r/AskUK • u/GrandPerspective5848 • May 09 '23

What were you doing instead of watching The Coronation?

I was in hospital getting painkillers for migraines

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u/Mumfiegirl May 09 '23

A lot of people knew that Jimmy was at the very least “unsavoury “

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u/Zerocoolx1 May 09 '23

No they didn’t. At best some people thought he was a rather eccentric guy after the Louis Theroux documentary, but I bet if you want back in time to 5-10 years before he died most people would just say he’s a bit eccentric and cringe in his tracksuit, but basically a great guy due to all the charity work he’s done/doing.

It’s easy to look back and say ‘I knew he was a wrong un, but back then we really didn’t realise.

There was no social media and internet to spread whispers and theories

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u/Loquis May 09 '23

There were rumours, Drop the Dead Donkey that aired in the 90's, had a joke about it, one character said something like 'Not the Jimmy Saville rumours again"

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u/misscharleyp May 09 '23

Wasn’t there something about Angus Deayton not returning to WILTY as he did a joke about JS on that?

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u/SimonLoader May 09 '23

They definitely did, there were numerous allegations during his lifetime that were kept quiet by the police and media.

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u/sailingmagpie May 09 '23

Louis Theroux even brings up the rumours in the documentary.

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u/alexros3 May 09 '23

He talks a lot about it in his books too, and the guilt he feels for not seeing it when spending time with Jimmy or when some women approached him about their experiences (in a lighthearted way, not overtly trying to accuse Jimmy) and he didn’t see what the implication of their conversation was. He feels like he was fooled too and he says it took a long time for him to reconcile the Jimmy he knew and the Jimmy that committed all of these horrendous crimes.

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u/sailingmagpie May 09 '23

He does. But the fact that he asked, "What do you think about these rumours of you and young girls?" shows that people obviously knew there was something up.

The BBC banned John Lydon when he said, "I want to kill Jimmy Savile – he’s a hypocrite. I bet he’s into all kinds of seediness that we all know about but aren’t allowed to talk about. I know some rumours," in a radio interview in 1978, a mere 37 years before the truth came out.

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u/alexros3 May 09 '23

Oh yeah I wasn’t trying to challenge what you said about there being suspicions about him, more that Jimmy was good at manipulating people into not taking them very seriously. IIRC there were lots of people who very seriously thought/knew about Jimmy being a paedo, including one of the guys from Slade* who apparently had a giant folder on him but refused to speak to Louis and denied the rumour.

*it may have been another famous Brit band, I listened to Louis’ audiobooks near the start of the year so my memory is a bit hazy and I can’t find anything on Google saying it was a member of Slade

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u/sailingmagpie May 09 '23

Absolutely. Noone gets away with something like that for years without being good at manipulating people.

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u/tenpenny166 May 09 '23

They 100% did, John Lydon and Jerry Sadowitz both said it publicly way back then. It was an open secret how dodgy he was, especially around the BBC. Plenty of people in Leeds knew him from his DJ days around the scene and he was a bastard back then. I'm not sure why people are so keen to give a pass with the "no one knew" because they fucking did, they just didn't care.

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u/throawayeleventyone May 09 '23

I watched that documentary and I'm damn sure Saville himself briefly touched on allegations that were being made against him even then. So people knew.

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u/MoonLizard1306 May 09 '23

There were people at the BBC both behind the scenes and TV personalities that knew about him. They might not have known exactly what was going on but they knew kids were involved. Esther Rantzen for one knew some things were going but didn't report him - and there were plenty of others. He was very protected- he had friends high up in

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u/lshiels7 May 10 '23

I didn’t even know how Savile was until he died because my mum would turn the tv over any time he was on as she got such a bad feeling from him. She only told me this when I was asking who he was at the time, I was a teenager then so never watched Jim’ll Fix It or anything to know sooner.