such an extent about, like, his penis, you know? Again, there's a lot of, in these... In his autobiographies and the things he'll say, he will tell like 80 or 90 percent of the truth.
He doesn't quite go all the way, but he focuses a lot on stuff to where like people should have known this is a guy with a weird fascination with his penis and like what it's doing. And it'll get a lot more ā he'll talk a lot more obviously about ā at least obviously he's not talking about sex crimes here.
But it is weird the degree to which he focuses on this as he's talking about himself as a two-year-old. Now, his mother, Jimmy's mother, Agnes, gives a very different account of his infant illness when she was interviewed in 1970. Per the book In Plain Sight by Dan Davies, she recalled the illness struck when Jimmy was two and a half.
My oldest daughter had him out in the pram and stopped at a shop, leaving Jimmy outside. He was strapped in but jumped about so much that the pram overturned and the hood caught the back of his neck and severed one of the muscles. And that's a completely different story. He's not like a sick kid who's dying in bed or whatever. He's like a kid who has an injury, a pretty normal kind of injury.
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Chapter 8: How did Savile manipulate institutions for his gain?
His pram falls over and he gets a muscle that's severed and the injury heals badly. Jimmy can't sit up or properly shut his eyes for six months, even while sleeping. He was admitted to the hospital. Yeah, it's really a scary thing if you're the parents. He's admitted to the hospital who are like, we don't really know what to do.
You know, there might be, we could try surgery, but we don't know if that'll actually work. And his family says, no, we don't want to like risk that. On the way back from the hospital, Agnes stops briefly to pray at a cathedral.
And then later that day, Jimmy goes to sleep and closes his eyes, which initially terrifies the family because they think he's died because he hadn't been closing his eyes. But he was actually fine. The injury had just finally healed, right? That's a much less dramatic story. We're like, oh, we were clustered around. Then they put the mirror up to see if he was still breathing.
No, he had a weird injury. And they were scared because when he closed his eyes, they thought he was dead. But he wasn't.
So it's not both. It's one was a lie and the other one.
One's a lie.
OK.
I can't think of why Agnes would have lied about this. I can think of a lot of reasons why Jimmy would. Now, Agnes did later write to the Catholic Church urging for the beatification of Margaret Sinclair. But again, this is just a very different story. His family was very poor growing up, although not unusually. They were like the normal level of poor for the town that they lived in.
So it's not like a... He was the poor kid in town and had to watch all of these other kids who had more. It was this is England in like the 20s and 30s. And he lives in like the north in a mining town. Everybody's broke. Nobody has money then. Yeah.
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