transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:01] Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2:
[00:04] Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. We are starting our second week, parts three and four, on one of the bastardest bastards we'll ever do on this show, Jimmy Saville, British broadcaster and pedophile extraordinaire. And to talk with me about the latter and worst parts of Jimmy's life and career as a fucking monster, the great Courtney Kosak. Welcome back, Courtney.

Speaker 1:
[00:33] Yay.

Speaker 3:
[00:33] Thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 2:
[00:35] Yeah, thanks for being on. And you've got a book, a book that we talked about in the first two parts, but are going to plug again.

Speaker 3:
[00:42] Dear God, if you guys haven't already bought my book, please do. It is called Girl Gone Wild. It is about trying to make it in Hollywood. It's an unwitting feminist coming of age. And it's the perfect antidote to what you're about to hear right now.

Speaker 2:
[00:57] Beautiful. Well, I guess we can't delay it anymore. So, last episode, we kind of ended by talking about one of the girls that Jimmy impregnated. She was, this one was 16. There's a number, I came across at least two stories, I mean, at least two direct stories and insinuations of a lot more. I don't think we'll ever have an idea of how many girls he impregnated. I'm gonna guess often generally they had stories like the lady we talked about where they get an illegal abortion, they have health consequences afterwards. Like that's a, I think probably how a lot of these went. I'm gonna guess Jimmy paid for a good number of those over the years. But the same year that happened, which is 1964, the London Metropolitan Police received a report about a flat in London that was being used to pimp out children, little girls, who would, not little girls, I think they were mostly like in their teens, but girls who were in many cases underage, who had escaped from a nearby facility for, I wrote for a facility for female juvenile offenders. That's not entirely accurate. It was called the Duncroft Approved School, and we'll talk about it more later. But some of these girls got in legal trouble, committing some sort of crimes while underage. Some of them just have behavioral problems. This place seems to be a mix of a juvenile reform school and a place, one of those troubled teen camps that parents send their kids to if they're not obeying enough. Some of these girls are escaping from the Duncroft School, and they're winding up at this flat where they're being pimped out as child prostitutes. The London Met bust this place in 1964, and in their notes at the time, there's detectives write that Jimmy Savile was a repeat visitor to the home while it was operational as a pedophile brothel, right? They don't go after him or anything. He doesn't get charged with anything. They're just like, oh, Jimmy Saville's going to this brothel for children. An awful lot.

Speaker 3:
[03:10] It's a famous teenage brothel, wow.

Speaker 2:
[03:13] Yeah, this brothel for teenage girls who have gotten in trouble with the law. Interesting, not worth looking into further. So that does, though, beg the question, how did he get away with this? And Davies gives us a good idea of how in his book, In Plain Sight, when he describes an interview where Jimmy discussed one time that he nearly got arrested because, and Jimmy's telling this to a reporter as like for laughs basically. And he talks about this story where like, well, there's always these a lot of underage girls hanging out around my office. And I got in trouble at some point, like someone called the police about it because they thought it was suspicious. And so I had to sit down for an interview with the police chief. And I told him, you know that your 16 year old daughter comes in here, don't you? Would you rather she was safe with me or being preyed on by all those scumbags and slags?

Speaker 3:
[03:58] What?

Speaker 4:
[03:59] Oh my god.

Speaker 2:
[03:59] He tells the journalist this and I think like the 70s or the 80s, he's just like, yeah, you know, people get angry at me for all the underage girls I hang out around, but some of them are the children of cops, you know.

Speaker 3:
[04:10] I'm just here to protect them.

Speaker 2:
[04:12] I'm here to keep them safe. They get into trouble if they weren't around Jimmy Saville.

Speaker 4:
[04:16] Oh my god.

Speaker 2:
[04:17] My gosh. Good times. So Roger Holt, Roger, yeah, not good times. Roger Holt was a record industry ad man in like the 60s and 70s. He's a guy like basically helping to, there's a lot of Paola going on in this period of time in the record industry. So his job is basically to bribe big DJs into playing specific records or specific songs, right? And there's a number of ways that they would do this. Sometimes you're just giving them gifts or hooking them up with, you know, concert tickets they can give out on the air. Sometimes it's more direct, we're bribing people. As we've talked about, some of these DJs are getting bribed in girls, right? Not that I'm saying Holt did that. I don't know what Holt did specifically, but he's a record industry ad man during this period of time, and he visited Saville's Radio One office regularly throughout the 60s. He would later tell Davies that the DJ's love for young girls was an open secret. Quote, I heard through his office, First in conversation, Jimmy's at it again. That's how people would talk about him molesting teenagers. This did not strike anyone. It struck people as a bit odd. They're talking about it, obviously, right? I don't think it was odd for DJs to, I mean, it certainly wasn't uncommon for DJs to be in close quarters with 16 and 17-year-old girls, which again was legal at the time. But it's notable that Jimmy is exclusively going for girls that age and younger, as opposed to that just being a thing, which I'm not saying it's okay when it was the thing that happens sometimes for guys, but people at the time are like, well, Jimmy really prefers them really young, often illegally so.

Speaker 3:
[05:59] Yes, didn't just slip through the cracks.

Speaker 2:
[06:03] Right. So yeah, what's important is you understand that Jimmy's love of young girls was seen as noteworthy and talked about but was far from an aberration within his professional circles. Certainly wasn't seen as like a reason to discipline him or look into it any further. What made Jimmy weird and the thing people did note about him at the time is that he doesn't, he's not into the social side of the music business. Most people who are like DJs or record engineers are like hanging out with other people in the business, right? They like like the culture around it and they're interested in like the creative aspect of it too. Like they like making music and they like, they're interested in how music gets made. Jimmy's not interested in any of that and he's not interested in like socializing with his colleagues. In fact, he has almost no relationship with other DJs, which is seen as kind of weird. As Mr. Holt told an interviewer, he was just a very strange person. You couldn't really have a conversation with him. I used to see him at top of the pops and I didn't talk to him unless I had to go to his dressing room. When I had to go to his dressing room the last time I was there, there weren't any young girls in there, but there were a lot of his mates that I thought were as weird as he was. There was definitely a clique in that dressing room. Now he's just saying the last time he visited, it wasn't a bunch of girls, it was his friends, his weird friends. What kind of clique do you think Jimmy Saville's hanging out with if it's not other DJs, right?

Speaker 1:
[07:26] I mean, the word is clique, first of all. Second of all.

Speaker 2:
[07:29] Okay, you can say it's a clique, but thank you. So my interpretation of the evidence I have is that Jimmy's issue, one of Jimmy's issues with his fellow DJ, he has a couple of issues with his fellow DJs. One is they're really reckless. They're not careful at all about the payola stuff. What does that mean? They're not like, you remember that speech he gave about being clever versus being tricky? I think he would say they were clever and he's tricky. And he didn't want to hang out with the clever guys because he knew the clever guys were going to get busted being clever. Whereas he doesn't want to get busted, so he's going to stay tricky. Now, the other side of that, what I think is also accurate and probably more worth mentioning is that most of those DJs aren't having sex with teenagers kind of, you know, it's not the whole point. It's like a bit, it gets a side part of what they're doing and their lives.

Speaker 1:
[08:22] They're not sexually assaulting children. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[08:25] Well, they are sometimes, but it's not their primary motivating factor. Jimmy's primary motivating factor is being able to sexually assault children.

Speaker 1:
[08:33] So who the fuck is in his clique?

Speaker 2:
[08:37] Great question. We know that one of his close friends, as early as 1966, was a member of the British Royal Family, and in fact, the person who introduces Jimmy to the British Royal Family, Lord Louis Mountbatten.

Speaker 4:
[08:50] Anybody, you guys ever heard of Mountbatten? Like the Lord, like the father figure to Prince Philip, like father figure to King Charles, like Earl of Burma.

Speaker 3:
[09:02] Yeah, that's his name. That's his real name.

Speaker 2:
[09:04] Oh yeah, the Lord Mountbatten. Yes, that was his name, was. We'll talk about that in a second. Fuck me. So, Mountbatten.

Speaker 4:
[09:10] Whoa. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Were they in like those weird men's lunch clubs together and shit? What's the vibe?

Speaker 2:
[09:19] We'll talk about what they might have been doing together because these are the Royals. You know, we don't have perfect information about what was going on behind the scenes.

Speaker 4:
[09:27] Sure.

Speaker 2:
[09:27] But Mountbatten introduces him to people like Prince Andrew, who's been in the news lately, and of course, Prince Charles. We'll discuss all that later. But let's talk about Lord Mountbatten for a moment, right? So he dies in 1979. He and Louis, again, he and Jimmy meet in 1966.

Speaker 4:
[09:43] Do you know who this guy is?

Speaker 1:
[09:45] Do you know how he dies and shit?

Speaker 4:
[09:46] Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[09:47] Yes. He gets blown up by the IRA on a boat in 1979 because Lord Mountbatten was rumored by the US FBI.

Speaker 1:
[09:54] There were children that died also on that boat, Robert.

Speaker 2:
[09:57] That part maybe not nailed it perfectly. You didn't note that there were children on the boat, Sophie. Lord Mountbatten was rumored to be a pedophile on a massive scale. Yeah. Which is not ideal. Yeah. You were saying something, Courtney?

Speaker 3:
[10:16] This is Philip's dad.

Speaker 1:
[10:18] No, father figure. No, no, no. Father figure. Not direct, but he does take the Mountbatten name, Philip.

Speaker 3:
[10:26] Yes, he does.

Speaker 2:
[10:28] I'm not an expert on the Royals. But it's Mountbatten who introduces Jimmy to the family, and Mountbatten is rumored by the FBI before his death to be a pedophile, and a major pedophile. The website Irish Central quotes from an interview with Anthony Daly, who worked as a rent boy for London's upper crust in the 70s. That means he was a young male prostitute for rich guys in London in the 70s. He recalled, Mountbatten had something of a fetish for uniforms. And some young men in military uniforms with high boots and beautiful boys in school uniforms. Great stuff. Now, I don't know that Mountbatten and Jimmy Saville hit it off because they love molesting boys together. I don't have evidence of that. But we know Saville loved to molest boys as well as girls, getting down to very young boys. These stories did not come out as early as the reports of Saville abusing and having sex with teenage girls, right? But they do come out later in life, and we have quite a bit of evidence of this. One of these accounts, which comes from the book In Plain Sight, is particularly horrifying because it comes from Guy Marsden, who was Jimmy Saville's nephew. He was one of Saville's older sister sons, and he runs away as a teenage boy after repeated trouble with the law. He's just one of these kids who gets in trouble, and he and three of his friends hitchhiked to London. I'm guessing they lived around Leeds or something, just based on where the family comes from. They spent their first days bumming around Houston Station, which they didn't know at that point in time was a common pickup point for men seeking other men or sometimes boys. After several hours waiting around, one man offered to put Marsden and his friends up at a flat nearby. They came over and these guys are chilling at this flat. You have to assume paying with their bodies for the privilege somewhat, but that's what's going on. After a couple of days of this, Jimmy Saville shows up. Now, Guy is terrified at first because he assumes his uncle has been sent there to bring him home and probably knock him around a bit. He thinks he's in trouble and instead Jimmy is surprised to see them and is basically like, hey, why don't you guys come with me? I'm going to quote now from In Plain Sight. Marsden claimed that Uncle Jimmy moved the runaways into a house. Over the ensuing weeks, he also took the boys to a number of parties. There were no women at these soirees, only men and children. Marsden maintained that he realized immediately what sort of parties they were. One of the houses he described as being particularly memorable. The big feature of it were, when you went in, the swimming pool, he explained, it were a room with a big swimming pool and it was so inviting. Everybody used it and were diving into it. It had lights in it. It was lit up. It was unbelievable. All you wanted to do was stay there forever. Marsden said he believes the house belonged to a famous pop impresario at the time. Don't know who that is, might have a couple theories. So what this is, is some of the better evidence that I found so far to suggest that Jimmy Saville was not just a guy who abused a lot of kids at scale, but was part of an or several organized networks of child abuse and exploitation.

Speaker 1:
[13:33] He's sex trafficking children.

Speaker 2:
[13:36] Yeah, and he's part of like a club of guys who were doing that. And because these kids-

Speaker 1:
[13:42] Sexually assaulting and sex trafficking children in a covert organized way is what you're saying.

Speaker 2:
[13:49] Yes. Yes. That is what this account suggests. And there's some other things that suggest this too. But yeah, this is not a thing where we have perfect- This has not been explored, for example, to the extent that the Epstein networks have been, in part because this stuff doesn't really start coming out until so much later. But what Marsden alleges is that these kids, some of these kids are being molested by the rich and famous men who attend the parties. Not actually like most of them necessarily, which is an interesting point, and I'm going to explain that in a bit. But Marsden claims that, quote, from time to time they, the boys, were led into rooms with adult males. Noises could be heard coming from inside. None of these kids were stressed. It was as though they were really, really enjoying what they were doing. That's the sad part, really. And that's not as strange as it sounds. These are all very poor kids. Many of them have been kicked out of their homes for being queer. These kids are living on the street. They are eating basically by prostituting themselves and have probably in general probably have been abused and raped and molested quite a few times. And this is still more of that. But the difference is now these boys are getting paid. They're spending all of their time. They're living when they're not participating in these parties at these various like mansions and palaces. So they're getting to live. These kids who have been on the street are getting to live that one percenter lifestyle at the price of being repeatedly raped. That's what's happening here. And it says a lot about the desperation of their lives that a lot of these kids at the time are like, okay, this is a worthwhile trade in for me, right? Now after some time at any one location, they would be put in a car and taken to a new location. Some parties would go on for days and would involve multiple different venues. Now, per Marsden's account, a lot of, if not most of the boys aren't being molested and that's for a reason. The kids who attend these parties range in ages up to their late teens, so anywhere from six to ten years old. And Marsden says most of the kids who were taken into rooms to be abused by adults were six to ten years old, right? Oh no. The older teens aren't being as often molested according to Marsden's account. And he says he was never abused himself. Maybe he's lying about that, but he provides a pretty decent explanation as to why that would be. As he posited, quote, someone must have had an idea that we would be a good intermediary for these kids. It might have stressed them if they were only adult men. So you've got the older teens there, so the younger boys don't think this is weird and don't get as scared. And so they can kind of be like, just go do it. It'll be fine, you know? Because the older teen boys are getting something out of this too. That's kind of what's happening here.

Speaker 1:
[16:36] Wait, so-

Speaker 3:
[16:36] That was my job on the Girls Gone Wild Tour, was just to be the girl so the other girls felt comfortable on the bus, sadly.

Speaker 1:
[16:44] Wait, Robert, so you're saying- Yeah, so- So what are the ages of these boys? Their ages anywhere from what to what?

Speaker 2:
[16:51] The kids being molested, he says, are generally 6 to 10. Marsden, I think, was more like 15 or 16, and the older teen boys are anywhere from 11 or 12 to 16, 17 years old probably would be, 17 would be probably the oldest.

Speaker 1:
[17:06] So all of these boys are being sexually abused even if they aren't aware that they're being sexually abused because they're being taken advantage of by adults.

Speaker 2:
[17:15] They're all being abused. They're not all being physically sexually abused, according to Marsden. Like the older boys are there, like it's abusive to put a 16 year old in a situation where they're like encouraging an eight year old to go get molested in order to have a roof over their head. That's a fundamentally abusive thing, but they're not necessarily being physically molested because their purpose is to be there to normalize the situation for the kids who are the real targets. That's what Marsden describes and that makes sense to me. As you said Courtney, I don't doubt this account.

Speaker 1:
[17:50] Understood. It makes sense.

Speaker 2:
[17:52] So again, his account is not that Savile is like the organizer or the main guy behind it, he's just a member of this network of very elite, pedophiles, right? These guys are very wealthy, they have massive properties, they're probably often doing this like miles away from civilization. A lot of this is happening on these big English estates where you're kind of a law into yourself. You're not going to go run to the cops out there, you're in the middle of pasture land and shit, right? There's like forests and stuff. Some of these properties have thousands of acres to them. So, and we see in this, in the way this is set up, an echo of how Savile abused the young teenage girls who were like fans of pop music who came to him. Most of the girls who showed up outside of his office or went to shows and hung out with him before and after shows are not being molested by him. He doesn't quote unquote pick most of them. And that fact helps to hide what's going on and make it seem believable that this is normal and acceptable because most of the girls you talk to be like, oh yeah, Jimmy's a little weird, but it's fine. Because they're not all the target, right? Does that all make sense in terms of like how he's structuring this abuse?

Speaker 3:
[19:07] Unfortunately. It's very sophisticated pedophilia.

Speaker 1:
[19:11] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[19:11] To get away with it as long as he was, you have to be good at it. You know, he's also lucky. He benefits from it for a lot of reasons, but like he there's he's set this up for this way for a reason because it works.

Speaker 1:
[19:23] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[19:24] So Marsden says he never saw his uncle abuse any boys at these parties. I don't know. Maybe he didn't. Maybe he was primarily at the parties to get access or to get favors for other things. Maybe he's just not into it in that venue. We know he abused young boys. I think the youngest I've heard of was five. So we know he abused young boys, but he may not have done it at these particular parties for some reason. Maybe this is just something he saw as useful to like facilitate the moving of his career. Right. So again, we know he bonds with Lord Mountbatten in 66. We know in 66 he's doing stuff like this. We know Lord Mountbatten is probably doing stuff like this. My guess is that this is how they become friends. Right. And we do know there's also versions of these parties that are being held with teenage girls and a different set of rich and famous creeps. Right. Where there's no boys, but there's rich and famous men and then there's like 14 to 17-year-old girls. Right. We also know that version and probably younger. We know that version. There's parties like that going on too. I see. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, none of this weirdness, none of the fact that this going on is enough to get the BBC to shy away from Jimmy. There's rumors around him. People talk about him liking him young. He makes some comments about that.

Speaker 1:
[20:40] The fuck is wrong with the BBC?

Speaker 2:
[20:42] Doesn't give a shit. Oh, they don't give a fuck about any of this. In fact, they're going to be a major engine of abuse for Jimmy Saville. He's not just a BBC employee who abuses people. He utilizes the resources of the BBC to aid him in abusing people. That's a major part of this story. At the start of the 1970s, they give him a radio one show, Saville's Travels, which also turns into a BBC TV show. I think it's called Saville's Yorkshire Travels. I think there's a couple. I don't understand. The BBC is weird. A lot of these shows aren't really archived in full anymore. But he does both. It's a radio show. It becomes a TV thing.

Speaker 1:
[21:22] Watch this really odd guy go to places?

Speaker 2:
[21:25] He lives in a caravan, which is like an RV or trailer basically, and he's traveling around the country talking to people. It's like his Anthony Bourdain type deal. That's what people are getting out of it.

Speaker 1:
[21:37] I don't like that person.

Speaker 2:
[21:39] Yeah, it's not great. But that's the kind of the appeal, is he's like this regular guy who's showing you the regular guy's view of these different places in Yorkshire or wherever.

Speaker 1:
[21:50] Whatever.

Speaker 2:
[21:52] So that starts at the beginning of the 70s. Now, by the start of that decade, Savile had already established a strong reputation as a charitable fundraiser. As we've said, anytime he's doing events, he's often having his salary donated to charity, he starts raising money. There's this thing people are doing sometimes, where you'll push someone in a wheelchair for a distance, and people will pay. It's like these different run for cancer type charities. He's doing some stuff like that. In 1971, he participates in his most ambitious charity drive yet, an 876-mile walk. He does this with his Savile's Travels motor pool, traveling behind him, so he's sleeping in the caravan at night, and he's walking all day, and people are joining him at varying points on the march. This is a 31-day event, and he's never really alone during this. He's constantly being followed by people, sometimes people who are in wheelchairs show up and he'll push them for a while. Hundreds of folks march alongside them. Jimmy wrote in his column the next week, I've wheeled cripples along in wheelchairs who didn't want to be left out. I've pushed prams with assorted babies in. I've slowed down to a shuffle with a 90-year-old lady gripping my arm and sped up fleet-footed downhill with an entire youth club tailing behind like Haley's Comet. And this actually ends with one of his first direct things with the fucking British Royal Marines, which we're not gonna talk about enough in these episodes, but the Royal Marines show up to march with him at the end of his march. He does a lot of events with them. He becomes an honorary member of the Royal. He loves the fucking Royal Marines. So that's a proud part of the history of the Royal Marines, is Jimmy Saville got to be a member. Great stuff. Wow.

Speaker 3:
[23:39] Speaks well of the organization.

Speaker 2:
[23:42] Yeah, yeah. He does a lot of marathons, he does a lot of marches for charity, does a lot of wheelchair pushes, all of these to raise money for good causes. Saville continued to make outrageous demands when he would agree to participate in these events as he had earlier in his career. During a fundraiser where he pushed a patient in a wheelchair from Rochester to Bromley, Saville admitted to press that he had given this demand to the event organizer. Find me a blonde teenage bird who lives in a house with a drive so I can park outside so she can wake me up in the morning with tea at eight o'clock. The organizer agreed. This is just in the press. Oh, Jimmy, he loves those blonde teenage birds, but he's doing good. He's raising so much money for good causes. Why be angry at him for being just a little bit odd, right? He couldn't possibly be hurting anybody. You know who else? Oh, sorry.

Speaker 1:
[24:33] Because he's a pedophile. Sorry.

Speaker 2:
[24:36] Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[24:37] I ruined the transition.

Speaker 2:
[24:40] You know who's not a, that's not a good ad pivot anyway. Let's forget I tried to do that. Here's some ads.

Speaker 1:
[24:46] I am.

Speaker 2:
[24:53] We're back. So after committing, or committing, completing his nearly 900-mile march, Saville was awarded the Order of the British Empire, or OBE, which is just a step under knighthood. Now, this entitled him to sign his name, Jimmy Saville, OBE, which he does on his subsequent autobiography that comes out not long after this. In interviews at the time, he is vocally thrilled by the recognition, which elevated him to a level of social respectability other DJs simply lacked. Here's a photo of him after his investiture at Buckingham Palace. There's Jimmy Saville, OBE. He's got like a normal suit on for once in his fucking life and he's got this big medal they give you when you get the OBE. He's smoking one of his cigars, he's got a fucking pinky ring on and a top hat and his fucking peroxide white hair. Just-

Speaker 1:
[25:41] That hair.

Speaker 2:
[25:42] Like a man who's got no business around teenage girls.

Speaker 1:
[25:45] Making the pinky ring look bad and shit, like it's fucked up.

Speaker 2:
[25:48] Oh yeah, this is a dark part of pinky ring history. Pinky ring history and Royal Marine Corps history, both not, low points of both.

Speaker 1:
[25:59] Gross.

Speaker 2:
[26:00] So Saville's Yorkshire Travels, his TV show version of this radio thing, hits the air in 1972. Just before that happened, per the book In Plain Sight, the body of 15-year-old Claire McAlpin was discovered by her mother surrounded by empty pill bottles and a red diary. In her diary, she had obviously committed suicide, and in her diary, she repeatedly mentioned the sex that she had had with top BBC disc jockeys that she had met while dancing for Top of the Pops. And again, she's 15. This is underage. This is statutory rape. That's what she's writing about. Multiple disc jockeys at Top of the Pops, at the BBC's hit show, Top of the Pops, rape this girl. Savile is believed to be one of them. Like we know he was one of them, right? But he mostly stays out of the fallout around this story because by this point, he's expanded beyond just being a DJ. So, the actual like scandal around Claire McAlpin's suicide and around all of this, and it's not just her, there's a couple of other girls that they find out were being trafficked basically to BBC disc jockeys as part of like a Paola scam. And that's the primary thing that blows up into a scandal, is that a lot of these like DJs who would like get brought in from the pirate world are accepting fucking sex with teenage girls as a form of Paola for playing songs, right? That's primarily the big scandal that happens here. And that's obviously not what people should have been most angry about. It's not the only thing that they're angry about. Some of these guys get in trouble, but not Jimmy, right? He's never a focus of these investigations. Because by the time this all blows up, he's kind of moved on, right? Like he's still doing Top of the Pops from time to time, and he's still a DJ, but he's like increasingly starting to be like a TV and radio star for other reasons. And so he's just not at the center of this stuff. But a good friend of his was.

Speaker 3:
[27:56] He was like one of the main Top of the Pops guys, wasn't he? Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[28:00] Yeah. Yeah. But he's not socially a part of that circle. So most of the accounts they're getting and most of what blows up is involving other guys. And Saville, we just kind of know he was involved, but he's not like at the center of this. And he may not have actually taken Paola. He may have just been molesting teenage girls like we know he was doing a lot. He may not have actually taken. We don't know. Like, but he doesn't get in trouble for this, whereas other guys do. And one of these other guys is a member of his clique, Harry Goodwin, who was a photographer for Top of the Pops. Undercover journalists recorded Goodwin bragging about taking pornographic photos of, I mean, and these are, I think most of these are CSAM, right? I guess it depends on the age of consent, but he's taking, he's making child pornography with pictures of underaged girls, I assume some, not all underage, but most of them probably are. And he's also making movies, quote unquote, movies of the statutory rape occurring here.

Speaker 1:
[28:58] So he's disgusting.

Speaker 2:
[28:59] And he's playing these, he's selling these movies to pop stars.

Speaker 1:
[29:03] Not only is he disgusting, he's despicably gross. And good friend of Jimmy Saville.

Speaker 2:
[29:10] Yeah, he must be by now. That's great. Like, yeah. And he gets in some trouble for this. So, you know, again, close friend of Jimmy's here, making child pornography or child sex abuse content of varying sorts. So a few people's careers end over this, but again, not Jimmy's, because he's moved on. Saville's travels keeps him on the road and makes his fame much broader than just pop music at a time when he desperately needed that. Of course, this doesn't stop him from committing sex crimes. There were almost immediately complaints along his route of travel that Saville, now well into his 30s, was molesting kids. Radio One controller Douglas Mugridge asked the station press officer, Rodney Collins, to make sure to check and see if any local newspapers in areas Saville had gone through planned to print any rumors about his behavior. As Mr. Collins later told the BBC, there were allegations that there were girls, underage girls involved maybe in the caravan. However, the newspapers that Mr. Collins talked to insisted they were unwilling to print allegations against Saville whether they were true or not because of all of his charity work and because he was, quote, perceived as a very popular man. So this guy is for the BBC looking into like, hey, are you going to print any rumors to see if we need to like bribe these guys or threaten them to stop it?

Speaker 3:
[30:27] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[30:27] And the papers are like, we weren't going to publish it even if it is true that he's molesting girls, you know, because of all of his charity work.

Speaker 3:
[30:34] He's a good guy and a bad guy.

Speaker 2:
[30:35] He's doing so much good stuff. You know? Yeah. Is it so bad that he's molesting children while he does this charity work? Right? Yes, it is. Someone's got to raise money for charity, you know? Why not let it be a pedophile? A lot of reasons. Yeah. So again, he's like, part of what he's doing on camera for these shows is like visiting mom and pop restaurants and cafes and clubs. He's talking to regular people in a way that no suited highly educated traditional reporter could have done. There's a number of reasons why Jimmy is so popular. One is that, again, there had been a BBC voice, there had been a voice that radio announcers, when they start doing television, TV announcers are supposed to have to be proper and to do the job the right way. This is a system that is primarily set up for people with specific educations from specific institutions, and they talk in specific ways. Jimmy is a former coal miner from the North. Voices, the accent of the Northern part of the country, is seen as more authentic in the UK, kind of in the same way as a Southern twang, is seen as both evidence that you might be a redneck and that you're an honest salt of the earth, real American. He's got an accent that works for him in that way, that makes him seem like a trustworthy working class dude. People are just kind of starved for that in Great Britain at this time. There's not a lot of it in their popular media. This is part of why he's so rabidly popular, is a lot of folks in the poorer Northern parts of the country see themselves represented in Jimmy. The fact that he kind of dresses like a weirdo is like, yeah, but he's our weirdo. Why should he have to wear a monkey suit like all these fancy guys? It helps to camouflage him. The popularity is part of the camouflage.

Speaker 3:
[32:27] He's got like five different covers. He's a genius.

Speaker 2:
[32:32] He's good at it, unfortunately. Most of the initial run of Saville's travels took place in Yorkshire. In a BBC article in May of 2013, less than a year after Saville's crimes were made public, West Yorkshire police noted that they had recorded evidence of at least 79 offenses by Saville against 71 separate people. Quote, per the BBC, 35 attacks by the broadcaster in hospitals involved complainants ranging from aged 5 to 45. The West Yorkshire police figures show Saville's targeted 18 victims at private addresses and leads at Bradford. Now again, a year after he dies and these stories come out, within the first year, West Yorkshire police have recorded 79 offenses against 71 people. That's not how many victims he had. That's what they record decades after the fact. When it's finally okay to talk about, he's abusing hundreds of people in West Yorkshire alone. We'll talk about, we have no idea his total number of victims, but we'll talk about what we know about it. I just need you to understand this is like an every night thing for him. He is abusing people with tremendous startling regularity. In 1972, yes, sorry, I like.

Speaker 3:
[33:42] No, five is so young. You said the range was five to 45.

Speaker 2:
[33:46] Five to 45 in that area a year after the investigation starts. Yes.

Speaker 3:
[33:53] That's nauseating. I didn't even think he went that old. But the young end of his rage is truly frightening.

Speaker 2:
[33:58] His old is there in like the 80s. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[34:00] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[34:00] The young end is real bleak. In 1972, Jimmy had a radio documentary made about him, The World of Jimmy Saville, OBE. It attempted to investigate who Jimmy was as a person, something that had already proven nearly impossible for interviewers to nail down. Jimmy himself claimed to have nothing to hide from people. Quote, they asked me, are you queer? I say no, but if I felt that way, I would have been. They asked me, why don't you get married? I say, well, I've never felt the need. I've got nothing to hide from people. And when you come to think about it, I lead a dead simple sort of life, which is okay and definitely enough for me. Simple. Now, the fact that Jimmy has been awarded the Order of the British Empire, as I noted earlier, it makes it possible for him to enter these higher echelons of British society, but it doesn't guarantee that he'll make friends and find influence there. To do that, he's gonna need to put in work. And initially, it seems, Jimmy tries to hedge his bets by getting in good with politicians on both sides of the aisle. In an article for the Tribune, Farrell Kinney writes, During the politically febrile's 1970s, Saville appears to have hedged his bets, filming a 1974 party political broadcast with liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe, liberal politician Cyril Smith, who would be unmasked as a pedophile in the aftermath of Saville's death, and enjoyed a light entertainment run on Saville's Clunk Clink program. So, he does talk to in the 70s, he's hanging out and kind of boosting liberal politicians, and he will later boost conservative politicians. But one of the liberal politicians he boosts, Cyril Smith, and has on his show a bunch of times, is unmasked as a pedophile too. That's going to be a habit for like friends of Jimmy's. We've talked to two, three so far. Lord Mountbatten, the dude, the photographer on the show, and this fucking politician. So that's three pedophiles had a Jimmy Saville friends already. The clique. Yeah, the clique. And also, he knows he and Prince Andrew are buddies. We know what Prince Andrew is getting up to, no longer Prince Andrew. In 1975, Jimmy Saville did something rare, which is that he officially becomes a bigger TV star than he had ever been like a radio star. This is the moment where he fully crosses over. And from this point on, he's not going to be primarily known as a DJ. He's going to be primarily known for his work on BBC TV. The BBC gives him like a dedicated show called Jim will fix it, which airs for the first time in 1975, in a 74, 75, and a prime time spot on Saturdays, right? This is like a major show. It's running at basically the best time you can. And the premise is very simple. Children from around the world write Jimmy Savile letters outlining their wildest dreams. And Jim will fix it so the dream comes true. Writing for CNN, Dave Gilbert notes that at its height, this program, which again runs until 19 is yeah, not runs from 1975 to 1994, was receiving quote 20,000 requests a week. Famous fixes included an encounter with boxing legend Mohammed Ali and the Boy Scouts who wanted to eat their packed lunches on a roller coaster, resulting in a predictable mess. So, that's the kind of show it is. You can see why this is such a hit. You know, you've got, first off, you've got these kids and the way the show works is like Jimmy gets letters. Right. It's like a make a wish. And he gets to read these cute letters that these kids write with their own drawings. He gets to laugh at like kids being cute or spelling stuff bad. Then you get to have the kid on, talk about their dream, and then you get to like film you making it happen for them. And then he gives them like these medallions that say, Jim fixed it for me, which for a while were quite valuable. So the series is a massive success, and it makes Jimmy more dangerous than ever, because now he's gone from, this is like a DJ who has access to teenage girls because he has access to pop stars. But like that has a time limit on it. For one thing, Jimmy's pushing the middle age now, so it's getting harder and harder for him to still seem like Britain's oldest teenager. Now he has a reason to be around kids and be trusted by them because he's Santa. He's like British Santa.

Speaker 3:
[38:15] It's crazy that they greenlit this show.

Speaker 2:
[38:19] We need a guy to be Santa Claus. Let's have a giant pedophile. Yeah, the guy who molests all the kids. Bring him on. He'll be a great Santa. Yeah. So the dreams he made come true ran the gamut. In one early episode, a child wished to fly like Peter Pan and sword fight Captain Hook and Jim's crew used like stage rigging and theater equipment to make that happen in the same way you would for like a Broadway production. Another kid wanted to take his school teacher out for an expensive dinner at a fine dining establishment. And so they put him up at this crazy restaurant with these really elaborate meals and they film all of it. You can see why generations of Britons ate this show up, right? That said, as innocent as this sounds and should have been, the content wasn't always innocent. And in fact, Jimmy can't help himself from like making references to his current and future sex crimes. There's bits of that littered all throughout episodes of Jim Will Fix It. Sophie's going to show you all one brief clip.

Speaker 1:
[39:17] Ever since I can remember, I've always wanted to be a singer, but shyness has always got in the way. Please could you fix it for me to sing? Your sincerely, Debbie Coleman.

Speaker 5:
[39:27] Here's somebody to help her who also has a problem with being shy, Gary Glitter.

Speaker 2:
[39:33] So, Gary Glitter, that doesn't seem like it was too bad, right? She's a kid who wants to be a pop star and he's like, okay, I'll fix you up with my friend, Gary Glitter. And Gary was indeed. Have you heard of Gary Courtney? Do you know anything about this guy?

Speaker 3:
[39:49] No, no. Also that kid was 20, so.

Speaker 2:
[39:52] Yeah, yeah. Kid was 20, thankfully. Gary Glitter was a major pop star in the 70s and 80s and was a close friend of Jimmy Savile. He was brought down in 1999 after being convicted of downloading child sex abuse material. He was eventually charged with child sex abuse and attempted rape of a child, among other offenses. Glitter and Saville partied regularly throughout the 70s and 80s and shared a taste for little girls. And in Glitter's case, the youngest of his victims were 10 and 11. So great that he's, he's hooking them up with people on the show. Good to have Gary Glitter on Jim will fix it. At least that one person seems to have been an adult. Thank fucking God. They often weren't. Now, the fact that Jimmy wasn't singled out when Glitter got busted is extraordinary, especially because Jim made repeated, as I was kind of insinuating earlier, he made repeated open comments about his attraction to girls as young as 11 in episodes of his hit TV, BBC, C Show, Top of the Pops and in Jim will fix it. Here's just one example. And this is from the part of Jim will fix it where he hands out his famous Jim fixed for me medallions to winners of the show. So we're going to look at that clip right now.

Speaker 5:
[41:04] You've got these young ladies there, Jim will fix it. But just because, wait a minute, how old are you? 12. Hello, Judge. And how old are you? You're not married yet. Oh, that's all right.

Speaker 2:
[41:17] It's fine. It's fine. Everybody laughs. Right.

Speaker 3:
[41:20] What did he say to her?

Speaker 2:
[41:22] He said he asked her age and she said 12. And he said, hello, Judge.

Speaker 3:
[41:26] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[41:27] He's joking that he's going to molest her and get in trouble. Oh, God. And then the other girl says 11 and he says, are you married? And everyone laughs.

Speaker 3:
[41:37] I didn't catch the are you married?

Speaker 2:
[41:38] He's joking with these young ladies. Yeah. I wish this isn't-

Speaker 1:
[41:42] Again, and I think this is part of his schtick.

Speaker 4:
[41:45] I was so thrown off by how odd he looked at him leading over and his like, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did.

Speaker 1:
[41:51] I barely even, Courtney missed it too. I was like, what did this strange man say?

Speaker 2:
[41:57] But literally what he's doing is first making a joke about molesting a 12 year old and getting in trouble in court and then making a joke about wanting to marry an 11 year old. Those are the jokes. He's not hiding this or it is, he's hiding in very plain sight. And that, that hello judgment is a constant. That's one of Jim's like catch phrases, right? Is he'll reference his attraction to a young girl and go, hello judge, you know, he makes constant jokes. He'll also joke about having an upcoming court date, like I've had a great life and I go to my trials next Thursday or something like that was like a really common reference from him. So there's a lot of bits about him being in trouble with the law for his attraction to underage girls that he performs on air with regularity. Once he dies and all of the stories of the actual abuse start flooding out into the open, people begin looking through old episodes of Jim Will Fix It, and they find a lot of evidence of the pedophile hiding in plain sight. For an example of that, here's one find from a user on the website beta.com. This guy's actually posting video from an old episode. He's filming it on his laptop. Again, a lot of these original episodes are harder to find now. So Sophie's going to play you a clip that starts with Jimmy reading this kid's letter.

Speaker 5:
[43:12] Well, think about that one as well. From North Chingford, London, Eastport. Dear Jimmy, fix it. As it happens, here. As it happens, I think you have fixed enough people now and I think it is about time you were fixed. So will you fix it for me to come along to the BBC theatre and fix you? Lots of love, Barclay Quartermain. PS please do not tickle me. Here, Barclay. I am presuming with Barclay Quartermain that you happen to be a young man and I am not in the habit of tickling young men, but if you have a sister, who knows?

Speaker 3:
[43:47] However, we don't think we have as well.

Speaker 2:
[43:49] Again, again, it's just, he's just everyone laughs at this joke about this weird guy tickling a female child against your will. It's just funny. It's a bit. Nobody takes it seriously. It's fucking amazing how open this is. Like the man, if the show was called Jim, a pedophile, it could hardly be more open about this guy's proclivities. Yeah. And yet, like paradoxically, the jokes act as a sort of camouflage as does, as you've said, the way he's dressed and the way he presents himself. It all helps him. It's very effective at letting him hide and play in sight. And in some ways, it's giving him like the fact that he brings the audience in makes them complicit. That's part of the tactic. They're giving him permission to act the way he does. If everyone's laughing, can what he said really be so bad? Right?

Speaker 3:
[44:41] But it's crazy that when Gary Glitter goes down or whatever, they're not like, wait a minute, what about his best friend?

Speaker 2:
[44:48] But that happens so often that some guy will go down for pedophilia, who is known as a close friend of Jimmy Saville, and Jimmy doesn't get in trouble. It happens a bunch. Good stuff. I'm happy. How are you doing?

Speaker 3:
[45:04] I'm okay.

Speaker 2:
[45:06] We have a second ad break yet, Sophie?

Speaker 1:
[45:08] We have not.

Speaker 2:
[45:09] We have not. Let's do that the fuck now. Let's take a second and then come back. And we're back. So, Jim'll Fix It was such an outrageous hit that it launched Jimmy's career as a superstar, or at least a UK superstar. He's never, people will notice, he never really crosses over in the way that some big BBC figures do, but he's very popular within the UK. As Dave Gilbert summarizes, generations of Britons also remember him for a string of public information films, including a road safety promotion that encouraged motorists to use their seat belts, a campaign that started before wearing belts became compulsory in the UK. Saville's closing catchphrase, clunk click every trip was instantly memorable and caught on with the watching public. He also promoted the National Rail Network in a campaign dubbed, This is the Age of the Train. And I read that quote because it's probably impossible for me to get across to an audience of mostly Americans and people from elsewhere in the world besides the UK, what Jimmy Saville meant to Britons of a certain age. The best I can do is to say that for most young British kids from like the late 60s and 70s, well, really like the 70s through the early 90s, Jimmy Saville was the BBC. He has too many TV shows to keep track of. He's, and whenever there's like a big, we're doing a big fundraiser, we're doing a big New Year's or whatever thing, we're doing a big holiday thing. Jimmy is the guy who gets picked a lot of times to like headline or MC, because he's the face of the BBC, right? For like 20 years.

Speaker 3:
[46:48] He's kind of like Regis Philbin or something.

Speaker 2:
[46:51] Yeah, yeah. But even like, I was aware of Regis as a kid, but we have so much choice and option for channels and the UK didn't as much in this period of time. So the fact that he is the face of the BBC, like he is, to a lot of kids, they would have just seen Jimmy as like woven into the foundation of the earth. Almost in like, if you can, if you were a 90s kid, a kid of like the late 80s through the 90s, the way that Robin Williams was to our generation, where it was just like, this is just like, and Robin never did anything wrong that I'm aware of, but other than steal some jokes, but I think that's forgivable. He was pretty coked out. But that level of like this guy is woven into the firmament as like a part of your childhood, right?

Speaker 3:
[47:37] Yeah, and like an uncle kind of.

Speaker 2:
[47:39] Like an uncle, like the country's weird uncle, right? In 1971, Jimmy also started volunteering at the National Spinal Injury Center at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital. He not only raised money to renovate the hospital's facilities, which had fallen into tremendous disrepair, but he started doing regular shifts as an orderly, helping new patients to their rooms and doing rounds, just as an employee would have done. As we'll talk about, this goes on for decades. From the start of Jimmy's time volunteering at Stoke Mandeville, there were rumors that Jimmy, per one acquaintance at the BBC, abused his position by having sexual relations with patients. But this source insists, he never heard anything about illegal activity with underaged girls. So this guy is saying, basically, everyone knew that Jimmy's sleeping with patients at the hospital that he's helping to fund and is working at as an orderly, but we never thought that they were underage. Jimmy's like, that's not okay, if they're all 40.

Speaker 3:
[48:38] It's hard for them to get away. They have spinal injuries.

Speaker 2:
[48:41] That's literally why he does it. Yes. That is the tactic here, unfortunately. That's dark. Now, however prevalent these rumors are, they weren't enough to offset the funds that he's raising for Stoke Mandeville, particularly at a time by the late 70s, Great Britain's social safety net is starting to look like it's running on fumes.

Speaker 1:
[49:02] It's pretty gross that the cost of fund raising is just mass sexual abuse.

Speaker 2:
[49:10] Got to let this pedophile abuse people. Otherwise, we won't have money to keep the spine hospital in business.

Speaker 1:
[49:15] Yeah. They really value people's lives and wellness and just it's despicably gross.

Speaker 2:
[49:21] Sophie, you're going to get so much angrier. You're going to get so much angrier.

Speaker 1:
[49:27] I got really angry after part two. I was like, I'm going to try to pace myself this.

Speaker 2:
[49:33] For an idea of how bad this is, we're not in the practice of doing trigger warnings on this show. I cried during the research to these episodes. That hasn't happened for years. I am dead inside and I was fucking full on weeping during some of the research for this because what is just the scale of it and the degree to which his victims had no possible method of fighting back against him. He's going after people who are the most desperate people he can find in his society. Anyway, let's talk about Margaret Thatcher. In 1977, Saville first hosted member of parliament Margaret Thatcher on a visit to Stoke Mandeville. The two became fast friends. Thatcher liked Jimmy because his talent for raising money to fund public programs and facilities meant that the government didn't need to use as much tax money to support the NHS. Jimmy, on the other hand, seems to have instinctively seen that Thatcher was going places, and he wanted her to owe him. His opportunity to do this would come as a result of the harsh austerity policies Thatcher sought to press upon the country if she became prime minister. Her vision of an ideal Britain didn't include public funding for health care, but did include a worship of wealthy and powerful people and the charity they might be convinced to provide, rather than compulsory taxes. By 1978, Savile was one of the most prominent charitable fundraisers in the country. If you just tax rich people to fund your social safety, you have to fund your hospitals, then none of them are particularly like gain a position of necessarily power over the organizations they're funding. If you're just paying taxes and that keeps the hospitals going, you can't just walk into the hospital and we're like, well, my taxes pay for this hospital, people are going to be like, fuck you. But if you walk in and say like, no, no, no, like you guys were going to have to close down and I raise $10 million to keep you in business, they're going to let you do whatever you want. Right? That's why a lot of rich people love charity. Right? That's why, again, if you watch the Bone Temple, the bad guys in the Bone Temple are based on Jimmy Saville. They're traveling around doing what they call charity. This is like that whole movie is a critique of Thatcherism and Saville's role in it. Anyway, I love that film.

Speaker 3:
[51:47] You're talking me into a wealth tax right now. That's what you're doing.

Speaker 2:
[51:51] Oh, yeah. However, has Farrell Kinney noted in his piece for the UK Tribune, Saville, quote, preferred small local charities over large ones with organized structures. He does a lot of charity, but again, it's mostly with these smaller orgs for a reason, because then they're totally dependent on him, and there's not going to be as much red tape, there's not going to be as much people looking into what he's actually doing. In Kenny's article, he links to a Super 8 video from 1978 of Jimmy hosting a charity event for blind children. In the video, Saville receives a flower from a young blind girl and then a drawing of himself. And I'm just gonna have Sophie show you the clip and we'll describe what's happening for those of you who, like he's out in front of this facility, he's got on like this shirt that looks like a fucking, what's that, it's like-

Speaker 3:
[52:43] A game of twister.

Speaker 2:
[52:45] Yeah, it looks like a game of twister. I don't know how else to describe it. And yeah, there's this little blind girl, looks like she's maybe 12, being like led up to him, so she can give him this drawing of himself.

Speaker 5:
[52:56] Yes, now say what you've got to say, my queen. Thank you for coming. And she's so pretty as well.

Speaker 1:
[53:15] Did he say, and she's so pretty as well?

Speaker 2:
[53:17] And she's so pretty as well. Goodness gracious. And again, you know, not necessarily upsetting unless you know what's actually going on.

Speaker 1:
[53:25] So, Icky, if he wasn't such a fucking pedophile. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[53:30] Yeah, exactly. Now, at the time, the more noteworthy thing about that performance was that he takes out this photo that's been drawn of him and he jokes about it being a photo fit of the Yorkshire Ripper, right? He jokes that this drawing of him is like actually a picture of the Yorkshire Ripper who's a serial killer that was active at the time. This is a guy who is ultimately murders more than a dozen women by the time he's caught and is actively killing people and the police are actively looking for him in 1978. The real Yorkshire Ripper was named Peter Sutcliffe and again he was ultimately caught and convicted of his crimes I think in 1981, but that's like three years away. What's interesting about this to me just as a side bit is that at the time Jimmy jokes about looking like the Yorkshire Ripper, he was an active suspect in the murders.

Speaker 3:
[54:19] Oh my God.

Speaker 2:
[54:21] Quote from the Telegram, Saville was brought in for questioning after members of the public contacted the police naming him as a possible subject. After a body was found close to Saville's Roundhay Park home, a Harley Street dentist was ordered to make a cast of Saville's teeth. Now again, Jimmy wasn't the Ripper, but it says a lot about what he was doing and how many people did try to stop him, that so many members of the public reported him as being the likely culprit, that the police force, which was largely staffed by his friends, had to investigate. That's how many people know there's something going on, that they're like, well, maybe he's this serial killer, right? There's a lot, people do know what's happening, and they do try to do something.

Speaker 3:
[55:05] He's a serial something, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[55:09] Wild that he's joking about it. Now that same year, 1978, Jimmy wrote another book, God'll Fix It, about his Catholic faith. It included these chilling lines. In my early years, I can tell you I did a lot of things that need a bit of forgiveness. I was in a business that was fraught with temptations. Temptations of the flesh are all about. So in my early days, I was a great, and he puts this in quotations, abuser of things and bodies and people.

Speaker 3:
[55:37] Okay.

Speaker 2:
[55:38] Couldn't be more clear. Interesting that abuser is in quotation marks. I don't know what entirely he meant by that, but you know, he's not-

Speaker 3:
[55:47] That is interesting.

Speaker 2:
[55:47] Heighten it. Yeah. Now the fact that he's so public about aspects of his personal life, as we'll call it, has consequences for him. Other people do read what he's writing and read these interviews. Well, he'll talk about his sex life and they get upset. Even if they don't always mark him out as a potential pedophile, they don't always realize what's happening, but they know that something is wrong. And there's also people in the pop industry who know more. Again, maybe not everything, but they know enough, they know enough other people that they know something about what's going on. One of these people is Sex Pistols frontman John Leighton, who said in an interview in 1978, I'd like to kill Jimmy Saville. I think he's a hypocrite. I bet he's into all kinds of seediness that we all know about, but are not allowed to talk about. I know some rumors. He then added, I bet none of this will be allowed out. And it wasn't. The clip did not air with the rest of the interview.

Speaker 3:
[56:45] Good for that guy.

Speaker 2:
[56:46] Yeah, I said something.

Speaker 1:
[56:48] Yeah. I mean, that guy had a lot of power and he didn't do that much with it, but better than every other adult in this entire thing.

Speaker 2:
[57:02] Yeah. As we'll talk about, libel laws in the UK are a big part of why stuff like that gets cut out is Jimmy's litigious and people are scared of being sued by him. Prior to the 1979 elections, Saville hosted a special episode of Jim Will Fix It at the Houses of Parliament, where Margaret Thatcher asked him to fix it for her to become prime minister. She was elected on May 3rd of that year. Right after she took office, Thatcher had her staff at Downing Street called Jimmy. Quote, her secretary rang to say she was rather upset because I hadn't been round to give her a badge. To give her her badge, I reported to Downing Street a few days later and presented it. Oh, good. Thank you, Jimmy, for Margaret Thatcher, for fixing it so she got to be prime minister.

Speaker 1:
[57:47] I really hate when a woman gets it so wrong.

Speaker 2:
[57:51] Oh, jeez, we have barely scratched the surface of how bad this is. Now, not long after this, Jim was carrying out Jim's Daily Dozen, a series of sponsored runs through various British towns, meant his fundraisers for different causes. He asked Margaret which charity she wanted a chunk of the money he was raising to go to, and he ultimately presented her with a check for 10,000 pounds for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. The NSPCC. That's good. Thatcher cares deeply about the kids, obviously. Obviously. Now, Jimmy and Margaret would remain close friends for the remainder of Thatcher's PM ship and life. Jimmy's skill with charity was extremely convenient given Thatcher's conservative austerity politics. By the start of Thatcher's term, the National Spinal Injury Center at Stoke-Mandville was in such bad shape that five ceilings of housing units had collapsed during a winter storm. The NHS needed additional funding for repairs and that was very much not in the budget or in the spirit of Thatcherism. However, Stoke-Mandville is a major facility in the UK. It's like a historically important hospital and allowing the facility to collapse would make for terrible PR because you want to cut the budget. You want to cut quote unquote entitlements, but you don't want people to realize that you're taking away their health care so that rich people have more money. You really want to hide that until the latest possible moment. Saville held a meeting with Gerard Vaughan, Minister of State for Health. As Davies describes for the book In Plain Sight, quote, over tea and cake at the House of Commons, Vaughan outlined the new government's thinking on the National Health Services, a philosophy which ordained that special projects such as rebuilding work at hospitals, even such urgent work as that required at Stoke-Mandville would have to be supported by voluntary contributions. In line with the cuts in public expenditure, Prime Minister Thatcher was implementing across the board. Vaughan suggested this meant they had a problem. Not really, replied Saville, and they struck a deal. Saville, Jimmy Saville would lead a campaign to rebuild the spinal injuries unit at Stoke-Mandville using private money and donations. In other words, it was to be a pioneering example of the type of partnership between government and the public that the Prime Minister was so keen to promote. Now, the renovations were to cost between 6 and 10 million pounds, as Jimmy announced at a subsequent press conference. When he was asked, shouldn't the NHS just be funding this? He replied, this is the way they used to build hospitals years ago, and laid out how a simple five pound donation could pay for a brick, allowing every Briton a chance to support one of the most famous hospitals in the country. To make a long story short, it worked. Saville used his connections to wealth and fame to solicit high dollar donations and his ability to connect with average Britons and host public runs and other fundraisers to solicit large numbers of small dollar donations. Now he does succeed in convincing Thatcher to contribute half a million pounds of public money to the cause, right? But that means this goes from a thing that the NHS would have had to pay 10 million pounds of public money to do to something they have to pay just a half million pounds of public money to do because he raises the other nine and a half that's needed. Once the money was raised, Savile was feted in a public press conference next to Prince Charles and Margaret Thatcher herself. This marks the beginning of his true climb up the rungs of power and fame in British high society. As Farrell Kinney writes, The preceding years had seen Savile work his way upwards through media elites, dance halls, to radio, pop television, to primetime flagship television, as well as integrating into the National Health Service. The years that followed, however, can be understood as Savile tirelessly working upwards through the British establishment, the Thatcher government, the monarchy, and an ever-present relationship with the police.

Speaker 4:
[61:42] So, that's good.

Speaker 1:
[61:44] Do we have any evidence that Charles knows?

Speaker 2:
[61:48] A bit. We'll talk about Charles a lot more. Don't worry, Zovie. You can come to your conclusion.

Speaker 1:
[61:53] Because I'm just thinking, like, he got, like, a somewhat, you know, I would guess people were not upset with him for, you know, not standing in the way of his brother getting arrested for being a disgusting pedophile, and he got praised for it. How did he? You know?

Speaker 2:
[62:17] Yeah. We'll talk a lot more about Charles. We're nearly done with him yet.

Speaker 1:
[62:21] I'd like to know more is what I'm saying.

Speaker 2:
[62:23] From the Thatcher years on, Saville was what some royal family watchers described as a court jester to the family, right? That's the role he takes on socially. Saville first meets Prince Charles in 1977, which is the same year that he met Thatcher, and Princess Diana herself later wrote that Jimmy was a mentor to the future king, right? That's Princess Di's take on things, that Jimmy Saville is her husband's mentor. Now, I was not at all surprised to learn that Saville and Thatcher had used each other for mutual benefit. What did surprise me is that this seems to have been a genuine friendship on Margaret's part, as in she deeply liked and appreciated this historically prolific rapist, and he seems to have enjoyed her company and considered her a safe person to joke around with. After one lunch in 1981, Saville wrote a letter to Thatcher that included the lines, My girl Patience pretended to be madly jealous and wanted to know what you wore and what you ate. All the paralyzed lads called me Sir James all week. They all love you. Me too.

Speaker 1:
[63:24] Great.

Speaker 2:
[63:25] It's beautiful to see a friendship blossom. It's wonderful here.

Speaker 1:
[63:29] I don't like the use of me too and Saville in the same sentence.

Speaker 3:
[63:34] He's not allowed to use me too.

Speaker 2:
[63:37] Now, that bit about, they all called me Sir James is something he includes here because as soon as he becomes friends with Thatcher, Saville starts working her to try to get a knighthood.

Speaker 4:
[63:46] Oh, he wants a knighthood.

Speaker 2:
[63:48] He's already OBE. The next step up is a knighthood, baby. And Margaret spends like a decade fighting for this. She spends years pushing Jimmy to be a knight. In 1983, Thatcher wrote Sir Robert Armstrong, the chair of the National Honors Committee, to ask about making Saville a knight. But Sir Robert said no. And his reasoning wasn't that Jimmy was like, obviously a dangerous child predator. It was that he just endured a minor scandal about some comments he'd made in an interview about the young girls he hung out with at his charity runs. The AIDS crisis was on fire at that point. And Sir Robert thought it was inappropriate for the government to celebrate and endorse a man who made light of premarital sex. He pointed out that the lurid details of Jimmy's sexcapades hadn't faded from public memory yet. And it would be best if Mr. Saville were to wait a little bit longer. Per the BBC, quote, we remain worried, he added. Fears have been expressed that Mr. Saville might not be able to refrain from exploiting a knighthood in a way which brought the honor system into disrepute.

Speaker 3:
[64:49] You know. Accurate. There's no way this was a genuine friendship. They're both just empty inside and they're such climber fucking pieces of shit.

Speaker 2:
[64:59] She goes to bat for him though, right? Do any of these people have real friendships? In as much as Thatcher ever did or Savile ever did, right? They were tightly, they both very much needed each other, right?

Speaker 3:
[65:13] It's like when Trump talks about having his friends, it's like you don't have one single friend on this planet.

Speaker 2:
[65:18] Not really. But you have people you need and it's noteworthy. The amount that Margaret goes to bat for Jimmy shows you how much she thinks she needs him. He is not just a celebrity who is kind of friendly. She is a major, he's a major part of thatcherism. But she needs him. He allows her to do a lot of the austerity shit she wants to do without seeming like she's fucking the country as much as she is because he's keeping the lights on in some of these facilities and in return, he gets a blind eye turn to his molestation of hundreds and hundreds of people because he's keeping the lights on in these facilities, which allows her to fucking cut shit to the bone, right? That's Saville's role in Thatcherism, and it's a significant one as shown by how much Margaret herself goes to bat for this guy. Now the fact that it's great. I love it when Margaret Thatcher is in the story. The fact that Sir Robert is worried Saville would use being knighted in order to like for his own benefit in some way that threw the system to disrepute was prescient. Saville's already at this point using his fame as a charitable fundraiser to shut down investigations into his sex crimes. Per the BBC, Saville persuaded the tabloids not to run stories by telling them they would be responsible for the end of his charity fundraising. Saville himself admitted in an interview, people leap about, yes they do, if he wants something because of his charitable work. Folks will do anything for me because of all the money I'm raising for good causes. Now, any hope of negative reporting on Saville's crimes was further dashed by his close public friendship with Thatcher. Again, this makes it harder. You're some fucking kid who's like at a juvenile facility or whatever because you got in trouble for something and Jimmy's molesting you. And this guy's, you're going to try to report the guy who's friends with the prime minister. Yeah, that'll work.

Speaker 3:
[67:17] And the royal family?

Speaker 2:
[67:18] And the prince, yeah, and the royal fucking family. In one episode of Jim Will Fix It, a little girl asks to be a cop for a day at 10 Downing Street. And Jimmy uses his connections to Thatcher to fix it. She gets a cop uniform and she gets to patrol around in front of the prime minister's residence. And when Thatcher shows up in her limo or whatever, the kid gets to escort her from her car to her residence. TV viewers eat this up, it's adorable, right? But his victims, many of whom are stuck in hospitals and psychiatric wards, see this as more evidence that Jim is untouchable. I found an article on the website, Investigative Psychiatry, that's like analyzing a bunch of different investigations, several, because after it all comes out, how many people he was abusing, all the hospitals he volunteered at have these internal investigations into how Jimmy was allowed to abuse their patients for decades. And there's like an NHS investigation, an NSCC investigation. So this article kind of summarizing all those investigations notes, he leveraged his fame and claims of high level political friendships to intimidate those around him. He successfully made hospital staff believe he had the power to have them fired, while simultaneously coercing vulnerable patients into believing that reporting his abuse would only worsen their treatment and lead to punishment. Well, he's, yeah, it's great. And the fact that for an idea of how much fucking absolute impunity he has. You remember in the first couple of episodes, we talked about Jimmy's got this weird thing about dead bodies as a kid. It's kind of a regular like thing. Like he makes some really weird statements whenever he sees like dead people.

Speaker 3:
[68:54] Yeah, I saw that shit get chopped up.

Speaker 2:
[68:57] Yeah. Let me read a quote from a BBC article.

Speaker 1:
[69:00] I'm afraid.

Speaker 2:
[69:01] Dr. Sue Proctor, who chaired an inquiry into Saville's actions at Leeds General Infirmary, said the star also had an unwholesome interest in the dead. It is alleged he posed for photographs and performed sex acts on corpses in the hospital mortuary. She also referred to Saville's claims that large rings he wore were made from the glass eyes of dead bodies at the mortuary. There's more we could say here. Jimmy's a necrophile. What the? That's bad and gross. That's all we're going to say that in these episodes. It's important you know that about him, but the living people are my primary concern. Obviously, this is bad too. It's just how bad this guy is. The necrophilia is like a side note. Also, he's doing this. It's not on the front burner in terms of the things he's doing bad.

Speaker 1:
[69:48] Could you, I just want you to repeat that one part about, what did you say he was with what, the ring?

Speaker 2:
[69:53] Oh yeah.

Speaker 1:
[69:53] What?

Speaker 2:
[69:54] Yeah, he's got these big rings and he would tell everybody, he made comments out of this publicly, that they're made from the glass eyes from dead bodies, mortuaries. That's where his rings get their big gyms from. Cool stuff, Jimmy.

Speaker 1:
[70:10] I don't know what to say to that.

Speaker 2:
[70:12] Thanks, man. So, my interpretation of what's going on behind the scenes of Jimmy Saville's head through this period is this. You've got this guy who gets his start as a hit DJ in a time when that means unlimited sexual access to teenage girls. He enjoys this for years, but he's not an idiot. He can see this isn't going to last forever. And since he doesn't really like any of his fellow DJs socially, he's got enough perspective to realize they're flirting with danger while literally flirting with children. The BBC offers him a professional escape to a world with less scrutiny and more money just as his old colleagues start drawing attention to their behavior and then he realizes the more big public acts of charity he does, the more good he gets in with the people running the country and the more camouflage he gets for his behavior. And this provides him with direct access to victims in his preferred age range who can't defend themselves. And that's why he volunteers primarily at spinal wards, psychiatric hospitals, and as we'll talk about in our next episode, the Duncroft approved school for girls. Okay. And that's part three.

Speaker 1:
[71:22] I hate this guy.

Speaker 2:
[71:24] Heralding stuff, isn't it?

Speaker 3:
[71:26] This is the worst one I've ever done. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[71:29] Yeah. Yeah. This is one of the worst ones we've ever done. This guy is the devil himself really.

Speaker 1:
[71:38] I don't even know if there's a word to properly describe how disgusting he is.

Speaker 2:
[71:42] No. No.

Speaker 1:
[71:43] I've been trying to think of one and I've had a loss for it.

Speaker 2:
[71:47] He's just a fox that got led into a hen house made up of every single person in a hospital in the UK. Okay.

Speaker 3:
[71:56] Cool. I don't even.

Speaker 2:
[71:58] You got a plug something?

Speaker 3:
[72:00] Sorry. Yeah, my book. Let me recover for a second. I wrote a book. It's honestly way happier than this, and there's a lot of that shit in the book. It's called Girl Gone Wild, and it's feminist, which we need after listening to this.

Speaker 2:
[72:17] Yeah. Sounds nice.

Speaker 1:
[72:18] Abhorrent. Abhorrent. I'm just throwing out words. Abhorrent. Yeah. Sickening. That applies.

Speaker 2:
[72:25] Abhorrent. Yeah.

Speaker 1:
[72:26] Obscene. I don't know. Revolting. Loathsome.

Speaker 2:
[72:32] Loathsome is a good one. Yeah. We don't use that word enough. Yeah. Loathsome. Let's end with loathsome.

Speaker 1:
[72:37] Okay. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/atbehind the Bastards. We love about 40 percent of you, statistically speaking.