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.

Yep. I often wonder why people cover up these things for others.

Who is this? It's not PS is it as someone said this to me the other day

Yes, I imagine that is who is being referred to. Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.

I have very few memories of savile but I grew up without a father figure and found almost all men creepy as a young child to be honest.

I find the relationship with Charles really interesting. From the letters that were read out in the documentary PC was basically asking for PR advice from him like he was some kind of PR guru which of course we now know that he was seeing as he pulled the wool over so many people's eyes with such ease and without really hiding who he really was. I think PC knew he had a lot he could learn from him!

Also the stuff about him staying with his mother for 5 days after she died and his now known penchant for necrophilia. Makes you think....

Yep. Relationship with a minor who was a runner. Yet no action taken

Jimmy Saville wore a three piece suit and sat in a big chair on Jim'll Fix It in the late 1970s. Even with the chunky gold jewellery and bleached longish hair he looked respectable in a wide boy Costa Del Sol supergrass kind of way.

I concede that people whose ,memories of him were in the Nineties in satin shorts and string vest pretending to run the London Marathon might have been more clued-up than I was.

But even Louis Theroux was taken in, as he kept telling us at nauseating length after failing to nail Saville in his faux naif interview nearly 20 years ago.

Long ago - 1970s - my DM commented that he was unpopular with nursing staff at that big hospital in Leeds (St James?). I’m sure she said that people avoid him if he’s around. We lived in London so who knows how she knew this.

Leeds General Infirmary. He used to be a volunteer porter and had an office in the hospital. The investigation report makes very interesting reading.

In a word and at the time "creepy" but this was in an era where there a lot of creepy older men perving over young girls.

I mean Sam Fox posing topless on her 16th birthday!! What's more it was her mum who put her up for this and had sent in the topless photos of her (when she was 15 which even by the laws back then was illegal)

To be honest I found Benny Hill to be way more creepy (shudders) but I was genuinely shocked at Rolf Harris.

I think you'll find it was Samantha'Fox's dad who promoted that rather than her mum, but I agree, my mum would not have allowed it. But then neither would my dad. It wasn't because he was puritan but because I had nice brains as well as nice tits and brains last longer.

The main thing though is that my parents earned the money. They didn't live off me. That's the way things should go, isn't it?

I loved Benny Hill as did most people in the 1970s. The programme wouldn't happen now because of its sexism and racism. What made you shudder at the time and how old were you? I was a child and never noticed. I also liked Love Thy Neighbour and Mind Your Language.

Similarly with Rolf Harris? What made you realise that the kindly presenter of a programme about pets was a wrong 'un? When I was a kid, Rolf made a commercial encouraging parents to send their children to swimming lessons as a life skill and we thought it was as sensible as Jimmy Saville endorsing "Clunk, Click every trip" about wearing a seat belt in the 1970s.

Did you or your parents think there was anything wrong with Rolf and Jimmy fronting those campaigns? Did they stop you from watching or did you decide not to do that all by yourself?

If so, you and your family were a lot smarter than mine and most people.

@Enfys1982 I first learned about JS from Digital Spy but it was more about him being a secret necrophiliac in the hospitals he had access to rather than being a nonce. Although obviously, both are horrific. This was genuinely the first time I had heard about his activities, no one talked about it during my childhood, my parents didn’t shudder when he appeared on TV.

Were we all naive? Maybe, but turns out there were a lot of men just like him on TV, he is now thought of as being the worst offender but it just goes to show they were all at it, and he was just one of many.

Honestly, compared to Benny Hill chasing women round a park and trying to push them into bushes, Rod Hull grabbing crotches through the medium of Emu, and Jim Davidson talking about his “mate” Chalky White, Saville with his jewellery and catchphrases just blended into the background.

As stated above, even Louis Theroux failed to expose his true character and thousands lined to streets to mourn him.

He wouldn’t fool anyone today but then Philip Schofield is still on TV so maybe we are not as evolved as we think we are.

Arent their lots of celebs who had sex with children. Was David Bowie one of them?

Apparently David Bowie was one of them

but this is excused as that’s how it was in those days

yet Jimmy Page started to have sex with the same girl and he hide their relationship because as we all know it was not acceptable even in those circles its the same old story men in power got away with it and still do

Reading that report was very shocking. The issue of single sex wards was mentioned as in “we used to have them” and the recommendations included not placing children in adult wards ,but no recommendation about single sex wards.
I suddenly remembered that when I worked briefly as a teenager in a summer job, I remember being told to watch out for a certain porter. Much later in a different hospital role I had to go to the mortuary and was disgusted and appalled by pictures and comments on posters there. I reported it but it was rationalised as a coping mechanism because of what the job involved. Awful sickening misogynistic and cruel.

I posted on this thread, before it was revived, about the routine and normalised sexism and misogyny of the 70s. Savile’s creepy, yodelling, ‘ow’s-about-that-then public persona, arm clamped round some uncomfortable-looking nubile young girl on TOTP, was absolutely standard then, sadly.

We watched Jim’ll Fix It but I always found him weird and deeply jarring (not to mention a shit presenter, but that’s by the by). I was in secondary school in the 70s in the NW and it was a universally-known rumour that there was ‘something’ dark and sinister to do with Savile and mortuaries. I can’t recall being remotely surprised by this. He gave off major red flags and yes, it was an understood thing.

But as pps have all said, he was - for whatever reason - bizarrely untouchable. Perhaps partly because he hid in plain sight, joking about his prowess with the laydeez….he was so freakish I don’t think anyone actually believed this could be true, and there was maybe a refusal to confront the idea of the full horror of what he was actually doing.

I was young when I watched Jim 'll Fix It. I loved the programme and didn't notice anything untoward about Savile. As an adult when I watch footage I think he seems patronising and intimidating, but many adults did Lord it over kids more then than they do now, so I wouldn't have noticed at the time.

I loved Jim'll fix it and wrote in several times

I'm 46 and growing up everyone seemed to think he was creepy. I don't think that was always the case, people a decade or so older than me seem to remember him more fondly and were more surprised at all the revelations.

He got away with it partly because he looked and acted like a paedo/creep but anyone who said anything was just being judgmental and stereotyping him based on appearance and the fact that he was a bit eccentric and an older bachelor who lived with his mother.

I really liked him, he was a major "personality" of the eighties.

My grandma used to run a cafe in Leeds. He used to come in and stroke my hair (I was 3 🙄) and say he ‘wanted my hair’. He wrote a birthday card to me which I scribbled all over. Obviously I had bad vibes from him
but nobody could say a word against him in those days.

Kids feel those vibes very strongly. Adults are socially conditioned to suppress them.

Agree totally!

As a young child he gave me the creeps... To the extent where i wouldn't watch totp if he was hosting.

It is difficult to understand how different 'jokes' /banter was then... When vile mysogynist, racist crap was normalised.

Agree too, re the police... Was there never an internal enquiry into their actions... Esp those who made complaints against him, 'vanish', specifically his lunch club companions.

Yes this is so true. I was unfortunate to meet him quite a few time as a child. Always got bad vibes from him.

Saville was kn own as the' perv' in my house