In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile

Product Information

C23 and I are rapidly questioned (without warning) by the Metropolitan Police, to whom our names have apparently been given. We both speak to detectives and, after Smith is appointed on 11 October to investigate Jimmy Savile and the BBC, we each give evidence during the four years of her investigation. Westminster , 26 June 2014 However, I also do believe that as a reader now and then it’s good to challenge oneself now and then and In Plain Sight is a Gordon Burn winner so I thought I’d go for it.

I was sure that his evasiveness, his refusal to be known, was connected to the darkness that seemed to emanate from him. But while it proved impossible to access its source, and none of his victims had been heard, I was left only with conjecture. I didn’t tell my mother until nearly 15 years after the assault, and never told my father. How many more older women and men have endured feelings of guilt and shame for decades, and how many more will continue to do so? The intimacy of the discussions undoubtedly heightened the emotional temperature in the small BBC studios where they were recorded.By 1992, a decade after it started, more than 60 people had sat In the Psychiatrist's Chair, ranging from American tennis player Arthur Ashe to politician Edwina Currie, from film-maker Derek Jarman to pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy. Davies had first encountered Savile at the age of nine, in the audience of the BBC's dream-making show. "Like every other child in the studio audience that evening, I had gone expecting to witness magic," he reflected in a piece for the Guardian. "What I left with was an unwanted insight into the unvarnished reality of pre-recorded television, and a strange ambivalence about the show's host." In 1972, Susan was a trainee optician in Leeds. Savile was one of the practice’s customers and she first met him when he came in for an eye test. He was clearly a strange character around the city, but she hadn’t heard any rumours about him. “I knew he was a bit weird, but I never gave it more thought.”

He was famous. Who was going to believe me against him? There were no witnesses’ … Susan. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian Waterson, Jim (28 February 2023). "BBC Jimmy Savile drama to air this year despite concerns". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 1 March 2023.Spending so much time in Savile’s company was like being in a hall of mirrors. I was never quite sure of where I stood or what I believed. The rumours were so persistent, and he was so brazen about the “fun” he’d had with youngsters during his years as a pied piper for the nascent pop generation, a fixer of dreams and a latter-day saint, and yet he had never been exposed.

The key task, Clare argued, was not revealing the repressed and the forgotten, but processing and understanding what was already knownHe said: “A high-ranking lady police officer came in one night and showed me a picture of an attractive girl who had run away from a remand home. Somehow, Clare created a space where even the introverted were willing to speak about their personal lives to an audience of millions on national radio.