Jimmy Savile series Netflix

Cafe Society
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I don’t think Soham was mentioned, but the CRB checks were put in place to prevent offenders getting jobs with children were not implemented uniformly at the BBC. After the scandal, they were tightened up, but not completely. Talent is still given a lot of deference at the BBC. Savile set off another panic, but this seemed to be in the institutions to cover themselves.

Operation Yewtree into Savile’s activities spawned several subsequent police investigations into other famous personalities. In some of these investigations the police work was very questionable and this led to some men being accused, arrested and bailed on very flimsy evidence. Operation Midland gave credence to a fantasist who accused several senior figures of being child molesters. Other investigations resulted in minor charges for events that took place decades previously. Some men were interviewed several times and no charges brought. There was also the treatment of Sir Cliff Richard were the police appeared to co-ordinate with the BBC to ensure the raid was filmed. This was for an offence that supposedly took place 29 years earlier. There was a court case and the BBC were successfully sued for invasion of privacy.

For a time it became ‘open season’ on many male celebrities. Accusations were made and the police took them all very seriously. The police went from not taking accusations seriously enough to taking every historic accusation very seriously indeed to escape criticism. Then, they were criticised for conducting a witch hunt. This police behaviour may have been a consequence of the Leeds police and their overly friendly relationship with Savile, the Friday morning club that was mentioned in the Netflix documentary.

There were a lot of institutions going into full self protection mode following the Savile scandal. The Netflix documentary did not dwell much on any of this, it focussed on Savile himself. I suspect the forthcoming BBC docudrama may do the same. Savile’s zany antics was a popular subject for mimics. Far more entertaining to focus on this creepy clown personality than a dry inquiry about which grey eminence knew what was going on when.

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Operation Yewtree was definitely problematic, but at the same time, it did convict numerous high-profile men in a pretty definitive way.

I’m not sure that a documentary about Savile and his crimes should, instead, as you wish it to, spend time talking about other people who did not commit crimes. And it still has zero to do with the Soham murders or parents being scared and overprotective.

CRB checks don’t necessarily apply to TV presenters because they’re never supposed to be left alone with children interviewees while at work for general safeguarding rules anyway, and AFAIA Savile never committed his offences at work in his media job. He used his job to get access to girls and young women, but in more subtle, “I’m famous and am having a party with famous people, this band you like might be there” way.

That’s not to excuse the BBC - it’s just that CRB checks and Soham have nothing to do with this. Not all abuse of young women and girls is directly connected; it’d be easier to deal with if it were, like the pizzagate people think, but it’s not.

(For the Americans - a school caretaker/janitor, Ian Huntley, abducted and murdered two 10-year-old best friends in the small town of Soham. It was and is a hugely well-known case across the country. Huntley had never been convicted of a sex-based crime, but had been accused on several separate occasions. The CRB/DBS checks brought in after his conviction can include accusations; they won’t always, but with ten completely unconnected accusations, it’s very very likely they would be included on the check and he would have been denied employment working with children or vulnerable people).

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It seems there have been internal reports in the BBC that suggest that a more cautious approach is appropriate. The checks should apply to anyone working with children, not simply anyone working alone with children. The Daily Mail is on the case.

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But the Mail, as ever, if wrong. If the children have a parent or guardian always with them, and they always should under the law for employing child actors and participants, the staff don’t have to have a DBS check.

It’s certainly advisable for them to get one, but it is not a legal requirement.

It’s also not actually putting the children at risk, because if for some reason the children are there without a parent or guardian, the staff definitely will need a DBS check.

Even teachers can work temporarily without a DBS check being completed, as long as another adult is always with them when they’re in contact with children. It happens sometimes, especially on teacher training courses (in which the majority of the course is in the classroom from very early on), because the applications can occasionally be delayed for a long time.

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What is a legal requirement is one matter. But organisations will develop their own internal policies and may decide to operate one based on a simple precautionary principle: everyone who works with children must have a DBS certificate. Given the anxiety amongst parents this is unsurprising. It avoids their judgement being questioned by parents who may not appreciate the latitude of legal requirements but be quite absolute in their fears for the safety of their children. That is a difficult conversation.

Every time a scandal like this is in the news, it causes a wave of anxiety. Some schools have serious problems in recruiting male teachers. However the victims of Saviles predations were in the care of less vigilant institutions that did not provide sufficient oversight. Quite the reverse, they gave Saville the run of the place and access to vulnerable patients.

That has been addressed by a clear requirement to have a ‘safeguarding’ policy. The Mail article refers to a report that expresses concern that this responsibility is devolved down to junior managers at the BBC who are easily overruled by the high value given to ‘talent’. So checks are not made. When they are done later, they reveal some cases with criminal records that should ring alarm bells.

Getting the balance right for an institution is precarious and requires good governance. A quality that is often in short supply in many institutions.

One aspect of the Savile case earlier in his career was the celebrity DJ/groupie thing. He targeted girls for a ‘reform school’ who were into trading favours for tickets for shows and probably alcohol and drugs.

These kids were seen as a lost cause by social services and police and this attitude came out later in subsequent scandals where it was revealed that groups of criminals frequently targeted childrens homes and trafficked the girls into prostitution. As well as a ‘safeguarding’ policy, there is now a ‘people trafficking’ policy. It is a slow process of institutional repair.

Scandals tend to lift the lid on serious weaknesses and questionable values in many of our institutions. If we focus on just the drama and personalities for entertainment it tells a story, but does not really tackle the underlying problems, which are often endemic. Solving such problems with policy changes and keeping these monsters out is hard work. Predators are criminals and they often move around. Gary Glitter, an entertainer of the same vintage as Savile, found that he could get away with his activities if he went overseas to countries where child protection laws are rudimentary or easily avoided if you are a rich.

One day we might have a rational approach the problem of predators becoming embedded in our institutions. But we are limited by the emotional reaction to these crimes. It is simpler to think of evil monsters rather than sick individuals and poor management. I am amazed by the way these characters are portrayed as very clever. They are not, they simply stumble on open doors.

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I was thinking too that Savile was “lucky” to have died just as social media was really coming into its own. Facebook and the like were the only venues by which his victims could speak out without being ghosted or defamed by the establishment, and it was only a matter of time before some journalist started digging, as eventually happened. Had he lived longer, or had Facebook come along five or so years earlier, he might have actually been held accountable in his lifetime.

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Well, I finally got around to watching the show the other day. I wasn’t particularly familiar with Jimmy Savile beforehand; I had lived in Britain from 2006 until 2011 but only got a TV a few months before I moved away, so I never saw him on TV and wasn’t around for the furore after his death. What little I knew about the man came from reading a newspaper article or two in 2012, as well as this thread. Watching the documentary was the first time I saw him speak.

Unlike what a lot of people in this thread have reported, I didn’t have any visceral reaction to his pre-scandal TV appearances. Without the benefit of the documentary’s editorializing, I would have assumed that his eccentricity and fashion flamboyance were simply a front he erected to make himself stand out. In this sense I wouldn’t have thought him any different from other entertainers, many of whom also cultivate a memorable public persona for the benefit of the camera. As a presenter, he seemed calculatedly zany, and as an interviewee, he seemed aloof, but I never would have pegged him as creepy or dangerous. The documentary cherry-picked public statements of his to make it appear as though he was openly confessing his crimes, but I don’t buy this – or at least, I don’t buy that this alone should have tipped anyone off. Plenty of entertainers employ self-deprecating black humour, but that doesn’t mean they’re all bona fide child molestors.

All in all, I found the documentary a bit of a let-down. Even not knowing a lot about Savile, I thought the first half of the show was more than enough to establish how famous he was. The second half described the what and how of his crimes but didn’t provide much insight as to the why. In particular, why was Savile an abuser in the first place, and why did he get away with it for so long?

With respect to the first point, we got a tantalizingly brief mention of how close he was to his mother, despite her boasting in a public interview that she didn’t beat him enough as a child. Surely that angle could have been worked a lot more. (Interviews with Savile’s siblings? Friends of the family? Independent psychologists to explain how people who are abused often become abusers themselves, and the extent to which Savile fits this profile?)

Regarding the second point, we got a plenty of interviews with people who worked with him without observing any abuse on his part, as well as interviews with people who actually did report his abuse, but no hard-hitting interviews with the people who suppressed those reports. I would have liked to see the show confront the hospital managers who dismissed their patients’ complaints, and with BBC managers and lawyers who refused to run the first documentary exposing Savile’s abuse, and with the Leeds police officers who buried the letter from the anonymous informant, even if they all denied any wrongdoing or claimed that their hands were tied. At least that would have provided some more insight into the complicity and protection of those in power.

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Cogent observations — thanks.

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Good post, and mostly agreed.

However, in Savile’s autobiography he boasted about shipping girls in from a children’s home to have sex with at gigs. Children’s homes at the time only went up to 16, so they would have been underage, vulnerable girls. He didn’t even hide that aspect of his life at all, it was the extent of the abuse and the necrophilia that really came as a surprise to most people.