One morning in 2011, all activity stopped in the city of Leeds, as a solid gold coffin was driven slowly past a large crowd, some of them solemnly crossing themselves out of respect for the demigod Savile. Soon he would be lowered into the ground, under a lavish tombstone reading 'It was good while it lasted'.
The stonemason could never have imagined the irony of the message. For the demigod would soon be found guilty of crimes that nobody had dared reveal in his lifetime. Sadistic rape of hundreds of children of both sexes, almost certainly including disabled ones. You simply can't get lower.
It is a measure of this man's power to silence whistleblowers that even two months after his death, the BBC had to find a pretext for not mentioning the flood of shocking revelations that were suddenly pouring in. Apparently it would be 'bad taste'. It took the thick-skinned ex-editor of Private Eye magazine, Richard Ingrams, to rise to the challenge and publish a sensational exposé in The Oldie.
Bad taste it was indeed. We hardly knew which was worse, the appalling cruelty of the acts or the sickening hypocrisy of the perpetrator, raised to divine status as the big-hearted man of the people, with his reassuring Yorkie accent, 'fixing it' for all manner of worthy causes, and filling his coffers (and building his power-base) all the while.
The findings were truly shattering. It was as though his super-virtuous image had literally dazzled the law agencies into a state of paralysis. He was quite illegally given the keys to Broadmoor (significantly the staff didn't like him or trust him), along with a convenient cottage beside the gate. And approached by police over accusations of abuse, he managed to become the interviewer, not the interviewee, as we can see from the transcripts.
Savile's nephew Guy tells of an odd coincidence, when he had bunked-off school to seek adventure in London, and been lured into the inevitable child-abuse ring, being passed round multiple adult men, day after day. We don't know who was the more surprised, Guy or his uncle Jimmy, who turned out to be one of the abusers. But naturally Guy's silence was ruthlessly enforced.
We might have learned more from Guy if we could make out half of what he was saying - as with Dennis Lemmon, Savile's bodyguard. We do better with his long-serving P.A., Janet, who not only speaks clearly, but comes across as an altogether more wholesome individual. Yet it's hard to believe that she could have remained in total ignorance about what was going on behind Savile's gleaming raiment of charity. (We should not be surprised to hear that the lavish tombstone was dismantled, and that Savile now lies in an unmarked grave.)
The stonemason could never have imagined the irony of the message. For the demigod would soon be found guilty of crimes that nobody had dared reveal in his lifetime. Sadistic rape of hundreds of children of both sexes, almost certainly including disabled ones. You simply can't get lower.
It is a measure of this man's power to silence whistleblowers that even two months after his death, the BBC had to find a pretext for not mentioning the flood of shocking revelations that were suddenly pouring in. Apparently it would be 'bad taste'. It took the thick-skinned ex-editor of Private Eye magazine, Richard Ingrams, to rise to the challenge and publish a sensational exposé in The Oldie.
Bad taste it was indeed. We hardly knew which was worse, the appalling cruelty of the acts or the sickening hypocrisy of the perpetrator, raised to divine status as the big-hearted man of the people, with his reassuring Yorkie accent, 'fixing it' for all manner of worthy causes, and filling his coffers (and building his power-base) all the while.
The findings were truly shattering. It was as though his super-virtuous image had literally dazzled the law agencies into a state of paralysis. He was quite illegally given the keys to Broadmoor (significantly the staff didn't like him or trust him), along with a convenient cottage beside the gate. And approached by police over accusations of abuse, he managed to become the interviewer, not the interviewee, as we can see from the transcripts.
Savile's nephew Guy tells of an odd coincidence, when he had bunked-off school to seek adventure in London, and been lured into the inevitable child-abuse ring, being passed round multiple adult men, day after day. We don't know who was the more surprised, Guy or his uncle Jimmy, who turned out to be one of the abusers. But naturally Guy's silence was ruthlessly enforced.
We might have learned more from Guy if we could make out half of what he was saying - as with Dennis Lemmon, Savile's bodyguard. We do better with his long-serving P.A., Janet, who not only speaks clearly, but comes across as an altogether more wholesome individual. Yet it's hard to believe that she could have remained in total ignorance about what was going on behind Savile's gleaming raiment of charity. (We should not be surprised to hear that the lavish tombstone was dismantled, and that Savile now lies in an unmarked grave.)
