With this I can break America.” A British Horror Story is for a global audience. It reminded me of Toby Jones’s villain in Sherlock, Culverton Smith, clearly based on Savile, who, when caught, was thrilled: “I’m going to be so famous now. I would have liked to see them.ĭespite these elements A British Horror Story still feels like entertainment, a continuation of Savile’s posthumous career in which he is no less famous. None of the BBC and NHS workers who knew far more about Savile’s crimes than them offer themselves up for interview, however. It allows the journalists Lynn Barber and Andrew Neil the opportunity to revisit their interviews with Savile. She would wear three pairs of knickers and tampons - though she was only eleven and did not menstruate - into the chapel anteroom in which he so glibly assaulted her. It offers a woman who Savile abused as a girl in the chapel of Stoke Mandeville Hospital the opportunity to describe his attacks on her. Savile had died and the BBC could not broadcast, Jones was told, “just” the testimony of “the women”. It offers Meirion Jones, the former Newsnight reporter, the opportunity to explain how the BBC came to pull his exposé of Savile in favour of hagiography. It still is, with different emphasis.Ī British Horror Story does some useful things. He emitted patter, not speech, as you do if you are a psychopath and other people are unknowable. I spent two hours with him fifteen years ago in Leeds and he was a dullard, grandiose and jangling in the costume that impersonated a soul. ![]() It may even, though obliviously, be an extension of that same culture that made people think Savile was a valuable public figure, even if - no, because - he talked drivel all his life. Netflix’s new two-part documentary, Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story, does not tell us why he got away with sexually abusing so many children. The reasons why Jimmy Savile’s crimes were unpunished in his lifetime - undetected is the wrong word, since many people knew - are so deeply woven into the fabric of British culture they are hard to extract, and the situation may still be as kind to potential predators.
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