TV icon accused of child sex abuse
Since his death a year
ago at age 84, Jimmy Savile, the popular TV host, disc jockey and
charity fundraiser has been knocked off his perch as a national
treasure, accused of being a predatory pedophile who used his fame and
position to abuse youngsters, sometimes on BBC premises.
The corporation has been
widely criticized for its handling of the crisis, which has grown in
recent days. British police say more than 200 possible victims have now
been identified in what one officer Commander Peter Spindler said was
"alleged abuse on an unprecedented scale."
But who was Jimmy Savile
and how did he become the eccentric star -- a cigar-smoking,
jewel-encrusted, larger-than-life character who was rewarded with a
knighthood for his charitable work?
He mixed with British
high society, and his death was greeted with sadness by many, including
Prince Charles and his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall. He was buried with
customary glitz in a gold-colored coffin and with a green beret
presented to him by the Royal Marines -- but his life began amid much
humbler surroundings.
Savile was born in Leeds
in northern England on Halloween in 1926 and as a teenager conscripted
to work as a coal miner during World War II -- these young wartime
miners were known as the Bevin Boys. He was one of the surviving Bevin
Boys who received an award from the then British Prime Minister Gordon
Brown in 2008 for helping to keep the mines operational during the
conflict.
Savile suffered serious
spinal injuries in a mine explosion and left the colliery but it doesn't
appear to have stopped him from lifelong participation in sport.
TV icon sex-abuse scandal rocks the BBC
In the 1950s he took up
wrestling and cycling, and he appeared regularly on British television
running in marathons for charity even into his 70s.
In an interview with the Guardian newspaper
in 2000 he spoke of his love of sport. "If you look at the athletics of
it," he told the newspaper, "I've done over 300 professional bike
races, 212 marathons and 107 pro fights." He proudly announced that he
lost 35 of his first 35 fights.
Jimmy Savile's 9-year-old Scout victim
"No wrestler wanted to
go back home and say a long-haired disc jockey had put him down. So from
start to finish I got a good hiding. I've broken every bone in my body.
I loved it."
BBC in hot seat over Savile scandal
Cycling Weekly reported
last year that he also had been a semi-professional cyclist and competed
as Oscar 'The Duke' Savile in the 1951 Tour of Britain, and supported
cycling charities most of his life.
His broadcast career
took off in the early 1960s but he said he had been playing records in
dance halls from the mid-1940s, later claiming that he was the first to
use the double-deck turntable, though commentators have pointed out that
they were available decades earlier.
He recalled selling just 12 tickets for his first show but said he enjoyed creating what he referred to as the "atmosphere."
"There was this amazing
effect: what I was doing was causing 12 people to do something," he told
DJHistory.com in 2004. "My thrill is looking at them, and they're all
doing what they're doing because I've just put this thing on. It's a
hell of a thing," he said.
He joined the
independent station Radio Luxembourg as a DJ in 1958, but his big break
came in 1964 when the BBC approached Savile to be the first host of "Top
of the Pops" -- a show that became a huge hit for the BBC. It also
began a 30-year TV career that was a showcase for his extravagant dress,
yodels and catchphrases like "Now then, now then, and "How's about that
then."
The BBC gave him his own
show between 1975 and 1994 in which he helped hundreds of hopefuls,
mostly children, fulfill their dreams to meet famous people and take
part in stunts. "Jim'll Fix It" aired in the prime teatime slot on a
Saturday, and at the height of its popularity, the BBC said it was
receiving 20,000 requests a week. Famous fixes included an encounter
with boxing legend Muhammad Ali and the boy scouts who wanted to eat their packed lunches on a roller coaster, resulting in a predictable mess.
Generations of Britons
also remember him for a string of public information films including a
road safety promotion that encouraged motorists to use their seat belts
-- a campaign that started before wearing belts became compulsory in the
UK. Savile's closing catchphrase "clunk click every trip" was instantly
memorable and caught on with the watching public. He also promoted the
national rail network in a campaign dubbed "This is the age of the
train."
Savile was knighted in
the 1990 Queen's Birthday Honors for "charitable services," adding to
the OBE (Order of the British Empire) he received in the 1970s, and he
set up the Jimmy Savile Charitable Trust.
Savile was well-known
for raising money through charity runs but also worked as a volunteer
hospital porter and had a close association with the Stoke Mandeville
Hospital spinal injuries unit.
Stoke Mandeville's
Jimmy's Café, named after the TV personality, has now been changed since
the sex abuse scandal surfaced and following specific allegations
widely reported in the British press that one of his alleged victims
Caroline Moore, now 53, was sexually assaulted by Savile in a Stoke
Mandeville corridor in 1971, when she was a 13-year-old patient.
He told the BBC in 2000 that he had raised £40m ($64 million) for charity during his lifetime.
In 1988 Savile was
appointed to a senior role at Broadmoor Hospital -- a high security
psychiatric hospital in England that treats some of the most dangerous
men in the country -- a role that is now being investigated by the UK's
Department of Health.
The department says that in hindsight he should not have been appointed.
Although he was
perceived as an odd and eccentric character, the British public has been
shocked by the allegations. The Savile family had his tombstone removed
from his burial site out of "respect to public opinion."
Dominic Sandbrook,
author of a series of histories of modern Britain, told CNN: "Because he
was associated with the BBC, people trusted him and thought of him as a
family-friendly face. He was a massive presence in the living rooms of millions of British families."
But when Jimmy Savile
died, fellow BBC disc jockey Tony Blackburn hinted that he was an
isolated figure, telling the BBC: "He was just a complete one-off. I
think he was a bit of a lonely character as well. In the privacy of his
own life I don't think he had very many friends."
Film-maker Louis Theroux
perhaps gained more of an insight into what many would regard as odd
behavior. In a documentary made in 2000 he interviewed Savile in a flat
where his mother had lived but still kept her clothing hanging in the
wardrobe 27 years after her death. In the same program he also revealed
that he only took a single pair of underpants with him when he went away
and washed them in the sink every night.
Despite hosting a
children's show, Theroux asked him why he hated youngsters and he
replied: "We live in a very funny world and it's easier for me as a
single man to say I don't like children because that puts a lot of
salacious tabloid people off the hunt."
And when he was
confronted about sexual abuse allegations in a 2007 radio interview, he
brushed it off with a laugh, saying: "What's the point of responding to
something that's not true?"
The extensive
investigations into Savile's behavior are only just beginning, but it
appears his reputation as a fun-loving host of pop and a tireless
charity worker are already ruined.
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