Non fiction

Jimmy Savile was a paedophile

Jimmy Savile was a paedophile. This isn’t a punchline, it isn’t a sniggery reference to the fact he looks a bit strange and there is something odd about his eyes, it’s as close as we can get, in the absence of an admission, to a fact.

A flurry of revelations in the last few months have caused a national scandal and turned a well-loved entertainer and cuddly old celebrity into the very personification of evil; the scale and scope of the accusations emerging seeming to prove his villainy beyond any shadow of a doubt.

Why weren’t we told? Why didn’t we know? The press decry the silence of the BBC, journalists and writers and entertainers and media pundits step forward to say they always knew and that they were bound to silence and that there was nothing they could do to let the public know what he truly was.

But were me and my friends the only children who grew up watching Savile on television who spent their subsequent adulthood making jokes about how obvious it was that he was a paedophile? The way he bounced children on his knee on Jim’ll Fix It, leering into their faces with his long and bird-like face, fondling a phallic cigar.

Surely everyone saw it, right? Who could possibly look more like a pervert? That was the joke wasn’t it? The child molestor and children’s entertainer who granted little boys’ and girls’ wishes? Get it? Jimmy Savile was obviously a paedophile. Ha ha ha.

So the jokes that are doing the rounds now (like the prank text read out on Radio Ulster about Jim fixing it for the respondent to milk a goat blindfold) are giving me nothing more than a queasy sense of déjà vu. Jimmy Savile being a paedophile was always the joke.

Obviously we didn’t quite mean a paedophile in the real sense. We meant a cartoon paedophile, we meant a local weirdo with access to children who gave right-thinking people the creeps.

Because he really was creepy. Even last year’s loving obituaries couldn’t help but admit his enigmatic nature (his total lack of close friends and confidantes, his private room in Broadmoor, his maintaining his mother’s bedroom as a shrine, his not having any feelings, the Daily Mail’s obituary stating he wore his oddness like a badge and remained an enigma to the end) in a way that made my flesh crawl.

Well-loved entertainer he might have been but ‘not quite right’ he clearly was too. Surely everyone saw that, didn’t they?

It might seem crass to compare the Savile scandal to MPs expenses (as disgusted as the public might be by unwittingly funding the cleaning of moats and the building of duck houses, the two pale in comparison to our license fees facilitating the molesting of children) but they both have something in common.

Part of the outrage, the scale of the fury that Savile or the MPs were allowed to get away with their abuses, was not how they hid their crimes or pretended their innocence but that it was exactly the behaviour that public would have expected of them.

During my early childhood in the 1970s perhaps values may have been different, perhaps they were ‘different times’, but Savile’s creeping hands that goosed pubescent girls on Top of the Pops would still have marked him out as a ‘dirty old man’ and parents would have steered their children well clear or, at the very least, never have left them alone with him. If only by instinct alone, since no evidence made it out to the public, we had a sense of what he was or, without appropriate checks to stop him, what he could be.

But we made the assumption that someone who was so obviously likely to behave in that way by definition must be restrained from doing so. We assumed that, if we could sense so automatically his unsettling nature and the inevitability of his wrongdoing, then surely any available watchdogs or authorities would have assumed the same; watched him like a hawk for any signs of misbehaviour and would have stopped him in his tracks the minute he tried any funny business.

The public didn’t expect better of Savile. Of course we didn’t. We expected better of those who were in a position to have seen what he was up to and stopped him. The fact that nobody ever did only forced the public to doubt its instincts, to think better of a man wronged by our suspicions.

So too with MPs expenses. The public don’t trust MPs, any number of polls of public confidence in the last thirty years could have told you that, but they trust that there must be systems to stop MPs from abusing their power for personal gain. Surely only an idiot would fail to stop these least trustworthy of people from stealing money from the public purse. Only journalists could possibly be seen as worse candidates for policing their own behaviour. Surely whatever brains were behind the design of MPs’ pay and expenses would have naturally taken in to their calculations the inherent greed and untrustworthiness of our MPs? The public assumes this of them by instinct.

But again because it seemed so obvious to us what they must have been up to and because none were ever caught then we were once more forced to give them the benefit of the doubt. We assumed that if they really had been up to anything then they would have been caught out already.

Of course the public can be wrong. Of course our suspicions can be raised and be found to be hollow. I certainly wouldn’t want to argue for the right of the mob to witch hunt any weirdo whose eyes it feels are too close together.

The landlord of Jo Yeats is a case in point. Rarely was there a man who looked so strange and unsettling. He unnerved the local children, the Sun said so, so clearly he must also be a murderer, their coverage of his arrest seemed to suggest.

But those children were wrong, the public’s suspicions were wrong and the Sun was too. How do we know that? Because the police investigated him, reviewed all the available evidence, a judge cleared him of all wrongdoing and let him go. Perhaps he wasn’t taken in for questioning purely for looking creepy but he was taken in. The police did check him out. Our watchdogs, in that instance, did their job and thankfully took the responsibility for finding wrongdoers out of the hands of a public dangerously inclined to assume guilt in people they have never met, purely for their manner and appearance.

So I’m not surprised at the scale or the intensity of the anger over Savile. We, the public, thought that you, the establishment, would have had this one covered. We trusted that you were at least as insightful and intelligent about finding out a wrong’un as we are. And because we trusted you we let him get away with it.

We knew what he would have been up to. We could have stopped him. But we didn’t. This outpouring of anger has been targeted at Savile, of course. It’s been targeted at the values of the 70s. It’s been targeted at the BBC. But it belongs to us.

Now we know for certain what he really was and we know, too, that it is too late to stop him and we are furious. And all that we can really do with that sort of futile rage is to try to laugh it off.

So the Halloween costumes and captioned photos and ‘now then now then’ jokes are drawing sniggers across the country. Not as a black humoured and timely response to the revealing of a terrible series of crimes but simply as a revival of an already well-worn joke. A joke that, I hope to God, people will stop finding funny soon.
Because there’s no joke to it anymore. It’s a fact. Jimmy Savile was a paedophile.
Ha ha ha.

Andrew Tildesley