ANDREW NEIL: The Reckoning was distressing for me because it brough back unpleasant memories of my own encounter with Jimmy Savile in 1995.
Watching BBC TV's grim but superb four-part drama on Jimmy Savile, The Reckoning, was distressing for me not just because it was about an evil predator who preyed on the young and defenceless, but because it brought back unpleasant memories of my own encounter with him in a Channel 4 studio in 1995.
I had harboured a visceral loathing for Savile ever since, as a kid in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I was forced to listen to his Teen And Twenty Club show on Radio Luxembourg in bed at night on my transistor radio because the BBC never played the sort of music I liked. But it went no further than suggesting Savile had an unhealthy and inappropriate obsession with young teenage girls, generally referred to as 'groupies' in these days, who may or may not have been over the age of consent.
In these days, famous DJs like Savile were just as well-known as the pop stars whose records they played — and they too attracted their share of adoring groupies. What they did manage to establish, however, was that Savile was stranger and more odious that even I thought. Despite the fact he promoted himself as a 'ladies' man', we could not find a single woman he'd ever dated, much less anyone he'd had a relationship with. Indeed, the only woman with whom he appeared to have a close relationship was his mother — 'the duchess' — on whom he professed to dote. So not quite the playboy, then.
It only added to the Savile enigma, making his defences even harder to penetrate. Since The Reckoning has started to air, there are plenty of wiseacres on social media averring that they knew about Savile all along or that they had a sister or friend who worked in a hospital where Savile was omnipresent and they always said he was a rum 'un.
Of course, they were not 'nobodies'. They were very much 'somebodies' who deserved our protection, which we failed to give. The Reckoning shows nothing explicit, but I defy you to watch the scenes where Savile moves in on his prey without having to wipe a tear from your eye — or control your mounting anger.
I saw this first-hand during that interview. As my questions became more insistent, the more the audience turned on me. He played them like a fiddle. By the end of the interview I was the villain, he was the hero. I should have put an investigative team on him. As for the red-top tabloids, I guess their editors saw no mileage in putting a lot of legally risky effort into bringing down someone their readers largely revered.
Even after his death, the BBC can't stop the hero worship. BBC2's Newsnight starts a major investigation into him, but it's canned from on high. The BBC wants a clear run for its Christmas Special, in which he is deified for an hour. Now the police were prepared to place great credence on the obviously fantastical ramblings of Carl Beech, who claimed to be the victim of a child abuse ring operating at the heart of the Establishment.
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