To wonder what people really thought of Jimmy Savile when he was alive?

[BarmyBrunhilde]

I'm a millennial, and was only really vaguely aware of who he was really, so watching the recent Netflix documentary I was fairly bemused to see how popular he seemed to be. Obviously he was beloved by the establishment, including the royals, Thatcher etc but he seemed to have massive following among the public.

Everyone now seems to say 'oh yes I always knew he was creepy' but I have to wonder - for those who grow up in the 60s-80s how was he really seen? In the documentary it seems like he had always had crowds of screaming and adoring fans, and they generally seemed none the wiser? It seemed like industry people and his poor victims were the only ones who really had any idea.

MP's like Harriet Harman & Patricia Hewitt were leaders of the National Council for Civil Liberties, an organisation which supported the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE), even funding it for 3 years in the 1970's.

How on Earth did this happen? Have they ever had to answer to a public enquiry as to why they thought this was a remotely good idea? It’s truly shocking.

I worked as a Secretary at Leeds Infirmary in my early 20’s. He worked as a volunteer Porter there at the time, he always absolutely gave me the creeps whenever I saw him.

I had no knowledge whatsoever about his abusive life, but he always made my flesh crawl.

Harman wasn't even a member of the NCCL when PIE was given affiliate membership, which stupidly was just a membership fee, with zero checks on anyone paying this fee.

A similar slur by the Mail, was done on Ed Milibands father, that he was anti-Semitic or Starmer is a multi millionaire property developer, when the field in question was a donkey sanctuary.

Much like the majority of slurs on Labour MPs they aren't true.

I think this is a huge part of it.

He WAS creepy - that’s pretty much an objective fact - but at the time it was just so normal for men to be creepy. It was just something lesser beings (like women and children) had to tolerate. Fact of life. No point complaining about it.

My dad went to a boarding school in County Durham in the 60s (so admittedly before Savile era) and he’ll say matter-of-factly ‘we just knew which teachers liked to look at us in the showers and we tried to avoid being alone with them’.

But even with all that said, I’ll still never truly understand how, with so many hundreds of victims, it didn’t properly come out until after JS’ death. That’s not intended to be victim-blaming by the way. But I just still really struggle to comprehend how so many people were successfully silenced for so long.

My dad made us turn the tv off when Jim’ll Fix It came on during the 70s. He loathed him. Frankly he was a man of conservative taste but he was right in this case.

This article says otherwise! They wanted to uphold the rights of people promoting paeodphilia

https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/2014/mar/02/how-paedophiles-infiltrated-the-left-harriet-harman-patricia-hewitt

@Coffeeandbourbons

In your link:

(Harman) said her husband had successfully fought to stop PIE having any influence in the NCCL in 1976 – two years before she joined as its legal officer

Admittedly, any group could join the NCCL, which had more than 1,000 affiliate member organisations and the council's motion probably owed more to defending the principle of free speech than defending PIE

So it doesn't really say otherwise....

Age of consent in much of Europe is lower than 16, 14yo in 7 EU countries (btw i think 16 is far better)

Also the Guardian published another article in which they support Harmans position.

anyway, its off topic, Saville was a monster, defended by the establishment but clearly in the 70s, he was very popular, with viewing figures around 15m.

I was born in 65 and remember Jim’s fix it- he gave me the total creeps. I did write as I wanted to meet a famous show jumper but I do remember hoping i did not get chosen as I didn’t want to meet him.
Watched some of the Netflix documentary- much of his behaviour was sadly normal in those days.
I vaguely remember Louis Thereux doing a documentary-when he came across as sad and pathetic. I just wish he had been alive when it all came out - hate to think he lived his life thinking he had got away with it. Horrible man

It was a different time ,I imagine it's easy to silence victim and even quite a few if they all tried to speak out at different times ,now we have the internet and 24 hour news coverage it's not so easy
Plus there will.a lot of fans around ,'re streets were lined during his funeral and lots of celebrities giving their heartfelt condolences when he died

One victim*

70s child here.
I think the public were split really.
There was one group who believed the rumours, which sounded so far fetched at the time, and another group who believed him to be a good man raising so much for charity, English eccentric, unlucky in love, looked after his mum etc.

He was a cunning abuser who worked hard to build a facade to enable him to get away with his crimes.
Everything he did furthered his ability to carry on in plain sight.
The Roman Catholic accolades, the Royal connection, the free reign of hospitals and morgues...

You can look back and see now how wrong it all was now but he'd perfected a lifestyle to further his abuse. Part of this was building a persona above reproach.

So what that Harman wasn't in the NCCL when PIE affiliated?
That's like saying "I didn't start the fight" after choosing to take part in a bar brawl. Doesn't make you any less guilty of punching people, does it?

PIE was a NCCL affiliate from '75 - '83.
Harman was Legal Officer from '78 - '82, & made no move to disasociate NCCL from PIE.

Exactly which senior establishment figures she was sucking up to by not denouncing & disbarring PIE is mostly still a matter for speculation, but government ministers & diplomats were amongst those implicated, or proven to be abusers, in the fallout. Some of them posthumously, such is the nature of governmental whitewashing.

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/harriet-harman-pie-scandal-were-british-establishment-paedophiles-involved-1437900

I love it when people say they always knew Jimmy Saville was a wrong 'un even as a small child in the '70s. I don't disbelieve them, I just marvel at how smarter than me they must have been back then and even smarter than my parents and everyone I knew.

It's a bit like when people my age and younger say they always knew Diana was being used as a brood mare. I didn't. I thought it was wonderful and so did my sister and all my friends. In our dreams Charles would have had a head transplant with Prince Andrew, but you can't have everything, even in fairytales.

I remember watching the wedding and my dad saying she was a brood mare and my mum telling him to shut up. Sorry, dad, you were often right and Mum was sometimes wrong. She was a bit swept up in it but most of the time you were both right.

I was born in 1964 and I absolutely loved Jim'll Fix It as did my schoolfriends. I was dying to go on it but couldn't think of anything to write in about. If I had been chosen, I can't see why my parents wouldn't have let me go but one or both would have come with me. That was because I was a child and like most parents, they took their responsibilities very seriously and loved me very much.

Probably both of them would have come because it would have been an exciting day or days out for us all. If anyone had tried to separate us they would have walked me away, probably crying and not understanding and they would have tried to explain things in a way I could understand without being too graphic.

Like most people they were nobody's fools but I want to make it plain that is not the same as me calling people who have been manipulated and intimidated, fools.

It is frighteningly easy for that to happen especially when money and fame and people running around with clipboards and barking: "This is how we do it in TV Land. Now you sit there while we take your little girl into Make Up and to meet Jimmy alone."

Being fooled has happened to us all to a greater or lesser extent and anyone who says they've never been taken in ever over anything is either extremely forgetful or a liar.

The thing is with paedophiles whether they are famous and never charged like Jimmy Saville or even more famous and acquitted of all charges like Michael Jackson or just the anonymous bloke who lives down your road with some puppies to show you, they pick their targets. They choose the vulnerable who won't be believed. It would be very stupid to target a child whose parents were around all the time and would scream blue murder.

Saville's victims of choice were wayward teenage girls from care homes who people thought of as little tarts. They still do, actually. Or girls from naicer homes who'd come for an exciting day out hoping to meet pop stars on TOTP and maybe getting on the telly not dreaming that they were going to get groped or worse.

Maybe my parents had Saville's number all along and if a letter saying Jim would fix it for me had arrived they would have sat me down for a serious chat along the lines of: "If a man comes up to you in the swing park and says mummy's ill and he'll take you to the hospital to see her, don't go with him. Use the 2p from your emergency money to phone Mrs Turner next door but don't go on your own. Walk to the phone box with your friends and stay there. until Daddy comes". But that never happened so they didn't have to do anything and I carried on enjoying Jim'll Fix It on Saturday evenings.

I was born before you OP and although I always thought he was weird and creepy, never did I think he was so depraved.

one of the camera operators on the show got my friend and me tickets for TOTP. He warned us to keep away from Saville as ‘ he has wandering hands’.

that was in 1967.

@SmallFerret Im not sure what your saying here, Harman is/was a paedophile sympathiser?
Were the NCCP even allowed to dis bar a legal organisation?

To me focusing on a Labour MP for events that happened over 40 years ago, when people like Saville were knowing allowed free rein shows perhaps you ve another agenda? trying to link Saville with the Labour party....

Harman as far as we know, had nothing to do with JS.

As for Saville, wasn't he heavily involved with the Tory party and in particularly Thatcher? who supported his "work" at Stoke Mandeville and other hospitals

Margaret Thatcher, the PM of the country at the time was the one who kept on pressing for him to be knighted FFS.

You were privileged insiders in that you were friends with someone who worked on the show and who wanted to warn you. Lucky.

Most girls who got tickets for TOTP didn't get that warning and neither did the viewers at home. So most people didn't know.

As I said, I loved Jim'll Fix It. I didn't think Jimmy Saville was weird or creepy when he was presenting TOTP but preferred it when Noel Edmonds did. We all liked Noel Edmonds and Kid Jensen.

I put Jimmy Saville on TOTP in the same category as when Fluff Freeman did it. They were really old but Sparks were on next. Who pays much attention to the presenters?

Im not sure what your saying here, Harman is/was a paedophile sympathiser?
She certainly sympathised with the rights of paedophiles to campaign for lowering the age of consent.
There is also no way she was unaware of the even more sinister aims, as many people in the '70's were outraged by PIE's tactics & goals -
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26352378

Were the NCCP even allowed to dis bar a legal organisation?
Of course they were. As you said yourself, membership was no more onerous than paying a £15 annual fee. All NCCL needed to do was not renew, if they didn't feel up to the publicity & potential shitstorm of a more active banning process.

To me focusing on a Labour MP for events that happened over 40 years ago, when people like Saville were knowing allowed free rein shows perhaps you ve another agenda? trying to link Saville with the Labour party....
Absofuckinglutely not.
I have mentioned several MP's. I don't give a shiny shit what colour rosette they sported.

Harman as far as we know, had nothing to do with JS.
But she had plenty to do with PIE, which was one of the interconnected circles within the Westminster Paedophile ring. Savile was connected to senior political figures who were part of, or who knew of, org's like PIE; the Elm Guest House scandal; the care home managers who colluded in the procuring of their young wards, outreach agencies for troubled youngsters; the KGB (really!); Savile himself.
If you google Operation Fairbank & Operation Midland you'll see that police were & are still investigating the links & activities between these people & organisations.

As for Saville, wasn't he heavily involved with the Tory party and in particularly Thatcher? who supported his "work" at Stoke Mandeville and other hospitals
I wonder if you are attempting to negate my statements by pretending they are motivated by party politics? Kindly stop it, it's not the case.

Thatcher CERTAINLY knew about the Savile rumours. M15 reported to her government, & they were aware!
Savile hid in plain sight, protected by all the dirt he held on senior figures like Cyril Smith, & his influence in procuring vulnerable children for the Westmister VIP paedo circuit.

His silence for a gong.

I was a child of the 70s and Firstly I would say that , as a child, Jim'll Fix It was a great programme. It just seemed like a brilliant concept - kids having their wishes come true.
I even wrote into it with a request.

Yes he seemed like an odd bloke, but these were the days of Rod Hull and Emu, a crotch grabbing puppet, and many other eccentric entertainers.

The documentary showed that Thatcher was a big fan, as was the Royal family.

When he died, although there were rumours, the overall impression was that he was one our 'great British eccentrics'. Ricky Gervais was one of the first to take to twitter, to say just that, and what a said day for the nation.

His radio 1 colleagues were notably distancing themselves, saying that they didn't really know him and that he kept himself to himself .

When I was at college in the 70's I had a boyfriend who had done his art foundation year at Leeds Art College. I remember him telling me about the rumours about Saville's activities including necrophilia at Leeds i. I recall thinking that this made sense as he had that "weirdo" vibe. Much later on a friend of mine who was a teacher told me that they had invited Saville to open the school fete and that she found him creepy. What was even creepier was the fact that he kept turning up every year and the head had to ask him not to as he not welcome. The rumours were always there but as others have said, men could get away with a lot more in that era. I can recall so many times I was groped as a teenage girl including by a doctor. I never told anyone about this as nobody would have listened or believed me. In fact I only began thinking about it after a friend recounted that this had happened to her at the hands of the same doctor when she, like me was 15. Powerful men will always take advantage of the vulnerable, we just have to hope that those who speak up these days are believed and supported

In the 1980s when I was in my 20s there were a lot of jokes about Jimmy Saville fucking corpses while working as an unpaid hospital porter. I don't know whether I thought it was true or not. I didn't think much about it at all. I think it just fitted because he looked a bit strange by then.

The thing is that not all sex offenders or dodgy people do look strange.

Saville did but Jeffery Epstein didn't.