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.

i met him, on a charity walk, meeting him was the prize at the end,
what a disappointment he was - i didnt like him

Loved jim'l fix it. Always wanted to write in. He seemed creepier as he got older but I assumed he was just an eccentric old man. Men having sex with teenage girls wasn't that unusual then the whole "groupies" thing was very well known. It was seen as the girls fault for looking like adults. (Ie daring to have breasts) I would like to think that even in the 80's, a time when being gay was considered more vile than underage sex (or rape as it is thankfully now known) the depraved acts he committed with disabled people would have been shocking. But we see constantly what powerful men can get away with and he was no different. Some of the men from that era got their comeuppance it was just too late for him. Also loved Rolf Harris saw him at Glastonbury 2009 in the legends slot. No clue about him what so ever.

I thought he was just part of the furniture - there were lots of OTT acts around then, and weird attitudes around young girls. As others have said Benny Hill etc. It was right the way through popular culture: I even remember my DF singing "Thank heaven for little girls" and feeling really rattled and uncomfortable, although I couldn't put what I was feeling into words. He also thought Benny Hill was hilarious and 'just a bit of fun'. Looking back, it really damaged our relationship, but it was 'normal' then. Every girl I knew had been warned "just to ignore" the resident flasher in the woods.

I wonder if , given he was with so many women consensual or not, that he had any kids?

At the time of seeing the Louis Theroux documentary, my thought was that he was a gay man 'in the closet', to use the term of the time.

I grew up in 80's and will always associate him with Jim'll fix it. Was too young to see him as anything but a TV presenter at the time.

It’s interesting that so many people have raised how normal it was at the time for older male celebrities to be hanging round with much younger women, and how much more sleaze was on the TV in any case. I’m reminded of other threads asking people about their closest escape from a dangerous situation, or the weirdest thing they had seen at a neighbours house, where there was a recurring motif of commenters talking about being targeted by male sexual predators, often as children.

The environment shielded Savile at least as much as other people did. It was such a rapey world that he was a lot less obvious than he would have been now. A good reason for us to continue to challenge rape culture.

@mrburrsir

"Were ‘the rumours’ the show goes on about very widespread?"

They were, even Esther Rantzen (Childline) has apologised for ignoring them. But it would have ended her career. The BBC banned Johnny Rotten in 1978 for outing Saville. They stopped being rumours, but Saville was close friends with Prince Charles, he was later to be Harry's Godfather, until Diana blocked it. He was friends with Thatcher. When you look how she shut down Hillsborough, Saville's situation would be easy. There were questions on why and how much access Saville had to the Palace and every part of public life, thanks to his friends. Prince Charles hid a pedophile Bishop, Peter Ball. Same high friendship group, there's a BBC documentary on it.

As said look at Benny Hill and on the buses, creepy older men were celebrated and women and girls were supposed to be flattered.

@TheRealBoswell, do you actually think that does documents have been lost? There were 'rent boy ' scandals every week in the 80's concerning Tory male MPs. The young men looked underage, some were. It's been proven that the Special Branch made any allegations against Cyril Smith disappear, possibly because of how widespread pedophilia was across Downing Street and the Old Boys network.

Each generation has its entertainment which now seems bizarre.
Black and White Minstrel show?
Drag Race may be considered weird and uncomfortable for future generations. It already is to me but to say so woukd out me as an old hag.
Mary Whitehouse with her Viewers and Kisteners Assocuation criticised a lot of the tv at the time (although she didn’t get it right about JS) but to go against the popular, liberal point of view i anything led to ridicule.

Typos! Sorry!

Born early 70s and had no particular opinion of Savile - he was just another TV presenter.

Child of the 80s. There were loads of old men on telly, making (now) inappropriate jokes and dominating the media. Savile was just another craggy faced white man on the telly.

Loved RH cartoon time. All of us used to watch that, often before Allo Allo

Overtly pervy men were the norm on tv- look at Benny Hill.

I was born in the 80s. I watched Jim's Fix It and wrote in once.

Didn't really have any opinion on him either way.

As an adult looking back I'm surprised that he was so popular.

I remember him and didn’t think he was creepy. Just odd. Timmy Mallet on the other hand, made a children’s show that was obsessed with snogging! I remember that being weird. I absolutely adored Rolf Harris. I never heard rumours about JS, I think I was too young. And also with no internet it was harder for rumours to spread. I do remember there was a bit of a culture of ‘she’s legal now’ with 16 year old girls. In newspapers and stuff.

What he did was so heinous, I think its become standard for people to say he was creepy, they always thought he was weird etc. He was very popular.

I thought of him as eccentric. An oddity really. I admired his charity work a great deal. However we don't have the level of media including social media that we have now and may have revealed what he was like earlier. It was a very different time. If you look back now at some entertainment programmes from the 70's and 80's you'd be shocked at what passed for acceptable.

I didn't like him. He seemed "wrong", even to a child who watched allo allo and other TV programmes with really fucked up attitudes to girls.

I always think its telling so many of our generation just shrugged when the news came out about him after his death because of course we had already worked that out, yet were shocked about Rolf Harris.

@Feelingoktoday

Born mid 1960s. Lots of men looked and behaved like him. We had page 3, Benny Hill, women left work when pregnant, sexual harassment at work all the time. If I thought he was creepy then I also thought a lot of men were creepy then.

this exactly.

It is hard to imagine.
Benny Hill was considered to be fun family entertainment. It literally features Benny Hill leering after and sexually harrassing women. That is the 'fun' of the show.
I found him much more creepy than Jimmy Saville.
But if you said any of them were creepy, you would have been laughed at.

I do think it is different for those who knew/worked with him in person. They do seem to have had an inside track on his behaviour. But for those of us in TV land, he was part of a wider general atmosphere.

I didn’t think much about him but I watched his shows (gen X). If I said I found him creepy I’d be lying, he just looked like an eccentric man in funny outfits, he seemed to create an almost asexual persona. He was massively popular regardless of what people say now. He got away with abuse because he was charming and famous and knew how to manipulate powerful adults.

I was born in 1966, so a child of the 70s who a teen in the 80s. JS was just always there....a bit like Eamonn Holmes/Ant & Dec/Rylan Clark. I can't remember having a strong opinion of him, if I did it was like others have said of him being odd and eccentric rather than dangerous.

I was born in the mid 70s. So he was present on tele and I was aware of my parents calling him a creep, and changing channel often if he was on. So I was brought up to think he was dodgy. A lot of people my age probably were due to the rumours. So I can well believe they feel 'they knew'.
My husband was on a children's ward during a visit by him. Husband was bed bound and the nurse told his mum to stay with him as visits tended to get children 'overwrought' . Years later she feels the nurse wasn't warning her to try and get an autograph, but to keep as many parents by the beds of their children. Overseeing. Which is pretty sad, that professionals knew something was off but never acted on their concerns.

But it was the culture of the time. There were always whispers and disparaging remarks behind people's backs, smiles and politeness to faces same was true of that teacher in my school who was convicted of abuse a few years ago.

I went to see a few bbc shows as my dad worked there. One time my friend and me were walking down a corridor in the bbc and saville comes towards us and starts putting his arms around us and inviting us to his dressing room and we being stupid teenage girls were giggling and said we would love to go. As we were walking away with saville, Keith chegwin and Noel Edmonds came towards us and told saville someone was looking for him and he went off and left us. And Keith told us to never be on our own with that man. I think we had a lucky escape but when I told my dad about it he said oh he is just a harmless old man

@LethargeMarg

As a child of the 80s Jim ll fix it was one of my favourite programmes and he was always on the tv . Looking back now he seems really creepy but this was an era when a rolling stone in his 40s married a 16 year old after dating her for years and page 3 in the sun had a countdown till Sam fox was 16 , EastEnders had a pregnant school girl as a major storyline with her friends dad as the father which I don't remember being shown as seedy or grooming but more of a love story . So his awful jokes about young girls weren't so shocking in the context of the time . A lot of things look hideous now looking back as an adult.

This is a great summary of the the 80s. It was weird and I’ve only just realised how weird as DD is working her way through some 80s classic films with me. For example Pretty in Pink was, I thought, a lovely romantic movie where Duckie gallantly fights for Andi - nope, in actual fact Duckie is a stalker who won’t take no for an answer, shouting ‘you belong with me!’ and riding back and forth in front of her house, showing up at her work etc etc. n

I digress. Jim’ll Fix It was on when I was in primary school/early high school and we all just thought he was a strange but funny man. I definitely put him in the category of ‘oddball’ though - the kind of person you’d probably, as a teen girl, try to steer clear of if you were, for example, at a family wedding with them for a day. So clearly my early teen weirdo radar was working.

Jeezo @7spanishangels, lucky escape. Saved by Keith Chegwin!

I was born in 1970 and my DPs are amongst the least woke people ever, but I remember them not being keen on me watching Jim'll fix it and they look horrified when I said I was going to write in.

I sent loads of artwork into Take Hart, (or at least I think I did, I now wonder if my DPs posted it or not) so that was clearly different.

But times were different, there was that truly weird show in the 80s called mini pops where very young DCs ( around 5) dressed up as pop stars with make up and mimed to hits.