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So I’ve always had Rolls-Royces and I’ve always had cigars because they go with Rolls-Royces. Every time I light a cigar it’s a celebration.’

Jimmy Savile on fame.

Jimmy Savile was born on October 31, 1926, in Leeds, a giant commercial and industrial powerhouse of a city, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire.

By a bizarre coincidence, on that same day several thousands of miles away across the Atlantic Ocean in Detroit, Michigan, the famous escape artist Harry Houdini died.

Savile was the youngest of seven children from a family where money was scarce. Houdini was a rabbi’s son from Budapest. Neither man was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and both went on to achieve fame and fortune, their funerals being attended by vast crowds of admirers, most of whom had never known either man personally but nonetheless grieved their passing.

That wasn’t, however, all they had in common.

Both men fooled the public throughout their lives. Houdini’s escapology seemed to be pure magic, so much so that his name became a by-word for inexplicable trickery. Savile’s deception was far more sinister, a dark secret that he kept for decades, hidden behind a veil of nonconformity and madcap bonhomie.

His public persona was a pure lie on his part, a cover for perversity, violence and the degradation of the young. And it was all carried off with swagger and cruelty and was due in a large part to, as he might have put it himself, the fact that he had ‘more front than Woolworths’.

James Wilson Savile’s parents, clerical worker Vincent and wife Agnes (always referred to in later years by Savile as The Duchess) already had six children in their home in Consort Terrace, Woodhouse, not far from the centre of Leeds, when little Jimmy arrived.

As an infant, so the family legend that Savile was happy to elaborate on in years to come goes, he was at death’s door until his mother prayed for his wellbeing while in Leeds Catholic Cathedral and he miraculously recovered. Savile could not remember what his illness was. ‘In those days,’ he explained, ‘if you were poor you just died – it was no big deal.’

He was schooled at St. Anne’s in Leeds where, a few years later the actor Peter O’Toole also studied. The Lawrence of Arabia star was to complain in adulthood about being beaten by the nuns because he was left-handed, although Savile’s take on that was different. He called it a ‘factory of learning’ and although it may not have been effective on the really bad boys, it ‘had a salutary effect on the rest of us’ was his verdict. He was entitled to a jar of free malt, from which he had a spoonful a day to combat the possibility of getting rickets, free canvas and rubber-soled sandshoes, and free milk, as well as days out to Scarborough. Perhaps this was to form his fund-raising ethos – his parents organised whist and beetle drives for charity – when he was an adult.

In later years he was to say he was evacuated briefly to Gainsborough in Lincolnshire to avoid the bombs that Hitler was raining on cities such as Leeds and when he returned, even though he was not yet five feet tall, he began to frequent the local dance hall at the tender age of 11, occasionally playing drums with the band. It is perhaps an example of where Savile’s version of the truth already enters a realm of fantasy given that, by any simple arithmetical calculation, that would have meant his being evacuated and returning home to endure the risk of being bombed some considerable time before 1939, the year war was actually declared.

His first date with a girl was when he was 12 and he later claimed that the young lady in question was some eight years older than him and worked at the ticket office at a dance hall. He said he only saw the top ten per cent of her body and on the eve of their first date at a cinema he cut his lip on some railings. ‘The darkness of the picture house hid my floppy lip and I discovered about girls that the 90 per cent that you can’t see is just as important as the 10 per cent you can. These days,’ he was to say in 1974, ‘the percentage is reversed, but the principle is the same.’

Savile’s autobiography, penned that year, gives several illuminating examples of his attitude towards women and girls. At very best they could be described as ‘of their time’; laddish, pop world remarks showing no attempt at any emotional contact. At worst, with the benefit of the hindsight that the world now has, they indicated the callous, uncaring disregard for women and girls that he was to show in the years to come.

For example, Savile was a keen cyclist and in one competitive race he and a friend were in the lead when they saw two attractive girls at the roadside. They immediately stopped and chatted them up, letting the rest of the field catch up and overtake them. All good, harmless ‘boys will be boys’ stuff perhaps…but then again perhaps it wasn’t?

In his autobiography, Savile wrote of his ‘introduction to the sex act.’ His description even then sounded seedy; now it gives a chilling foretaste of his future behaviour. Although he doesn’t state his exact age, it appears immediately after an anecdote about a sexual conversation he was having as a 14-year-old, so it is safe to assume it occurred at about the same time, Savile’s early teens. ‘I was quite simply picked up in the dance hall by a buxom and randy young lady for whom, that night, I was definitely the bottom of the barrel’, he said.

She asked him to see her home – the most direct of approaches – and they travelled in the third-class compartment of a corridor-less train for seven miles to Horsforth on the outskirts of Leeds.

Once on board she told him to put his feet up, which he did, but on the seat opposite and not lengthwise as she wished. Savile says: ‘I fastened hold of her with tenacity. Heartened by my firm grip she waited for “here it comes” and lay dormant. So did I.’

In gloating manner he continued: ‘Realising that not only had she paid the fare but she would also have to do all the work, she manhandled me into a sitting position and to my terror, mixed with embarrassment, slid her hand into my one and only pair of trousers and searched, in vain, for what she hungered.’

After they walked to her home they went behind her house where they leant against a wall screened by a large hedge. ‘Clutching me to her body like some flesh-eating plant she once again started her search for the Nile. Oft times since have I tried to remember the details of our time in the bushes.’

It was something he was not only proud of at the time, but was eager to share with his pals. ‘I trotted home the seven miles and carefully committed each detail of this amazing night to my memory.’ Savile didn’t just wallow in sleazy reminiscing, he felt it appropriate to boast of his subsequent behaviour when he added: ‘From that day to this there have been trains and, with apologies to the hit parade, boats and planes (I am a member of the 40,000ft Club) and bushes and fields, corridors, doorways, floors, chairs, slag heaps, desks and probably everything except the celebrated chandelier and ironing board.’

He continued: ‘As to the right and wrong of it, most of us have burned our bridges, not to mention our boats, long before we realise there could be a right or wrong to it. Ah that we were all but innocent animals. For fun, girls take a lot of berating.’

It is remarkable that Savile chose to make those views public in the mid-seventies when his fame was at his height and when he was a giant of mainstream entertainment, with a vast following of youngsters.

In wartime Leeds, according to Savile, he first thought of joining the Navy like elder brothers John and Vince, but his inability to swim ruled that out. Then he fancied being a Rear-Gunner in the RAF, only for his eyesight failing to meet the required standards.

He was 18 and although the war was nearing its end, he would have to do service in one form or another, and for Savile that resulted in him becoming a ‘Bevin Boy’ – the young British conscripts who worked in the coal mines of the United Kingdom, from December 1943 until 1948.

As the country could not import coal during World War II, the production of coal from mines in Britain had to be increased. The Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, decided that a percentage of young men called up to serve in the forces should work in the mines and one in ten of the young men called up were sent to work in the mines. These conscripts, almost 50,000 in total, were given the nickname ‘Bevin Boys’.

To make the process random, one of Bevin’s secretaries would each week pull a number from a hat containing all ten numbers 0–9, and all men liable for call-up that week whose National Service number ended in that digit were, with certain exemptions, directed to work in the mines. Not surprisingly, the men came from all walks of life and as well as Savile other Bevin Boys included comedian Eric Morecambe, the farce actor Brian Rix who later became the head of Mencap, and England football hero Nat Lofthouse.

Whatever else Savile may have invented about his life and the experiences that moulded him, it is incontrovertible that the time he spent underground had an impact on him that lasted throughout his life. As he put it: ‘The noise, the dark, the dust and the torn fingers created an impression of Hell that I will carry to the grave…Past memories of my after-school job in my beloved dance hall with its whores and hooligans were like a dream that never existed.’

He was a miner after the war ended and, in total, spent almost seven years in the mining industry, sometimes working with a pick and a short-handled shovel, lying on his side for up to eight hours in just 18 inches of space. Eventually he suffered a back injury and had to wear a steel ‘corset’ and use walking sticks to get around – his mining days were over. Perhaps that injury played a part in the empathy he had for the sick which he was only too keen to show to the public in years to come.

Savile may have been spending his working life underground, but his mind was in the stars; in a family where no one even owned a motor bike he cut out a photograph of a Rolls-Royce and pinned it inside his wardrobe door.

He would never have bought that ‘Roller’ if he had stayed in mining, it was the new world he was to enter that enabled him to achieve the fortune he longed for. Having spent his youth around the dance halls of Leeds it was a short step for him to enter the world of music and entertainment – and it was an opportunity he was not going to miss.

Together with a friend he booked a room above the Belle Vue Road branch of the Loyal Order of Ancient Shepherds friendly society for ten shillings (50p) and decided to charge one shilling (5p) to enter. The music came from a radio wired up to a wind-up gramophone and by 9pm they had taken eleven shillings on the door. They had made a profit.

One of the customers then booked him at a fee of 2d10s (£2.50) for her 21st birthday and that celebration took place above a café in Otley near Leeds. He wired his speaker to such an effect that it blasted out noise and once he had been paid he was able to reflect: ‘Looking at this vast sum of money I realised most definitely and positively that I had arrived at the threshold of a fortune.’

He decided he wanted a job at the Mecca in Leeds where he had worked part-time as a schoolboy and soon he was on 8d10s a week as assistant manager at the ballroom, rising quickly up the ladder with the nationwide organisation. It was the early 1950s and at last the weariness and austerity of the war years – rationing did not completely end until 1954, an astonishing nine years after the conflict ceased – was being left behind. Savile was determined to be the right man in the right place at the right time.

But it wasn’t all petticoats and dreamboats during the Fifties as Savile worked in various Mecca establishments up and down the country. There was an ugly side to these working-class palaces, and Savile was more than capable of not only looking after himself, but ensuring that others did as he told them during the long dark nights of the Fifties and Sixties.

One of the bouncers, Dennis Lemmon, who almost acted as Savile’s bodyguard, recalled one incident when Savile was in his early 30s. ‘He came in and just ignored us all, walked straight past us. I remember saying: “what’s up with him?” and someone in the club replied: “He’s up in court tomorrow – interfering with young girls. He’s worried”.’

A few days later it was business as normal for Savile; his old bounce and confidence was back. ‘He was really worried but everything was dropped. I was told he had paid them [the police] off. And apparently that wasn’t the first time either but I don’t know about that. He had a lot of friends though.

‘I would go on walkabouts with him around the club,’ he said. ‘He would make a point of talking to all the girls in the younger end, the girls who were 14 or 15. Those were the girls he always wanted to speak to.’

Life could be tough on the Northern dance scene, but that didn’t bother Savile; quite the opposite. ‘I never had anyone beaten up, but I did not take any nonsense in the dance halls. I had to look after the welfare of hundreds of youngsters. I was protecting my young patrons from drugs and other immoral influences.’

In the early 1960s, according to the DJ’s autobiography, Savile had another brush with the law after being approached by police asking him to help trace a missing girl. ‘If she comes in I’ll bring her back tomorrow but I’ll keep her all night first as my reward,’ he wrote of his meeting with a woman police officer, who had gone to question him.

Sure enough, that evening the young girl came in. Savile claimed that he took her into his office and told her: ‘run now if you want, but you can’t run all your life.’ The girl stayed at the dance and then overnighted at Savile’s before he took her to the police station the next morning.

He went on: ‘The lady of the law…was dissuaded from bringing charges against me by her colleagues, for it was well known that were I to go I would probably take half the station with me.’

Savile also worked at The Plaza dance hall in Manchester, where one of his first stunts was to label one evening ‘Saturday Night is Crumpet Night’, and he also bought a second-hand Bentley which he managed to fit the unmistakeable Rolls-Royce radiator grill to, thereby giving him a black and gold ‘Rolls-Royce’. Of those days he later wrote: ‘To run a dance hall is better than running a harem because all your wives go off home to reappear fresh and lovely the next night.’

He added that there were two reasons why he would never disclose ‘the story of all the girls I have known’. One, he said, was because he respected them too much ‘for their incredible days and nights’. The second was that ‘no one would believe it’ and he would have to take refuge in a Himalayan village as a result.

There was even a spell at Ilford Palais in High Road in 1959 where he ran records-only dance sessions on Monday nights, popular with teenagers. He was quoted in an Essex newspaper years later saying: ‘Some of the happiest days of my life were spent in Ilford’. When asked how he got to Ilford he answered: ‘I came out of my front door and turned left and it was about 186 miles from there because I lived in Leeds’. When asked how long he was at the Palais for he replied: ‘About five feet ten inches’.

Once, after he had achieved fame, he also calculated in arithmetical terms, how many young women were available to him every night. He reckoned that at the large dance halls when he was in charge there would be 200 ‘who would take kindly to any suggestion I might make’ on any given evening. If a portion of those were shy, that would still mean ‘at least 50 girls would actually do the chatting up’. He added: ‘If I only fancied half of the 50, that left 25 super, dolly-birds actually putting the pressure on me or my disc-jockeys’. Those figures, he mused, only applied to personal appearances. ‘Multiply those figures by the millions who watch TV or listen to the radio and life gets interesting or complicated according to your state of health’.

Back in Leeds in those early days, Savile was the ballroom’s DJ as well as its manager and this led to his biggest break yet when a Decca executive who also happened to DJ for Radio Luxembourg came in one evening, liked what he saw and arranged for Savile to have a Luxembourg audition.

Radio Luxembourg was a remarkably important player in the British music business at this time. Broadcasting from abroad, it was the only presenter of continuous pop music that young people could rely on for the latest records from both the UK and, even more importantly to begin with, America. That impact was reduced with first the arrival of the pirate radio stations based in the waters off mainland Britain and eventually the launch by the BBC, who realised they had fallen way behind the times, of Radio 1. Luxembourg brought Savile to the attention of a nationwide audience at last. Not just the city dwellers either, but youngsters all over the country, in the remotest parts of the land, could now listen to the unique delivery of his patter between records, especially on his Teen and Twenty Disc Club show, a type of ‘club of the air’ where for a fee you could join for life and receive a small medallion with your membership number on it. Its most famous member was Elvis Presley, whom Savile was to meet years later, and for many teenagers the Club helped fulfil their adolescent dreams of belonging to a youthful group with a shared love of music.

Savile would record the programmes on Thursday, his day off from Mecca, and he also began to write a column for the Sunday People newspaper. It meant he was working seven days a week and also earning big money.

His fame was increasing daily and, as he later described it, ‘I decided it was about time I saw Elvis’. The purpose was to give Presley a gold disc for his record sales and that meant going to Hollywood where the star was filming. Savile’s impressions of California were later written down in his autobiography and, after mentioning the pleasant sight of oranges growing on trees and the differences between sights such as that and the desolate nature of the Yorkshire Moors, his observations take on a far more worrying tone: ‘Gleaming cars and gleaming bodies of beach girls made the head turn and I felt it officially criminal that the age of consent is that admirable state is eighteen. It really is unfair because everyone knows that everything matures quicker in the sunshine.’

Reading those words written in 1974 they sound, at the very least, distasteful. Based on what was to become known of Savile’s behaviour and attitude to young women, they give an early, sinister, indication of his true nature.

Savile boasted that by the early sixties he was earning £500 a week, and he splashed out on a genuine new Rolls-Royce for £7,500. He also decided to buy a flat on the seafront at Scarborough and install his mother there as he did not think the family home was suitable for her any more.

He later wrote: ‘The Duchess was my nickname for her and she was life, by the simple fact that there was no one else. It was our joint regret that my father was not alive to enjoy the halcyon days that were to come.

‘The first thing was to get her out of our old family house in Leeds. Whereas I would only leave when it was pulled down, big old houses are not good for 70 year old ladies.’

He claimed that in their early days he gave advice to the young Tom Jones, told Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits that he should ‘sing little boy stuff and smile while you do it’ in order to capture fans’ hearts and he championed the cause of the Rolling Stones when others were calling them ‘five layabouts.’ Also, he bragged how Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein asked him to compere the group’s three-week Christmas show at the Hammersmith Odeon, after which he shamelessly spoke of his relationship with the Fab Four: ‘We enjoyed, and still do, mutual respect’.

It wasn’t just the Beatles’ manager who wanted him, he claimed, as one day BBC producer Johnny Stewart contacted him and said he was launching a programme called Top of the Pops and he wanted Savile to be the host of the first show. ‘And so ended the Springtime of my pop career’ he was to write. ‘Here then started the 100 degree Summer with no clouds to cover the burning brilliance of total recognition by, eventually, nearly all of this country’s 53 million people’. It is hard to asses which was the worse; Savile’s prose style or his inflated ego.

He had appeared in a short-run pop programme for Tyne Tees Television, Young at Heart, for which, although it was transmitted in black and white, he had his hair dyed a different colour every week. Savile also hosted the televised New Musical Express awards, but it was TOTP that was the real breakthrough. If other programmes were later to consolidate Savile’s position in the light entertainment world, it was TOTP which projected him into stardom.

One newspaper preview of the show proclaimed:

Teenagers get a new pop music show tonight – the BBC’s Top of the Pops (6.35). It is the Corporation’s answer to ITV’s Ready, Steady, Go! screened on Friday evenings.

The BBC series will come from the Manchester studios, and a team of four disc jockeys have been booked as weekly hosts. First to face the camera will be Jimmy Savile, followed by Alan Freeman, David Jacobs and Pete Murray.

For the first time, the BBC are letting the performers mime their recordings – as they have done on ITV. ‘We want viewers to hear the original discs’, explains producer Johnnie Stewart.

‘All the discs will be from the current hit parade and our audience will hear the exact sound that won its popularity. Some of the artists will be booked at the very last moment, for our aim is to be as topical as the “Top Twenty” itself.’

For tonight’s show, four acts are already taped on film. These include The Beatles.

‘It’s Number One – It’s Top of the Pops’ was the announcement at the start of every show, a programme that was on screen for nearly half a century and, during its glory years, helped shape the face of British popular music.

A review the next day in the Daily Mirror noted:

A new BBC beat show, Top of the Pops, was born – or, rather, prefabricated last night. Disc-jockey Jimmy Savile was in charge wearing a shining blond hairstyle.

He is the first of four jockeys to carry the show throughout the year, into the hearts of teenagers. Well, it couldn’t be their minds.

The songs were the best in the current hit parade, mimed from records to a bunch of serious-looking youngsters. I agree with the BBC’s policy that the record itself should be heard, and not an on-the-spot ‘live’ version.

All artistes can’t appear in the studio at the drop of a Beatle wig, but those who can’t are going to suffer. There is no doubt that the ones who did turn up made the biggest impact.

That first transmission was on New Year’s Day 1964 from BBC-owned premises: Studio A, a converted Wesleyan Church on Dickenson Road in the Rusholme district of Manchester. The show was to be on the nation’s screens, although from different venues, for a staggering 42 years. In the 1970s 15 million people a week watched it and – in a pre-pop video age – it made household names of the acts who appeared regularly performing to the hits of the day if the band or singer concerned was not available. Many of them became better known than the artists TOTP was allegedly showcasing; the dance troupes Legs and Co and Pan’s People, for example, but above all the DJs. None more so than the man who became synonymous with the programme; Jimmy Savile.

He and Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman presented the first show early in the evening of Wednesday 1 January, which featured The Rolling Stones with ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, Dusty Springfield’s ‘I Only Want to be With You’, ‘Glad All Over’ by the Dave Clark Five and several other classics from the period – The Hollies’ ‘Stay’, The Swinging Blue Jeans’ ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’ – and then finished with the hit parade top number of the week (a format used throughout the show’s long history) which that week was The Beatles’ classic ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’.

There was a ‘disc girl’ presenter too, theoretically there to help play the records, and a quartet of DJs on a ‘rota’: Savile, Freeman, Pete Murray and David Jacobs.

All of them had their distinctive styles. Aussie Freeman had learnt his trade Down Under and then at Radio Luxembourg. He presented Pick of the Pops on BBC radio which told listeners of the latest movements in the Top Twenty and his quick-fire delivery and catchphrases such as ‘Greetings, pop pickers’, ‘Greetings, music lovers’, ‘Alright? Stay bright!’ and ‘Not ’arf!’ were later to be parodied affectionately by the comedy duo of Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse in their ‘Smashey and Nicey’ sketches. Despite the jokes about his ebullient manner, he was universally praised for his professionalism and delivery and in years to come became widely regarded as being one of the most innovative of DJs. When he was presented with a Sony Award in 2000, six years before his death, he was described as ‘a man who has served, and is held in the highest affection by, quite literally every sector of our industry.’

Murray, another Luxembourg presenter, was an urbane, public school-educated former actor who’d presented one of the earliest pop shows, the skiffle-orientated Six Five Special, while Jacobs had been an announcer on the BBC, played many parts in the radio adventure series Journey Into Space and become nationally known for hosting Juke Box Jury on television.

All four were born in the mid-1920s, so were approaching their fortieth birthdays when the show was first aired – something inconceivable for any popular music programme nowadays – but it was Savile who stood out. It wasn’t that in any way he was more professional than his co-hosts, simply that whereas they wore their ages well and dressed and groomed themselves accordingly, Savile, in his 38th year, appeared to have come straight from a school pantomime costume fitting.

He made sure he attracted all the attention he could when he presented the programme. Once he wore a Roman legionnaire’s outfit, another time a suit adorned with real bananas. His hats had lights on them, he wore a kaftan before anyone else in the music business and his hair was longer than many of the acts, male or female, that he introduced. In slight contradiction to his madcap appearance, his presentation of the artists was, verbally, quite straightforward, deliberately devoid of gimmicks or jokes.

For years he appeared on the show, smiling, clowning, using his catchphrases ad infinitum, in front of massive audiences. What could be more harmless; a sanitised presentation of the world of pop music for youngsters to eagerly watch and for their sometimes bewildered parents to turn a blind eye to. The studios were crammed with young people vying to be on camera around their idols and at every link they could be seen crowding around the presenters, creating an impression of innocent semi-mayhem. The truth was far from innocent. Throughout his years on the programme Savile used it as one of the bases for his lust.

In the same way that the dance halls of the North had been his hunting ground, so the world of television provided him with fresh fields to conquer. There had been no one to stop him in those dark provincial evenings where he ruled with a mixture of charisma and threat and who was going to stop him now in the heady world of the BBC and the hit parade? It was all too easy.

We will be examining in detail later his behaviour on and, especially, off-screen during those Top of the Pops years, up to – incredible as it might seem – the last TOTP show ever broadcast. In 1964 he’d said ‘Welcome to the very first Top of the Pops’ and in July 2006, wearing a shiny gold track suit and taking centre stage with presenters from over the years lined up either side of him he announced, ‘And welcome to the very last Top of the Pops’.

The BBC noted on its news website on July 26, 2006:

Recording has ended for the final edition of Top of the Pops at BBC Television Centre in London. Just fewer than 200 members of the public were in the audience for the programme, co-hosted by veteran disc jockey Sir Jimmy Savile, its very first presenter. Janice Long also returned to record links for the show’s swansong, alongside Tony Blackburn and Mike Read. But no live bands took part in the programme, which will instead feature celebrity tributes and archive footage.

The programme will be shown on Sunday, 30 July. Classic performances from the Spice Girls, Wham, Madonna, Beyoncé Knowles and Robbie Williams will feature in the show alongside the Rolling Stones – the very first band to appear on Top of the Pops. As is customary, it will conclude with this week’s number one single.

Speaking on BBC Breakfast, Sir Jimmy, 79, said it was ‘terrific’ to be hosting the show’s final broadcast.

‘Most shows don’t last 42 days – we lasted 42 years,’ he said. ‘You can only feel incredibly proud.’

He said he was proud and the BBC was certainly proud of him – why on earth wouldn’t they be? Top of the Pops may have been the first of the BBC programmes to propel him into the stratosphere of stardom, but it was not to be the last.

His name became synonymous with the phrase ‘Clunk Click Every Trip’ in a series of public information films on behalf of ROSPA, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents. The slogan had been introduced during the previous campaign, fronted by Shaw Taylor, but it was Savile who, from 1971 onwards, made it famous as he urged viewers to put their seatbelts on every time they set out on a journey, years before wearing them finally became compulsory in the UK in 1983. It was one of the phrases by which he was to be remembered. The advertisements, which included graphic sequences of drivers being thrown through the windscreen and an image of a disfigured woman who survived such an accident, helped lay the groundwork for compulsory seatbelt use in the front seat of a vehicle.

In one episode Savile explained how most road accidents occur on short trips and often on roads with which the driver is familiar, such as a woman going shopping for groceries or taking children to and from school. Another episode, called Loose Objects, showed the difference seatbelts can make in an accident by using an egg in two different boxes to illustrate its point.

It led to a show he hosted called Clunk Click which briefly ran on BBC television. After his death it emerged that he had given three youngsters who appeared on the programme £10 each – then claimed it back in expenses from the BBC. Whilst on radio he had joined the fledgling Radio 1 in 1968 where he presented Savile’s Travels, a weekly Sunday show where he travelled up and down the country with a tape recorder chatting to interesting people and playing records. In one episode, he climbed Ben Nevis in the middle of winter.

From 1969 to 1973 he also fronted Radio 1’s Speakeasy, with its catchy theme music, ‘Yakety Yack’ by The Coasters. It was an hour-long uninhibited discussion programme for young people, with debates and music, and it dealt with serious issues such as war, education, health, religion and politics.

One researcher on that show was to write in 2012: ‘I soon learned that the show’s presenter, Savile, functioned in London out of a Winnebago parked between Broadcasting House reception and All Soul’s, Langham Place, into which a stream of very young women flowed. This went on in a semi-public way, under the eyes of BBC management. What’s more, Speakeasy, a discussion show aimed at a young audience, was a co-production between light entertainment and religious broadcasting. How could the head of religious broadcasting, Rev John Lang [who later became Dean of Lichfield and died in 2012] have allowed such behaviour to go on? My recollection is that they were awed by Savile’s status and the access to youth culture he provided; grateful for the chance he offered to break out of the ghetto of religious broadcasting.’

If any programme could surpass Savile’s success on Top of the Pops, however, it was the successor to Clunk Click, the phenomenon known as Jim’ll Fix It.

The show first appeared on British screens on 31 May 1975 and ran in the early evening on Saturdays until July 1994. It was a natural progression for Savile, who now became an avuncular figure, albeit a slightly odd-looking one, for millions. And having been surrounded by teenagers on TOTP the youngsters involved in Jim’ll Fix It were often children.

Each week, Savile would ‘fix it’ for the wishes of several viewers, invariably children, to come true. The producer was Roger Ordish, referred to by Savile as ‘Doctor Magic’. The standard format was that the viewer’s letter, which described their wish, would be shown on the screen and read out aloud, initially by Savile but in later series by the viewer himself or herself as a voice-over.

Then Savile would introduce the ‘Fix’, which would either have been pre-filmed on location or take place in the studio. At the end, the viewer would join Savile to be congratulated and presented with a large medal with the words ‘Jim Fixed It For Me’ engraved on it. The badges became highly collectable and for many years after their appearance the youngsters who earned them would show them off with pride, even when they were well into adulthood. Occasionally other people such as actors from well-known series featured and they might also give the viewer an extra gift somehow relating to the Fix. Savile himself played no part in the filming or recording of the Fix, unless specifically requested as part of the letter-writer’s wish.

So well-known did the show become that many boys and girls wrote to ‘Dear Jim’ll’ as if that was his first name. Early series saw Savile distributing medals from a ‘magic chair’ which concealed the medals in a number of discreet sections.

Among the famous ‘Fixes’ were the troupe of cub scouts who tried to eat their packed lunches on the rollercoaster at The Pleasure Beach in Blackpool and a young Doctor Who fan who got the chance to appear in an episode of the science fiction series. The horror film actor Peter Cushing appeared when he had his wish to have a variety of rose named after his late wife Helen come true and a ‘priceless antique’ vase was broken on purpose in a staged accident on Antiques Roadshow, unbeknown to many of the horrified onlookers.

Savile insisted on travelling first class and was well remunerated for hotel, food and drink expenses.

By 1980, TV executives agreed he was due a ‘significant increase’ for Jim’ll Fix It and he landed a £600-per-episode deal – nearly £1,800 when adjusted for inflation. He also demanded the BBC paid for a new suit for each of the 13 programmes on one series. A memo in 1989 said: ‘Perhaps predictably Jimmy has raised the question of expenses using the argument that although he maintains a flat in London, he is now principally resident in Leeds.’ It was later agreed he should be paid £200 for every trip – equivalent to roughly £1,500 at the time of his death. By 1990, his Jim’ll Fix It fee had soared to a massive, for the time, £2,350 per episode.

Savile was at his showbiz peak. In the world of what is now deemed classic British family-by-the-fireside television; Morecambe and Wise, Steptoe and Son, The Two Ronnies, The Sweeney, The Generation Game and many more, there was Savile ranking alongside the greats.

His charity work was to enlarge that profile even more, to such an extent that it gave him access, and influence, to the Great and the Good. It was a reputation he all too readily exploited for his own evil purposes.