The voiceover suggests there was a “huge multi-institution cover-up”, implicating Duncroft House, the Thatcher government, hospitals, prisons and the BBC. Andrew Neil shows how Savile eluded his questions about sexual behaviour by turning the audience against Neil with some comic business involving a banana.Ī measure of Savile’s psychopathy is that the Discovery film can be considered relatively restrained for ignoring the widespread rumours, reflected by Dame Janet Smith, of Savile also being a necrophiliac (his charitable service included working as a hospital morgue porter). The freshest material involves Savile’s activities in Jersey and at London sex parties, bravely described by victims. The documentary presents a devastating succession of victims or whistleblowers, who were disbelieved or discouraged. ![]() (His talented colleague Liz MacKean died in 2017, having, like Jones, left the BBC.) Almost exactly a decade on, this Discovery film has the feel of the Newsnight investigation reborn a central testifier is Meirion Jones, lead producer on the censored show. The Newsnight no-show led directly to 2012’s Exposure, which included some of the BBC-blanked data and witnesses. A quasi-independent inquiry, the Pollard Review, broadly cleared managers of that charge, though it found their actions “flawed” some editorial figures were moved by the BBC to equivalently paid alternative roles. The producers’ view was that the BBC feared a tonal clash with Savile tribute films in the Christmas schedule. In December 2011, two months after Savile died, a planned BBC Two Newsnight investigation into rapes and assaults by the presenter at Duncroft House, a a school for emotionally disturbed teenage girls in Surrey, was pulled. I was interviewed for the Netflix films.)Īnother oddity of Savile’s TV CV is that the most influential film about him has never aired. (Disclosure: I witnessed, and reported to the BBC, an assault by Savile on a BBC staff member in 2006, as recorded in the Dame Janet Smith report of 2016. ![]() Discovery’s Jimmy Savile: The People Who Knew is the first a Netflix two-parter is due later this year and a BBC docudrama, The Reckoning, is also in production. The 10th anniversary of Savile’s death in October will greatly add to the TV credits the presenter wouldn’t want to have. Screened after the broadcaster’s death, that film triggered institutional investigations concluding he had sexually abused at least 450 people, 80% of whom were young people and children. In When Louis Met Jimmy (BBC Two, 2000), Louis Theroux raised questions about longstanding rumours of paedophilia, which were rebuffed but later certified by Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile (ITV, 2012). U nusually for someone who presented TV and radio programmes for six decades, Jimmy Savile is most significantly represented in the archives by shows he didn’t host.
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