All Media, Hey everybody, Robert Here and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences have announced that three different Cool Zone media shows have been nominated for awards at the thirtieth annual Webby Awards. You can vote on these now if you just google the name of the podcast and the category. Behind the Bastards has been nominated in
the Experimental and Innovation Podcasts category. It Could Happen Here is in the News and Politics Podcasts category, and James Stout's mini series Migrating to America A Dream Worth Dying For has been nominated in the Podcasts Documentary category. And you can find links to vote for each of these podcasts in the episode description and in the posts on social media for episodes that It Could Happen Here and Behind the Bastards, Thank You, Welcome pod. Behind the Bastard's
cast Robert Evans with Courtney Kosak and Sophie Lichterman. How Everyone be?
We are good?
Is that good?
Sophie?
Is that to get intrail?
I liked it. I just gave Anderson my dog, like a really big treat and she's enjoying it, which makes me happy.
Good good. I just scarfed a bunch of trail mix. Uh, I thought for you tidied up slightly upstairs? Hey, Courney, what's we're now recording part two?
What's that cute thing behind you?
This?
This is my book cover our Girl Gone Wild?
Yeah? Do you want to tell the audience about it a little before? We talked about a pedophile more?
Well, hopefully you listen to the first episode, but it if that would be weird.
Yeah, it's called Girl Gone Wild. It's about when I sold t shirts on the Girls Gone Wild tour. It's about acting in independent films. It's basically about learning about what society thinks of women, which is a lot like this episode.
Yeah. Yeah, unfortunately, So well, I guess let's get back into it, shall we.
Yeah.
So when we left off, Jimmy had just mate tried his hand, or at least his legs, at becoming a professional cyclist and found out that he wasn't quite good enough for that, but he was really good at being a weirdo, and that got him a gig commentating for
bicycle races. Right, So his first proper media job was calling races for the Daily Express, because that was the newspaper that was funding the first tour of Britain race Back in the day, newspapers used to have money and they would like fund or support stuff like big races in the like for a while. Since newspapers worked that way, that was.
Like a pain laugh. That was like a was like a triggered cackle.
It was like yeah, but it wasn't all good because clearly that's how Jimmy Savile gets his fucking break, right. So this newspaper that's funding the races he's doing like sees, oh, this guy might have this guy might have like it. You know what it takes to be a sta. So they make him a race commentator and he is very good at that job. They pay him a sizable fee. In nineteen fifty four and this jump starts his career
as a bona fide celebrity. He becomes the face and voice of the Daily Express and that starts to earn him attention from the BBC and from Radio One, which is the BBC's radio thing of a jigger right now. Back then, the British media environment was much more restrictive than it is today, and the BBC has essentially a monopoly on legal radio play. Right You're not allowed to just have another radio station, right, you can get in
trouble for that. Now. As a result, the BBC is like they're very much see themselves as cultural gatekeepers of like what should be acceptable and popular in Britain. And this pisses off every because people who run the BBC are old, stuffy, rich assholes and they have terrible taste in music. And this is the moment in which pop
music is starting to explode. You know, you have this period of time like the mid to late fifties, early sixties where we've talked We talked about this on our episodes about Phil Spector with my buddy Will Greasy Will. This is the first time in which teenagers are like a demographic that you're marketing towards and selling towards, and that music is angled heavily towards the teen set because previously, you go back fifty years, teenagers are all working in
the minds or something. They're not dancing at party clubs or whatever. They're not they're certainly not like a chunk of the of the populace that you are like trying to sell stuff to.
Right.
That is also started to change right now now because the BBC has essentially this monopoly on what can be on the radio. There's this vibrant community that pops up of pirate DJs who are like very literally pirate DJs. This is some very cool stories that come out of this because these guys are like living on boats and old defense platforms in this scene broadcasting youth music illegally to the island. It's fucking awesome.
They're legit pirate DJs.
Like literal pirates. Yes, there is a movie called Pirate Radio that's at least ostensibly about this. I don't remember how good a job it did, honestly, I just remember
it exists. So the very idea again of youth culture is new and scary to a lot of influential people in British media because these are members of the upper class and they're kind of worried in part because they're all everyone who's got money in the Western world is terrified of the communists, right, and so there's this fearful understanding that these young people have different values, maybe it'll lead them towards like socialism and all these other scary things.
And there's also just this aspect of this has never been a thing that existed before teenagers and they're being a whole media industry geared towards teenagers. Is it good for? Is it making them bad? Is it going to damage them? You know, there's a lot of concern about that sort of thing, and unfortunately the concern is focused on like the kind of music as opposed to maybe the people making the music and playing on the radio, which is who they should have been scared of harming the youth
of Britain. The music itself isn't really doing any damage. But I bring all this up to point out that it is very difficult and is a very strange and noteworthy historical fact that within this kind of sclerotic and very much like not welcome, not open to newcomers, not open to like different ideas, this list like media culture, that a guy like Jimmy Savile becomes prominent because Jimmy talks like a working class man from Leeds and he
dresses well like this. Sophie'll show you one photo of the guy where he he's got like he's wearing like a black velvet mask around his face, he's got his hair slightly curled, his long white hair, and he's got like a lace fucking gauntlet around his hand. It looks like it's hard to tell what is going on with his sleeve there. Yeah, he looks like.
Hey, Loki loved the sleeve.
And he's always every time he goes out in public, every time he's DJing at an event, every time he's like broadcast he's doing because he's going out to these like races. He's always dressed weird in some way. He's always wearing costumes, and he never talks about it.
I hate to be the person I would wear the shit that blazer with the lace cup.
Yes, the mask is an improvement over the just the maskolse.
The mask helves.
Weirdly enough, hides his But you know.
Is he never talks about the way he's dressed, and when people ask him, he'll try to deliberately avoid the question. And he taught he writes about this. I think it's because he knows. Basically, if you talk about it or explain it, it's not nearly as it doesn't it's not nearly as interesting. If you just show up dressed like a maniac and pretend like you're a normal person like everyone else, that gets you more retention. And yeah, that's that's what he's doing at this point in time, he.
Learned his lesson from the coal mine situation.
He really did. And part of what he's learned is that if you're dressed like a weirdo, not only does it get you attention and can't quote unquote pay off, but people don't poke too much around you. They're not gonna look to see they're not. No one's going to investigate to see if you're like a dangerous weirdo, because they already know you're some kind of weirdo. Right, That's something he starts to realize about about this, about like
dressing this way, is it weirdly enough? Standing out and looking like a maniac divert suspicion and interest away from his actual behavior.
That's it.
Jimmy is immediately successful as a broadcaster. People love him, particularly teenagers, even though by this point he's well into his twenties. He talk, he understands their slang, He talks like a teenager. He understands the music they like, He understands how they're spending their time because he socializes almost exclusively with teenaged girls. Right, and he's doing this because he is having sex with slash molesting them. The legal
definition is dependent upon the age that they are. Again, as I've noted, but that's exclusively who he hangs out with. So he does understand them, right, And at the time, other people in the media are just like, well, he's the only one these kids seem to really like get you know, he understands the kids, and we know there's a lot of money there, so we better keep paying Jimmy Savile because he's the only adult we know who can communicate with the teenagers.
Right now, nobody thinks to go and I wonder that is.
And I will no doubt not at this point in time, nobody's concerned about that they.
See in the twenties.
Sorry, yeah, he's in his twenties. He's in like his mid twenties by this point, Okay, mid to late twenties during this period, and part of what's happening is they're scared of the teenagers, right This is a frightening and anarchic, seeming new segment of the culture, and Jimmy can control them.
So a big part of his early success and famous his ability to convince people in the media who come from money and who are part of this like, you know, this rarefied air of people who got to do that job back then, that I can make these kids less scary and uncontrollable to you. I know how they tick and I can control them. Right, that's why they're hiring him, right,
So that's great. Basically, he he provides these media elites in Britain at the time with a degree of control and predictability over a bunch of teenagers who scared the living shit out of them. Now, good stuff. Nothing like this has ever happened since his main job was still djaying, and by this point he's helping to manage the Mecca
dance hall. He is like the manager of the whole dance hall, and he's often doing shows and he hits upon the brilliant idea in nineteen fifty five of playing top pop hits for his audience while they waited for the house band to rest between sets. So normally you just have the band stop and I either maybe you have a secondary band do something or whatever. But Jimmy comes in and he starts DJing and just putting on
playing the hits for these kids. And he's really good at knowing what they want to hear, and he's good at you know, he's talking in between putting on these songs, he's getting the crowd amped up. You guys know what a DJ does, right, but very few people are doing that at this point. He's one of the first generation. He's not. He'll often claim to have been the first DJ. I don't think that's really true. But he's part of
the first generation of guys doing this right. And this proves to be extremely popular and it earns him a promotion. So he's a job managing a different, much larger dance hall in London. So he's now moved from Leeds to London and he's running this big dance hall and he's got access to this full size ballroom and the power and funding to try something more ambitious than that crude
gramophone wired to a speaker that he'd used previously. According to the book in Plane Sight, he was connected to the company Westrex, who made turntables, and quote he said, he walked into the pala which is the dance hall he's running to find an electrician fitting a record deck in the box from which the lighting was operated. He told the man he wanted two turntables and for them to be installed on the stage, one next to the other. It was. He claimed the first twin turntable system in history.
Now it wasn't an article I found on CNN notes commentators have pointed out they were available decades earlier, But he was one of the very first guys to do this. Jimmy is legitimately quite novel. I'm sure he saw someone else do it, maybe, but there aren't a lot of people who did that before. Or Jimmy Savill who had a twin turnsable system running right, probably a black guy.
Everybody in music's ripping off right, right black people at this point.
Yeah, yeah, But Jimmy does get that reputation as being like the first DJ to do this, like, and he's got that reputation for quite some time. He also develops a reputation for always traveling with a security team of large and angry bouncers, which he bragged about for years, using to brutalize people who stepped out of line during
his shows. He had a zero tolerance policy, and he talks about this a lot in interviews and stuff because he was he really liked telling stories about having these big, dangerous men beat the shit out of people at his command. Now, the fact that Jimmy was always surrounded by dangerous men, was, Davies suggests, probably due in part to the fact that at night he would pick out one or more of the girls at his shows to invite backstage, and he
was scared of their parents. Right, So Davy suggests he's kind of lying about the fact that he needed these guys to keep ordering his shows. He wanted a bunch of scary, big guys around him because he's fucking a bunch of teenagers and their parents get angry. Right, And at this point this is when this stopped by the I mean it had happened at some point previously, but by this point he's like twenty eight years old. It
is no longer. Even within the standards of the time, people think it's a bit weird that he's pretty much exclusively going after like sixteen year old girls, sometimes young.
So he's molesting a bunch of teenagers. He's sexually abusing a bunch of teenagers.
Some of them for in legal I would say, in moral terms, yes, in legal terms, a lot of these are still sixteen year year old girls, and that is legal. Right. This is important in terms of like why nothing is done right. So one of his first victims was Kathy Kirby, who became a prominent singer later herself, but at age sixteen, went to see twenty eight year old Jimmy Savile at the Palais. She claims he pursued her and her even
young her sister, which is not legal now. She turned him down, but the next year, in nineteen fifty six, Kathy got to perform on stage at the Palais and was invited to tour with the band leader Bert Ambrose, and she says that she hit on Bert, but he turned her down because he was forty years older than her.
And I don't know if this is Burt actually trying to be a good guy or just being creepy, but the way he frames the way he explains turning her down is that like, you need to get some experience.
Now.
He may have just meant I don't I'm not gonna get with a teenage girl. That's fucked up, but she interprets this as, oh, I need to go have sex with somebody else first, that that's what he wants. And maybe that's what Burt did want. I don't know the guy, right, but Kathy, because again she's a teenager and she's using the logic of a teenager, decides not to say no the next time that Jimmy propositions her so that she can get experience. And again, she's seventeen at this point.
This is legal, right, But that's one of the first stories we have of she's very uncomfortable. She's particularly uncomfortable that he's hitting on her fifteen year old sister. But she does eventually sleep with him because basically she thinks it'll get her in with someone in the industry she really like wants to have a relationship with and work with.
And this should get to kind of how murky a lot of it is at this period of time, right, this is this is not at all something we can talk about directly using all of our modern terms.
Right. Well, actually, people today love to cite that this was quote unquote normal.
Back it's not normal, we can say, because again she thinks it's weird that he's hitting on her sister, right, But she also doesn't think it's weird when she's seventeen to hit on like a forty year old guy. Right, So there is this is a different time with different values. But what you should note is that by this point
in time. This early in the story, people know it's weird, and that Jimmy likes some young and that that is weird, even within a time period in which it's not at nearly as abnormal for older men to have sex with much younger women. Right, even in that period of time, Jimmy is weird and gets a reputation for liking them young women and girls, right because he's doing both, you know, professionally. During this period, Savill seems to go from strength to strength.
He starts mixing popular songs together when he's on stage, in a manner much more familiar to modern day listening as DJing. But again, he's not interested in making music or the artistry of any of this. The appeal to him here is always control. Hence, once he turned his second dance hall into a hit, he started stopping shows regularly to announce Smooch Time, in which he gave the teenage participants permission to grind and make out with each other.
This was totally novel, As one regular this is someone who was attending these shows as a teenager at the time, later told biographer Dan Davies he was giving teenagers the chance to get together. Teenagers had the chance to hug each other and fall in love. It was a romantic, fantastic time. And I can see how for the teenagers
at the time this would be really nice. Right, You've got a culture that's much more repressed, and there's you're suddenly getting this permission in a public space that like it's okay to make out with other teens. Right. It's like you're with your boyfriend, you're out at the club and he's like, okay, it's not you can all make out now, right. It's very popular, I guess, is what i'd say, like a lot of people. And again he's not this is he's the one on stage. He's not
making out with anyone at this point in time. He will after the shows. But what he's doing here, as much as a lot of these kids like it, is he's normalizing the fact that it's like it's not weird to have sexual and like romantic physical contact at what is his place of work. Right, And even though he's on stage when he's announcing smooch time, this is going to help to normalize what is going to become predation from a nearly thirty year old man to a bunch
of largely fifty to seventeen year old girls. That is part of what's happening here, but nobody it's not noticed as that because all the teens are just happy that someone's saying it's not bad for you to make out with your boyfriend a girlfriend, right, Yeah, like you could get how that camouflage is it? Right?
It's excellent camo. I mean it's really good. Kind of a genius, yeah, evil genius.
Unfortunately, he is very good at this. In nineteen fifty eight, he's hired by Radio Luxembourg, an independent station on the continent that was popular with the youths. This gives him access to pop musicians, to the biggest stars of the days. He's talking with the Beatles, he's talking with the Rolling Stones, He's talking with fucking Elvis, right, I mean at varying points in time, that's not all starting in nineteen fifty eight.
But if someone is a pop musician who is famous and beloved, he knows them, and you've heard him talk to them on air, so you know he knows them, and this gives him a huge amount of power over the teenage girls his audience. Now to the adults who are running the business, and who own these venues. This helps to reinforce Jimmy's status as a teen whisperer, right, although this is largely based on a misconception they have about his fame because they see like, oh wow, the
teenagers love Jimmy. What's really happening is the teenagers know Jimmy has access to the musicians they love, and so they follow him because he provides access to these pop stars. Right, and he increasingly grows skilled when he's talking with these teenage girls who are lining up outside of his office after the show, at making himself into a gateway between these kids who are obsessed with their favorite musicians and those musicians. That is what provides him with the bulk
of his victims. He is the door. If you make Jimmy happy, Jimmy can introduce you to the fucking Beatles.
Right.
What won't you do for that guy? If you're a sixteen year old girl in this period of time, Right.
It's like Weinstein can get you a part of it.
Maybe, yep, yep, it's how it works pretty much always right, yep.
Disgusting.
One former employee at the Plaza, which is one of the dance halls, he managed recalled seeing a line of girls outside of Jimmy's office queuing up regularly for what was euphemistically called a chat with jim No, he used to always say, I'm going to interview this young lady for a job. That's all. He'd say. I don't know what went on behind those doors, but I do know that he was a man. I we know what was going on behind those doors.
Right.
And again, while a lot of these girls are legally of age, a lot of them aren't. And we know a lot of them aren't because people talk about him hitting on them when they were fourteen or fifteen or even younger. Right, And I don't have an exact list of And here's the age and number of the girls that he molested and the girls who you know were of age and maybe consent to I don't know how that breaks out as a ratio. But none of this is okay because none of this, all of this is
even in the case when they're legally of age. He is making them have sex with him to get access to famous musicians. And that's bad. Like it may not have been a prime at the time, but it's bad.
Now.
Jimmy's making good money now and despite the fact this is something that will be within most of his life, despite the fact that he now makes good money, he's always driving around like fancy sports cars, rolls, royces and stuff.
He lives in Squalor. His apartments are always disgusting and like the cheapest place he can possibly get his house in this period of time is this gross, mold covered flat nicknamed the Black Pad because he painted the walls and everything else black to disguise the grime so that like it wasn't as obvious how gross it was. Rent was a pound fifty per week. He's just cheap, okay, and he doesn't I don't think he spends a lot of time in his apartment too, so he doesn't see
the reason to spend much money on it. At this point. He spends a lot of money in his cars, and usually if he's not having sex in his office, he's having sex in his car. Now he does bring people back to his pad to party too, and he's lit the space with red light bulbs to further hide how disgusting it is. But it was it's gross.
Did you get a better place with like a bullpit or something?
We probably don't need to be giving him notes, but it is like weird. It's kind of a noteworthy thing about how he does this. You know who else lives in Squalor, Well, that may not.
This is behind the products and services.
They're death right, they're living in Squalor, living in living in mold covered apartments and trash pads. Uh and weird back so uh. In public, Jimmy always wore expensive, ostentatious clothes and drove luxury cars, particularly Rolls Royces, and these also helped to draw teenage girls and his orbit, and by the time they got back to his disgusting pad, he'd usually done a good job of roping them in, promising,
I can get you backstage at this show. You can beat your heroes and get you to come in when you know we're gonna have Elvis in or whatever the studio and you can meet him, you know, if you just do something for me right now. Jimmy is as good as his word usually when he makes these promises for a very good reason, right, this isn't He's not fulfilling the promises he makes these girls, who he then molests because he cares about being as good as his word.
He is also providing pop stars with groupies who are quote ready to go. That's the term he uses, and that's part of his job. He is a fixer for these musicians who are traveling all over the world. They're coming past, you know, they're doing part of their tour in London, so they're going on the radio to talk to Jimmy. He's talking to them about, you know, the show they're doing, and it's expected. Hey, you know, you guys are going to be in town for just like
two nights. Jimmy can hook you up with some girls who are ready to go, you know, like that's that's what he's doing. We don't know, specif scifically who he did that for, but he does it a lot and it's part of the appeal. It's part of why you go to Savil's parties. Is if you're famous, he'll get you. He'll gee up with some groupies. Right, it's very normal. At the time, it's very bad.
It's very bad.
And yeah, you asked me at the beginning of the first episode how I knew him, And it's those stories. It's like the story of the girl who gets like a fish put inside her or like whatever that are like likely underaged girls with these famous musicians.
Yeah. Yeah, And you know, even when it's they're not legally underage at the time, it's still bad. Jimmy Donnelly, who attended the Plaza starting at age sixteen right around this time, was interviewed about Davies for his book, and his recollections of Savel helped get across something important. Quote. We didn't have this word pedophile in them days. We had the word weirdo. And Savill was a weirdo. He always had the Bobby Socks girls, the young girls in
his car. He'd always pull up with the girls in his car going home. He'd always have the girls in his car. Right. So, again, as normalized as aspects of this were, it's weird. Jimmy is a weirdo for the time, and people are using the term weirdo to refer to the fact that he's a pedophile.
Right, that's known.
It's not a secret. It's just not seen as as big a problem as it's later going to be seen. But it's not a mystery. Nobody doesn't think he's doing this now.
Words important though, because weirdo can mean a lot of things.
It can, and that's what Jimmy understands is that his very oddness, the fact that he is so strange and so so purposefully strange, is a cloaking device. It helps to hide the fact that he's a predator. Jimmy dressed, and it's not just that, it's that Jimmy dresses in a way. Because he's dressed so weird and ostentatiously, he regularly gets called a poofter or various other slurs for
a homosexual person. Right, And he's fine with this because if people think he's queer or just off in general, then the fact that he's always surrounded by teenage girls is just another mark of his eccentricity. Right. Yeah, And in fact, part of his strategy is he deliberately doesn't have sex with or group most of the young girls that he's hanging out with, the majority of the girls that he's surrounded by at any given time, he is
not molesting because that provides further cover. Right, most of the girls who were out there will say nothing happened, you know, And that makes him seem safer and it makes it seem less worth paying attention to. Dan Davies relates the story of Penny Anne Rolls, who met Savill when she was a teenage girl working at a coffee shop that was also a concert venue which Jimmy part owned. She recalled quote, one Sunday night, he used to take a few of us to a restaurant, an Indian place
in the Curry center of Manchester. We used to go there for curry and he would park his Rolls Royce up. Afterwards, he would take us home with the roof down on his car and we'd all be singing our heads off. She remembers there were three or four girls that Savill took out regularly, but insists he never tried it on with her. I never saw him in a relationship with anyone, she maintains. Between you and I, I don't know whether he was gay. And tactics like this were very much
in line with Jimmy's repeatedly elucidated approach to life. He talked about this as a strategy. I'm going to quote from one specific interview he does near the end of his life, but he repeats this sentiment in numerous places over half a century. You see, I never ever thought that I was clever. Tricky. Yes, I'm a very tricky fella. But tricky is much better than being clever. If you are clever, you can slip up because you're clever. But if you're tricky, you don't slip up. You never slip up.
If you're tricky, Fuck off, Fuck off Jimmy. Unfortunately it works, yea, but he talks like he's talking. This guy is being like, I'm tricky. I'm always around teenagers. No one ever has noticed what's wrong with me?
What a mystery? This guy was molesting people for decades. We couldn't have known.
What a sperry little fuck a little uh huh.
Because like people expect less of the trickiness versus the cleverness.
I don't know, right, yes, exactly now. In books and interviews, reporters would always note that Jimmy never talked about his inner life.
Right.
You can go through all of the he wrote books about himself, multiple ones, and you don't get anything about what he actually does on his own or who he is as a person. And in fact, Jimmy claimed not to have an inner life. He would talk about this regularly. It Yeah, I kind of do too. He keeps incredibly busy, not just with work but with sporting events. He continues to be an athlete of varying kinds this whole period.
And while he's rising to fame during this time when he's he's you know, m seeing events and running all these dance halls and stuff and this popular DJ and on the radio, he's also a prominent wrestler. And in fact, he tried to use his he gets into wrestling, and he tries to use his fame, the fact that he's kind of famous as a broadcaster to jump start his wrestling career, and the fact that he is so well
known does make him popular to promoters. Like promoters love having Jimmy savalon because people will show up to watch him wrestle. But other wrestlers hate it because he's not really a wrestler, right, and he's kind of like he's kind of like stealing his way to the top.
He's like logan fucking Paul and ww.
Right.
Yeah, real WWE fans hate that guy.
Yeah. The website Pro Wrestling Stories notes his toe was broken in his very first match. After one bout, he visited the hospital after his testicles had been kicked up into his body.
Hey, thank god. Yeah love that.
Yeah, there's a couple of good bits here of him getting hurt. Saville claims to have fought in over one hundred bouts and proudly lost all thirty five of his first matches. Despite this, and despite his appearance, he was very popular with female fans. One wrestler who did not like Savile and beat him brutally in the ring recalled years later that Savill bragged about girls lining up to see him after fights. He would tell them, I'll take you and you and you the rest of you. Come
back another time. You might get lucky. Ew bro.
Yeah.
Now for reference, here's how Jimmy looked back then as a wrestler. And just what an upsetting looking man. I don't know, like he looks like one of the like in this at least his hair isn't shock white. It's a bit shorter and black. He's like shirtless, Like he's in good shape, you can tell, but again he just is. He's so his face is so upsetting always to me.
Yeah, he's got like real potato shaped face.
And then just yeah, crazy hair the bangs again.
Not sure, I mean, I'm not I don't want to harp on his appearance, but also fuck him.
Yeah he's I mean, but also his appearance is a big part his conscious His appearance is a performance, right, So there is you know, it's not totally.
Question on the wrestling, because did you say at the beginning that he also messed with boys?
Is there any evidence? Yes, we're getting there.
I don't know when that starts. I don't know that anyone does. But yes, he molests a shitload of boys, very young ones, as we'll be talking about. I don't know when he begins doing that. We really don't. I will we will be talking about it later. I have kind of the earliest point that we know he was by,
but I don't know how far back that goes. Okay, I should also know the kind of wrestling Saville did was a mix of like the pure entertainment pro wrestling that we Americans know and love today in actual competitive grappling. So these are real fights, right, like where there's like a winner and a loser that's not decided ahead of time. And I will talk about one of those fights much later.
At the end of these episodes. You're gonna need it as a palette cleanser, but that's getting We'll do that later because again, it's going to be necessary However, it's important you know that the fact that he's bad at wrestling doesn't mean that his time as a wrestler was a failure for Savil. In fact, it's one more thing that makes him seem terrifying and impossible to resist to his victims. The fact that he's a pro wrestler helps helps ensure that when he's molesting someone, they don't fight
back because he's scary. He's in really good shape, and he's huge. He is a big man. He's physically dangerous. This is not a This is a guy who is in fights. This is a guy who knows how to hurt people, and who knows how to uses body to hurt people. He even told one wrestling magazine, if I arrive at the gates of Heaven and Saint Peter says, you've been a very tricky man. You can't come in here.
I'll break his thumbs because I'm qualified to do that, because I've earned a living being a wrestler, and I've not had a problem yet with anyone who's thumbs I've broken. No one could have known, impossible to know this guy was preying on kids. There were no signs.
Don't even think of that scenario in your head.
Also the fact that again he's periodically in his life being like, I'm not clever, I'm tricky, and no one can catch you if you're tricky. And then in this he's like, Saint Peter wouldn't let me into heaven because I'm tricky. Really, let you know what he means when he says he's tricky exactly. In nineteen sixty four, the BBC asked Jimmy Savill to be the first host of a new television program. Well, I think it's a radio program that becomes TV later, but well, I think it
is TV at this point in time. It's a little because a lot of media, it's kind of hard to find from nineteen sixty four, so I think this is a TV program at the time. It's called Top of the Pops and it's a video showcase of the hit bands of the era that becomes this massive hit. And
Jimmy's not the only host. They rotate DJs, so like every episode you'll have somebody different, right, but Jimmy is like the first one to host the show, and he's like one of the most regular people that they bring back to host Top of the Pops during this period of time and throughout the sixties and I think into the seventies, he's repeatedly voted Britain's favorite DJ, like he's the top DJ in the country by pretty much any
person's like standards. And so he also gets the job regularly when these huge bands that are honestly probably bigger in a lot of ways than any popular musician is today. When you talk about the Beatles or the Stones at their height, he's the guy on stage introducing them whenever they play in England, right, and he continues he'll dress
in bizarre costumes. I saw one video where he's like opening for the Stones and he's dressed as like a stereotype of a Japanese woman, wearing like a kimono and like waving fans to cool himself down. As he approaches the microphone, he's got his catchphrases like now then, now then and now how about that then? Because catchphrases were easier to have back then, more than anything, Jimmy had access. This is a guy who talks to the Beatles repeatedly.
He's in like a top of the Pops they do like a TV skit with the Beatles, where Jimmy, because he's so huge and tall, is like he's like the abominable Snowman, and they're all out like hiking, and he's like one by one like eating the Beatles basically. And I don't think they're actually friends. I don't think they know, Like they're certainly not hanging out socially the rest of their lives. But he knows them. And if you're a teenage girl, all you see is that, like, wow, he
knows the fucking Beatles. You know. On stage, when Jimmy wasn't surrounded by pop stars, he was often quite literally buried in girls, which further helped to normalize and disguise his behavior. Here's one example from an episode of Top of the Pops in the nineteen seventies, that Sophie's gonna play for you here, I thought.
Something I fought like the very souls.
I said, I'm too going to come.
Get used to it. So ladies and gentlemen, all can say is good night from all of the certain Top of the Toops, and it's number one time, and of course he's believed me. Now it's from the one and only she can go.
I'd think there's to do so.
For those of you who couldn't see that, Jimmy is surrounded by like a dozen young, very young women, I can't tell their age, and one of the girls, the girl next to him, keeps like jumping and making like oh sounds. I think because he's grabbing her the whole Oh no, this is the most popular show in the country, one of them at the time. He's just on stage with a bunch of teenage girls groping one of them
on video. This is so normalized, This is not hidden, This is not like I have to really emphasize there was no reason not to know what Jimmy was doing here.
While I was looking for that clip, I accidentally came across another clip from a nineteen sixty five episode of Top of the Pops, and Jimmy's only on for the first second, but once I heard the words to the song he's introducing, I had to include this too, just because it's just a very I had a funny bit of irony Sophie's to play that clip to you now from the sixty five episode. The song is called little Children, Jay,
little Children, You dare not tell on me? You tell what you Why was that a song I Know, just to kind of talk make the point about how like some of this is that things were fucked up at the time. Why is that a song? Yeah, just Jimmy sat the Pedophile introducing a song about telling kids not to tell on adults. Great. So by this point, by the time, and again we're in kind of like the
mid sixties. In this era, Jimmy's moved on from the Mecca he's hosting, he's running things at a new thirty three hundred person dance hall called the Top Ten Club, which promised music by famous pop stars and top international DJ Jimmy Saville. On ads for the club, Jimmy was pictured with a chimpanzee for some reason, and the text it's a gas, it's a ball, It's like crazy man.
The club only allowed people sixteen and up, which was again the age of consent, but numerous people who attended in those days have made it clear that lying about your age was so easy as to be essentially encouraged. No one's checking or cares if you're not actually sixteen, right, And in fact, there's some evidence that, you know, the bouncers, the people like at the gate are specifically trying to bring in younger girls for reasons I probably don't need
to elaborate on here. Now, the Top ten Club becomes Jimmy's primary like hunting area, and he, in order to maintain sort of this h like his kind of specialness, he forbade none of the other DJs were allowed to play Top twenty hits, right because Jimmy knows his popularity is based entirely on his perceived closest to fame, and this further helps to make him seem special and make
it seem like he's got access. Jimmy Donnelly, who we heard from earlier, recalled that Savill always left with girls from their mid to late teens and that it was well known Jimmy Savill liked him young. Now the Top ten Club is going to become probably his most reliable hunting ground in this period of life. That's the term Davies uses for it through the mid to late sixties, and both he and the BBC are recruiting girls from
the Top ten Club right. Saville is recruiting them because he wants to molest them, and the BBC is recruiting them for the studio audience of their hit new TV show Top of the Pops because they have just teenagers come into dance, right, Like these girls are bringing brought into like dance on stage to be in the background. It's like in that clip I've shown you, you just have them as set dressings, right. And so you've got like Cecil Korr, who's the assistant producer for the show
and a twenty nine year old man. He'll go talent spotting out at club nights at the Top ten club and he'll hand out tickets to girls. And he had said later, I was looking for girls aged thirteen to seventeen, right, that's who he's handing out tickets to be on TV too, said one Top of the Pops director. If they were dancers or were attractive, obviously they got on. So again, both the BBC and Savile are preying on underaged girls.
The BBC because they the BBC recognizes that they have sex appeal quote unquote to the audience, to the musicians, to the DJs, and they want there to be girls younger than sixteen.
Here.
The BBC makes that decision too. This is not just Jimmy deciding to molest kids. The BBC wants to put kids in a position where they will be molested. That is a choice made by the people running the BBC, and it is a choice they keep making for decades. That is a very important part of the story.
Surely they're not getting paid like no, no, no, they're getting paid in the ticket to get They're.
Getting paid in the ticket. You know that, and maybe you'll get you know, with your favorite pop star or whatever. Right, that's there. I think what draws a lot of these kids in right, because obviously they're kids. Jimmy maintained his reputation as Britain's oldest teenager by speaking like kids, knowing their lingo and their music. But his larger appeal was the simple fact that he represented access to the pop
stars they idolized. Savell was constantly on the air on TV or in concerts introducing the Beatles, Manfred Mann and of course the Rolling Stones, and while the kids perceived him as having a close relationship to all these guys, the reality was often uglier. Let's take the Stones as an example. Savill was an early advocate of the band, even when the record company Deco wasn't sure they had what it took to outshine the Beatles. Savill had seen
the way audiences went nuts for the group. He described it as rioting, and he supported them in his he gets a newspaper column, so he's writing newspaper articles about the pop industry at this dime and in his discussions with industry insiders. This does not mean that he was friendly with or liked by the band members. In nineteen sixty four, after their first number one record, the Stones were booked to play at the Top ten club. The crowd that night was, for lack of a better word, insane.
Fights broke out constantly and the police even had to show up. And the Stones, to an extent, part of like what they're doing in this time is playing up how crazy their concerts get. This is what's going to kind of culminate and the like there's a like somebody gets killed at one of their concerts by a Hell's Angels, like back in the US, not crazy long after this period of time, because that's part of what makes the Stones famous, is how nuts their shows go, how crazy
their fans go for them. But things get so bad this night that the Stones refused to play when their time came up, and part because like they've lost their instruments, like the instruments they were supposed to have didn't show up, and they didn't want to play with like the venues, like backup set of instruments. They didn't think they were good enough. And that's just going to make the fans even crazier, which makes them less want to go on stage.
So Jimmy, who's out DJing to try and calm the crowd down, gets called up by an aid and he goes backstage to see what's wrong, and he's told that, like you know, the band isn't going to play. These instruments aren't good enough, Like they're just going to leave. And I'm gonna quote now from the book In Plain Sight. Saville's response was characteristically blunt. He pointed to where three of his largest minders were standing and growled, you've got the time it takes this stage to revolve to make
your mind up. If you're not going to play, you're going to be unconscious because my minders are going to chin all of you. I'll accept drummer Charlie Watts, that is Saville claimed that Watts looked him up and down before speaking. You would, wouldn't you, he said? No, Danger replied Saville, and I'll throw you to the fucking audience. I guarantee you that. And the Rolling Stones agreed. They take their preferred audience instruments and they play on there
and they go play their show. Right, this is a he does this with other people. This is just one example of like the way he is. He is very comfortable threatening violence even on these big pop stars. Right, that's going to be fair. That's that's wild, Like, that's crazy.
That's unhinged behavior. That that level of aggression. Like I'm sorry to make to make Jagger.
To Mick Jagger. Yeah, and again Mick Jagger. They're young, yeah, yeah, they're kids at this point too. They're not that much older than their teenage fans, whereas Jimmy Saville is now pushing like thirty something, like he's a mature adult. Yeah, Like you can't think of the Stones as like these massive figures that they are today. At this point, they're a lot less sure of themselves.
That's great context. Thanks.
Yeah. Yeah, So the Stones agree, they play the show, and Saville later told an interviewer that had they refused, I would have had the bastards chinned and slugged to the crowd. If they lived or died, it wouldn't have mattered to me. He's very open about all this stuff. What a maniac. What a fucking maniac. By this point in the late sixties, he's a well known MC and public figure. Saville got hired to host shows all over
the country. In nineteen sixty seven, the town of Otley hosted their annual civic Ball and named it the Pop Civic Ball to attract youngsters. Of course, Jimmy Savill was asked to attend as chief guest, and he responded with a list of conditions for his appearance. The first was that his normal two hundred pound fee had to go to a local charity. Right, So that's what you start.
Your first demand is, don't pay me, send the money to a local charity, right, because that deflex suspicion, particularly it to flex suspicion. Before his second and third condition, I wish to sleep the night on the Chevin, which is like a park or something nearby, in a tent which you will organize plus sleeping bag and a large torch. And this is the answer that the venue gives. I will personally organize a tent plus sleeping bags in a large torch for you to sleep overnight and moreover, will
hold you to it. And his third demand is a guard of honor of six young ladies in another tent, of course, to keep me safe. And the venue answers, I'll organize a guard of honor of six young ladies, but I won't be held to their comple alliance or your safety. Get it. The town, you know, whatever representative of the town is like, I'll make sure there's the six young ladies for you, but I won't make sure you don't bless him. Haa.
This is called sex trafficking.
This is in writing that.
Yeah, that's that's horrific. That's deeply horrible.
That's repub Oh, it gets so much worse. This happens all the time.
And again I've been angry with the entire episode, but that is absolutely just I'm disgusted.
Yeah, and this is public at the time. He talks about it to the media, that he made the town provide him with sixteen aged girls, and they did. Everyone knows this, it's not hidden. His fourth condition is that he'd be given a tour of the local hospital, because he likes volunteering at hospitals. We'll talk about that a lot more. But he loves going on, you know, doing
his good charitable work at these hospitals. Right, And so you see, you Sandwich, I want teenage girls and privacy so that I can molest them in between money to charity, volunteer at a local hospital.
Right.
You see what he's doing here. You know, now all of these becomes standard demands for him in the years to come. Whenever he's asked to do something like this. He is constantly hosting events and he will always say, Okay, I need you to provide me with this number of girls as an honor guard or whatever, you know, sometimes to camp with, sometimes to hang out with, sometimes to
like wake him up in the morning. Right. And I'll always open with a charitable donation and then in the middle is the girls, and then at the end is some other like good cause, volunteering at a hospital or something. All of these demands, particularly for the honor guard, were publicized at the time. Local press wrote about this. Jimmy
wrote about this in his autobiography. In his autobiography, which is published after he has awarded the o or Order of the British Empire, which is a step below knighthood. In his autobiography, he describes the teenage girls that this town provided with him him with as looking good enough to eat. Now, I don't know precisely what this is not a hidden.
What year are we in Robert here?
Sixty seven? Sixty seven?
And how old would he be?
Roughly, he's like he's got to be he's like twenty nine pushing.
Thirty and has the face of that is it looks.
Like Jimmy Saville. Yeah, I don't know precisely how old the girls were, but they all seem to have been under eighteen. In the book in Plain Sight Davy's Rights, and he's talking about a woman who told it, who was one of these girls and talked to him years later about it. Right. The woman recalled that it was bitterly cold when the girls got into their sleeping bags and the separate tenth that had been set up for
them in that clearing. It was at this point, in the early hours of the morning, that Jimmy Saville, who had been playing them with vodka all night but not drinking himself, came in and tried it on with each of the girls. Although the woman refused to elaborate on what had happened on the grounds that she didn't think it fair on the others in the tent that night. She did describe Jimmy Saville as a disgusting old man
and a pervert. Her version of events was that they were saved when youths from the rugby club shot out the paraffin lamps with air rifles. They had followed us up there, she said. She described the girls huddling in the tent while a fight broke out between Savel and the youths. Saville was violent, really nasty. Once he turned, she added, thank god the salute to those teenagers shooting in tent with an air rifle. Thank God for you.
The honor guard term is like so ironic and disgusting. Yeah, and also.
One of the grossest things I've ever heard.
Yeah, I was gonna ask you. You said the vodka thing. But like, is he is this a common thing that he's like applying them.
He does not seem to have been very much of a drinker or much of a I'm sure he did some, but he doesn't seem to be much of a drinker or march into drugs. But he lies girls with them. He does a lot of that in this period of time and later, so we'll talk more about that. But this is as good a time as any to go to ads.
I guess.
We're back. So the same year that Jimmy Saville helped host the oughtly pop civic Ball, a magazine called People. I don't think this is the People magazine we have today. I think it was a different magazine called People launched an investigation into Savill's predilection for young girls, based on numerous complaints by underaged girls that he had raped or otherwise abused them. This is happening as early as nineteen
sixty seven. The investigation was never published, though, because the editor of the magazine, Sam Campbell, had hired Jimmy Saville as a columnist because he's going to draw on young readers, and so basically he's like, we're not going to publish an investigation over the whether or not this guy molesting girls.
He's one of our most popular columnists, you know. In January of nineteen seventy two, after receiving the Obe People, this magazine published a four part series with Jimmy titled Me and My three Thousand Birds At Last, Jimmy Savill's own story, give you a guess as to what that's about.
Disgusting, Oh my god, yep.
Now, when you're in three thousands of very realistic I don't know, maybe not at this point in time, but his victim's number in the thousands.
And when you're amusing a pedophile of distinction with his ob.
With his ob yes, yes, pedophile ob. Now, when you're abusing women and girls at the rate Jimmy was during this period, you're going to need a close circle of cop friends if you want to avoid trouble. And from the start of his period of major fame in the late sixties through the early seventies up to the end of his life, the adult men that Jimmy Savills primarily social with appear to have been police officers. When he's hanging out with other adult men, they are often, if
not mainly, cops. Those are his best friends.
Is because they would all the cops. Yeah, they would be bastards.
During the height of his dance hall days, Manchester police officer Lewis the Lion Harper was Per Davies Jimmy Savile's eyes and ears. He's watching to hear if there are any complaints he needs to take care of Harper was the chief superintendent of the City Center and a prominent member of the Vice squad. As a note, when Harper died, he left more in his will than he had earned in total during his time on the police force. Not
cricket at all, not getting bribed by Jimmy. Yeah, I gave him that nickname.
Fucking yeah, like the lion Taiwan land Master asked, shit.
What the One of my sources for these episodes was an article in the UK Tribune by Ferrell Kenney. He notes that in Sable's out of print nineteen seventy four autobiography, As It Happens, Jimmy referenced a female Manchester police officer who attempted to bring charges against him for harboring a teenage runaway. That means a girl ran away from home and Jimmy was keeping her in one of his houses, right, Yeah. However, this officer was, in Saval's words, dissuaded from going through
with this by her colleagues. Quote because it was well known that where I to go, I would probably take half the station with me. Now does that mean that if Saval were charged, half the station would quit because they were his friends, or does that mean that if Savile were charged, he would tell stories about half the station because he was providing half the Manchester Police force with teenaged girls to molest. What do you think is more likely?
That's so shape.
I know what I think is more likely the finest Manchester's finest. Yeah, good guys. Now we know that during this period where Jimmy was managing his dance halls, doing Top of the Pops and starting with the TV show he's going to start, we'll talk about in part three jim Will Fix It, he impregnated at least two teenaged girls. Now, I'm only going to give you one of these accounts, and I'm sure there were more. I'm going to only give one of these accounts in the interest of just
not breaking everybody's spirit. But you should know this is happening more than the one time we're talking about.
My spirit's pretty broken before you even got to this part. This is just like yeah, yeah, christ.
Now, this particular allegation that I'm going to relate came out in October of twenty twelve, which is after Saville's death, But the alleged crime occurred in nineteen sixty four, when the woman in question was sixteen years old and a virgin. She had started an Elvis Presley fan club, and Savill invited her on his Radio Luxembourg show to talk about the fan club she had, and he tells her afterwards, well, I'm flying to America soon and I'm going to visit Elvis.
I'll be hanging out with him, So why don't you send me a picture of you that I can give to the King. Right, So she does, and I'm going to quote from Endplaine Sight as to what happened next. According to the woman, who did not want to reveal her identity, on returning from the States, Savile phoned her house and told her he had a present for her from Elvis. She was understandably thrilled and recalled walking to the London hotel where Savill was staying. She said he
met her in his pajamas. He then took her into his room, pinned her to the wall, and started kissing her. The man said she pleaded for him to stop. He whispered, You're an angel, before pushing her onto the bed and raping her. Afterwards, when he's done, he tosses her some badges from the new Elvis Presley movie kissing cousins and leaves that's the present from Elvis, So she goes home. After this, she misses her next two periods, and she
realizes that she's pregnant. She attempts to induce a miscarriage. Eventually, her father takes her to receive an illegal abortion, which she endures without painkillers. This was physically damaging enough that she endures multiple miscarriages as a young woman in her twenties. Again, not the only story like this, And again to a point of even when someone's technically legally of the age, he is still often raping the people who are legally
of age. It's just that who's gonna charge him with rape? The cops he's friends with.
Yeah, wow, Robert, Yeah yeah, I wasn't quite ready for that.
Yeah, that's what we're We're only going to relate one of the that the stories of girls that pregnant. But there's more than one. There's more than one. I don't know how many there were. Could have been hundreds, to be honest, Yeah, it could have been hundreds.
It's hard to hear, but it happened, and like we can't ignore, yeah, that these types of things had to happen. To so many people.
But wow, I'm the euphemism of honor guard or whatever, there's a lot of that.
There's a lot of real bleak stuff behind these euphemistic terms.
Yeah, just to say I'm so fucking glad that guy's dead.
I really, he's for sure dead.
Yeah yeah, but he had to pay for it a little didn't ever pay for it.
And so many such cases where this has happened, which is why it's important that we talk about horrific things that have happened in history and today so that like people know.
What to look for.
But this is, like, there were so many people where I think.
That's only gonna be more of it as this goes on.
Yeah, I think that's part of what's really hard to stomach for me, because so many people are aware and like, honestly hearing that you know, not that you know, any cop isn't a bastard, but hearing that a woman knew about this.
And a woman and tried to do something, try to.
Do something, but honestly, girl didn't try that hard, and like that's heartbreaking.
Well this, I mean, you know, she may have been threatened with murder, Like, yeah, a bunch of her fellow cops may have said, well, fucking kill Like, I don't know what you know, I'm like not to not to hold water for a cop, and I literally don't know, and I can imagine it pretty brutal.
All these people are responsible for his crimes, Like you knew, you fucking knew what he was, and like he one of the most vile people to ever live.
Oh yeah, well and one of the At this point in the story, you do you can still say the thing that, like this is all happening within this subculture pop music and the people who are like presenting it to the nation where this kind of behavior is extremely common and normalized. That's true up to this point in the story. It is not going to be true for
most of Jimmy Savile's life as a sex offender. When I tell you at this point that people implicated in his behavior are some cops and other DJs and like BBC people working at the time. By the end of this story, the entire royal family, including Princess die are implicated in degrees of his crimes. In addition to the In addition to Margaret Thatcher, the whole ruling class of England is implicated in what Jimmy Savile did. So that's cool. We'll talk about that in part three and four next week.
God, I love Princess Die. That ruined him?
Yeah yeah, I mean maybe she didn't know anything. I don't know. Prince Prince Charles shere did, King Charles sure did. Absolutely, we'll in the subsequent episodes. I don't know. I know that Die was a good friend of Savile's for the for a chunk of her life. I don't know what she knew, but we know what Charles knew and Prince Andrew.
Is so funny is when I saw your Epstein episode, I was like jealous of the guest and I manifested too hard because look what episode I wound up.
Yeah. Yeah, because he's very much in some ways is kind of like the English equivalent, right, you know, in some very different ways. And we'll talk about all that in part three and four. But yeah, you want to up plug your book before we roll out here.
Jesus Christ.
You guys, Girls Gone Girl Gone Wild. Girl's Gone Wild is similar to this but different. But Girl Gone Wild is a feminist manifesto.
So if you need something to just.
Wash out that gross taste in your mouth after that brutal rape scene we just heard.
Order yourself a copy. That's the best plug I have.
Cool Well, sorry for these episodes being so bleak, folks. Yeah, it's not going to get better, but hey, we'll get to you know, we will get to talk about Jimmy Savile experiencing some degree have come upance, not unfortunately if the legal variety. But I am saving a good story for the end of this just as a palette cleanser. So I'll promise you all.
That can't wait.
Well, shit, thanks.
Until next week. Everybody you know touch grass I had a dog. If if you know a BBC executive, sock them right in the teeth, you know, I mean it. Probably at this point all those guys are gone, but probably still deserve it.
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes that Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit remind me of Netflix. You don't miss an episode for clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube dot com slash at.
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