Within days of Jimmy Savile’s death in 2011, Newsnight sent reporter Liz MacKean to interview Karin Ward, who was abused by Savile when she was a pupil at Duncroft Approved School. It’s the first known interview with one of his victims, but it was never shown. Scandalously, the Newsnight report was pulled, while two Christmas tribute shows celebrating Savile went ahead.
The events recounted in Abused: The Untold Story (BBC1) are no less shocking for being well known. The victims who bore witness to the crimes of Savile and others still struggle with their words, the trauma just as raw and present all these years later. But this was the real point of this powerful, sometimes excruciating programme: to give the victims a voice.
The Savile story didn’t break for almost a year. Dee Coles was the first victim to appear on television, in a 2012 ITV report. Looking back, her one regret was taking beta blockers to get through it. They made her seem a bit matter of fact, which was not how she felt. “That’s why I was determined not to take the beta blockers today,” she said. She retold her story, visibly distressed by the recollection.
It is quite startling now to hear recordings of people calling in to radio programmes to defend Savile’s memory and malign his victims. But the victims kept coming forward. To Peter Spindler, commander of specialist crime investigations, it quickly became clear that “the scale of this was going to outstrip policing structures”. Operation Yewtree was launched, and Spindler called Savile a predatory sex offender on TV. This opened the floodgates: at last victims felt they would be believed.
The enormity of Savile’s crimes really becomes apparent when the victims themselves speak. Only then does one get a sense of the damage done to lives and relationships, across decades. Sam said she had been abused by her grandfather from the age of four, and reckoned that Savile singled her out because her body language made it apparent. Kevin’s wife Sharon still doesn’t know what happened to him, and has to leave the room when he tells his story. He was raped by Savile and another man in a room in Television Centre, after a recording of Jim’ll Fix It. Footage from the episode, with Kevin in his Cub Scout uniform, was positively chilling. Afterward, Savile told him, “We know where you live.”
The documentary also followed Katy, who was in the process of testifying against her attacker in a case of historic sexual abuse. “My aim is not to throw up,” she said on her way to give evidence. She found cross-examination so gruelling she had to be carried from the car to her front door by her husband. When her abuser was convicted on only half of the counts brought against him, she was wild with distress.
In 2012, it transpired that the Crown Prosecution Service had records of four victims who came forward with allegations when Savile was alive. Savile was interviewed and denied everything. The victims, unaware of one another, each decided not to pursue complaints alone. The subsequent expansion of Operation Yewtree led to convictions of living abusers, notably DJs Chris Denning and Ray Teret (whose arrest and trial featured in the documentary series The Detectives).
Operation Yewtree has now been wound up, yet, for the victims, coming forward wasn’t the end, but the beginning. Some of them clearly found speaking out therapeutic; others seemed, if anything, further traumatised by it. Nobody has been healed. Their courage was, and is, immeasurable.
Remind me never to accept the challenge of showing Alastair Campbell a good time. In the new series Into the Wild (BBC2), wildlife photographer Gordon Buchanan escorts various celebrities round some of the UK’s most picturesque, animal-ridden locations. Campbell was first up, and seemingly determined not to be impressed.
The pair were in search of otters on the Inner Hebridean Isle of Mull, but the otters were late, and Campbell was impatient. “All I’ve seen so far is a lot of disorganised geese,” said Campbell, peering through binoculars. “Why are they wandering around aimlessly?” He knitted his brows in the manner of a man who does not suffer fools gladly just because they happen to be geese.
Buchanan obviously hoped that his enthusiasm would become infectious, but Campbell seemed immune. He yawned. He frowned. He looked bored. Above all, he seemed profoundly doubtful. When told that the presence of sea eagles brought £3m a year to Mull’s economy, he said, “I’m always very, very wary of these surveys.” To Buchanan’s suggestion that two voles on the roadside might be related, he said, “You just make this stuff up.”
He warmed up in the end, but it took almost the whole hour. Buchanan had me at the voles.
