Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television

It is striking, looking back, that the most revealing and unselfconscious piece of video that, to my knowledge, exists of Jimmy Savile – a mumbled confession of criminal acts committed in the sixties – should have been recorded by Will at a time when I was oblivious, in another room, trying to sleep.

We had resumed early in 2000, first – like a man dipping his toes in freezing water – with a day of charity work in Doncaster that was drizzly and uneventful and only gained us some shots of Jimmy lugging a huge cuddly bear on and off a train; and then – plunging in, knowing there was no turning back – a more ambitious week-long rail trip, that took us on a tour of three of Jimmy’s homes – Leeds, Scarborough, and Glencoe.

As before, Will was mixing two formats: using a full crew for the bigger scenes, and filming intimate scenes and after-hours material on a small DV camera (nicknamed ‘the toy camera’) that he operated himself. The idea was, as much as possible, to stay close to the ground, blend in and make ourselves inconspicuous, like anthropologists trying to film a remote tribe.

We started, once again, in Leeds – though this time with just Will and myself present. The three of us ate at Adriano’s Flying Pizza, a restaurant near Jimmy’s penthouse that was his default hang-out. Jimmy was on celebrity duty, presiding over birthdays, ferrying cakes to tables, conducting the singing like André Previn in a tracksuit.

‘It must be bittersweet having fewer and fewer opportunities to spread this kind of happiness,’ I said.

‘Me and the Pope can never retire,’ he replied. ‘When he wakes up he’s the Pope. I wake up and I’m me. That’s the way it is.’

After dinner, we took a taxi back to Jimmy’s. I turned in early for an uneasy sleep on a too-narrow bed in a spare room full of knick-knacks: a cuddly lion, a portable Sony TV, a trophy with a tarnished little plaque glued to it that said, ‘Presented to Jimmy Savile OBE on the occasion of the opening of the Trinity Shopping Centre, Leeds, by Laing Development Company Ltd, on Tuesday 3 July 1973’.

The next day, I woke to the sound of Jimmy knocking on the bedroom door, then cackling as he walked away.

We took the train to Scarborough. Jimmy’s flat there was in a grand old Victorian building, high above the seafront with a view across Scarborough bay, the waves rolling in, and hills off in the distance. Inside it was like passing through a portal into the seventies. There was white shag carpeting on the floor and suede wallpaper, a zebra-print sofa and pink cornicing.

I had been pinning a lot on the idea of the Scarborough flat. It was here that he’d lived with his mother, who he called the Duchess and where, to this day, he’d kept a wardrobe of her clothes, dry-cleaning them once a year. After the days of Jimmy’s evasions, the idea of the Duchess’s wardrobe felt solid – something properly odd that Jimmy would have trouble dancing around. His mother had been the only woman for whom Jimmy had ever expressed anything like love. After his father’s death, he had taken to wearing his wedding ring on the third finger of his right hand. His mother had died a few years after, and Jimmy had once memorably described the five days he’d spent with her open casket, at a wake at a sibling’s home, as the best time of his life. ‘When she was dead she was all mine.’

All of these details I hoped to reflect somehow in our programme and they crowded in my mind, looking for a chance to join the conversation. But I was underslept after the night in the guest bed, and a little grumpy, and so intent on being forensic and focused that when it came time to pick up filming I tipped over into a mode that was closer to being badgering and rude.

On a narrow balcony, Jimmy puffed his cigar, wearing an aquamarine tracksuit and a chunky gold watch and wraparound Oakley glasses, and talked about life with the Duchess.

‘Did you argue much when you were living together?’ I asked.

‘Never,’ Jimmy said. ‘No point in arguing.’

‘And what if you had a girl with you?’

‘She would have actually killed the girl.’

We walked back inside and Jimmy closed the balcony doors.

‘Did that not cramp your style a little bit, since you couldn’t bring girls home because your mum wouldn’t let you sleep with women?’

‘Didn’t want to sleep with them. Good heavens!’ Jimmy said with feigned shock. ‘Anything more than two hours, brain damage.’

‘Did that not cramp your style, Jimmy?’ I repeated.

‘I’ll answer the question,’ Jimmy said, pointing outside. ‘If you see over there on the horizon, a caravan camp. I had a caravan there. So that was the love nest.’

In the Duchess’s bedroom, appropriately grannyish with its dark pink bedspread on the double bed and genteel furnishings, he opened the doors to a small freestanding wardrobe against one wall, revealing a rack of clothing sheathed in dry cleaners’ plastic.

‘Now, all this gear was gear she wore,’ he said. ‘So instead of slinging it away, I thought I’d hang on to it because these make better souvenirs than photographs.’

This was my moment to elicit some vulnerability from Jimmy and I tried to slow the conversation down.

‘Can we take some of them out?’ I asked.

‘What do you want to take ’em out for?’ he snapped. ‘Do you want to wear ’em?’

He moved towards the door, making as if to leave.

‘I sense this is an emotional thing for you and you don’t want to share it and I respect that,’ I said.

‘No, it’s not emotional, it’s a friendly thing,’ Jimmy said, going on to explain the difference between emotion, which he seemed to regard as suspect – gloomy and incapacitating – and friendliness, which was positive and healthy. ‘When I come in I always go, “All right, darling?” ’ he said. ‘It’s a friendly thing. It’s not morbid. It’s totally friendly. So there.’

I questioned him a little more, telling him he was being passive-aggressive, as he attempted to move the conversation away from the subject of the Duchess and her clothes. ‘I’m just thinking of the time factor,’ he said, and it was only later, viewing the rushes, that I noticed that the recollection of his mother appeared to bring him close to tears. Resigning himself to staying in the room, Jimmy sat back in a reclining armchair, affecting a pose of bored tolerance. I pulled photographs from an overstuffed drawer – pictures of Jimmy with prime ministers and stars and anonymous young women. I was aware this moment might be my best hope of addressing Jimmy’s sexuality – the mystery of whether he was gay or straight or celibate or something else – and more generally how it was that for so many years he had kept a veil of secrecy over his romantic life.

‘Your love life has never been discussed in the press, has it?’ I said. ‘Why do you think that is?’

‘Probably because I’ve never been linked to anybody.’

‘Do you mean you’ve never had a girlfriend?’

‘Friends that are girls, eight million. Friends that are girls, yeah, but “girlfriend” in the sense of today, i.e. you are together, you don’t bother with anybody else, et cetera – no, never.’

At the time, I took him to be saying either that he was celibate or that he had legions of lovers dotted around the country, but neither scenario seemed very plausible and I considered that the riddle of his sexual interests remained unsolved.

The rest of the day involved a saunter around Scarborough as dusk came on. We visited an amusement arcade on the seafront, run by a friend of Jimmy’s, filled with machines that cascaded 2p coins, and then a fish-and-chip shop, where Jimmy was approached by a young woman.

‘I’ve wrote to you loads of times,’ she said.

‘I know,’ he replied. ‘If you’d have put “if I ever meet you I shall fall madly in love with you”, that would’ve been OK. I read the letter. I thought, “She won’t even fall in love with me.” So I slung it in the bin.’

Jimmy was approached in this way almost any time he went out in public.

That night I slept in the Duchess’s bed.

The following morning the crew left and went home. For the next couple of days, it would just be me and Will and Jimmy, and I was imagining it would be quieter now. The only thing in the diary was a plan to film Jimmy recording a tribute for an episode of This Is Your Life featuring the DJ Dave Lee Travis.

And then, at the hotel, Will approached me with the air of someone with a secret.

He had something he needed to show me, he said, a piece of footage he’d shot two evenings earlier at Jimmy’s penthouse after I’d gone to bed.

He scrolled around on his camera, and I peered into the viewfinder. In the clip, Jimmy, seemingly unaware that the camera was on, slouched back on his sofa, cigar in hand, watching a natural history documentary on TV – you could hear soft animal growls. There was video of me saying goodnight to Will and Jimmy and then, with me off stage and out of earshot, Jimmy appeared to relax. He reminisced to Will about his days in the sixties as a nightclub manager in Leeds. ‘I invented zero tolerance, me,’ he said. ‘In the nightclubs, if there was any nonsense, I wouldn’t tolerate it.’ He explained that if any young men misbehaved at his clubs, he’d lock them in the boiler room until closing time. The police had spoken to him about it. ‘Your daughter comes in here,’ he’d told them. ‘Tell me and I’ll let them slags have their way with ’em. And they said, “All right, Jim, you didn’t give ’em half enough.” And they never nicked me for it. And I never altered.’

Of all the things I’d expected to uncover about Jimmy Savile, the idea that he might confess to more or less kidnapping customers of his dance halls was not high on the list. Also surprising was his manner of speech, which was mumbled and unselfconscious, still recognizably him but a more understated version. Even allowing for exaggeration, it hinted at a much darker, more brutal figure than the one the world knew. I didn’t doubt he had been questioned by the police, and his steeliness and sangfroid were telling. He hadn’t just imprisoned his customers, he’d sent the police packing when they questioned him.

Nothing else that happened on the shoot quite rose to the strange surprise of the discovery of Will’s secret footage – though the days had their rewards, and in filming terms we basically got what we thought we needed: material of Jimmy at his Glencoe cottage, where he’d hosted Prince Charles the previous July; a visit to a pub where a local scallywag flashed Jimmy on camera (a rare instance of someone being sexually inappropriate to Jimmy Savile); a sequence in which Jimmy, having fractured a leg, went to hospital but not before notifying a local photographer with a view to making it a national news story.

We had made a plan for Jimmy and I to spend the night together in a camper van, but in the event he refused my company, opting to stay on his own. But there was a small incident I cherished which we captured, when Jimmy emerged from the caravan and stumbled over his crutches, evoking – at last and for once – the air of pathos and vulnerability of the elderly and reduced man he was.

On our second or third day I asked Jimmy about the ‘zero tolerance’ tape during a walk in the Highlands. We shot the conversation in an extreme wide – the two of us ascending a hillside next to his cottage – thinking some distance from the camera might encourage him to speak more freely.

He did not show any disquiet when I told him that we’d filmed him boasting about tying people up. He said he’d been speaking figuratively. ‘It’s like when you say “I could kill him.” You don’t mean you really want to kill him.’ This was patent cobblers but evidently the best defence he could think of in the moment.

After the Scottish trip, we shot two more outings with Jimmy – visits to Broadmoor and Stoke Mandeville. He had lodgings at both hospitals with the same sort of memorabilia as was in his penthouse flat: awards, framed newspaper cuttings. But under questioning, for whatever reason, Jimmy was obtuse in his answers, his patience for my interrogation after so many days of filming having perhaps worn thin. I had the impression in both places that staff viewed Jimmy as an irritant, a presumptuous interloper turning up and expecting the run of the place. That, too, may not have helped his mood.

By the end of filming I’d arrived at an assessment of him as a rather remote figure, annoying, self-involved, but that those negatives existed alongside more surprising qualities of intelligence and acuity. For a man whose persona was so cartoonish, any subtlety of insight tended to come as a surprise. He had what seemed to be a watertight and self-contained outlook on life, involving logic and a certain understanding of psychology, and perhaps more than anything a quality of toughness, an ability to weather any kind of negative attention.

His self-image was as a steely kind of Yorkshire Übermensch who, through mental strength, had transcended the normal human need for relationships, for love, for the ties of convention – be they trivial, like tying one’s shoelaces or packing clean underwear or having a cooker, or more profound, like the love of children or a wife.

He had made the decision to be unruffled by the crosswinds of fate and misfortune. As long as his most basic needs were met – unfussy food, shelter, cigars – he considered himself well taken care of. As for the demons of loneliness, anxiety, melancholy, he gave the impression of having banished them through an act of will. From somewhere he had learned habits of emotional self-reliance. He regarded himself as something of a guru on the subject of applying logic to human predicaments. More than once, during filming and after, he said to me: ‘Call me when you have your nervous breakdown.’

When the time came to say goodbye, with no real expectation of seeing him again, I felt not so much a fondness for him as a kind of grudging respect.

Given all the pressure I’d felt to shake Jimmy up and rattle his cage, it’s perhaps both surprising and unsurprising that, when the time came to edit the material, one of the challenges was not to make me look too bullying or inconsiderate.

Reaction from one or two friends and colleagues to a couple of early cuts was that I was being too mean to Jimmy. Sarah told me she felt I was insensitive in grilling him so cold-bloodedly about his relationship with his mother, right there where he kept her clothes, and we ended up toning the exchange down a shade. I showed a sixty-minute cut to a colleague while on location in India – we were doing a story about religious gurus. He was from Lancashire and I had the impression that, possibly because of some native northern loyalty, he found me overly rude to Jimmy.

But other than these niggling tonal issues, the film came together with surprising ease and, even in its earliest long cuts, was engaging throughout. One of the pleasures was the discovery that Will had left the camera running during various meals we’d had, capturing moments of candid reality, natural exchanges between the three of us. During one such dinner at a pub in Scotland Jimmy had picked up the camera while Will and I were off somewhere else and delivered a secret message, an odd sentimental little paean to our group, designed to be discovered by us at a later date, in which he expressed how much he was enjoying the filming. ‘This is very, very pleasant,’ he said. Then, addressing imagined accusations of being saccharine, he said, ‘Might be a bit yucky for them’ – meaning us. As an unsolicited Easter egg, it made a strange and telling counterpoint to the zero-tolerance footage: Jimmy ‘on’ and ‘off’; the Jimmy who loved innocent good fellowship and the one who used to lock up ‘slags’ in his boiler room.

Of the hours we spent at Broadmoor and Stoke Mandeville, almost nothing was used, with the single exception of a section from a car journey in which Jimmy addressed the rumours of paedophilia. This exchange, which I probably would not remember had it not been in the show, later came to be much repeated. It was odd because it was only at his prompting that I raised the question of the rumours. We were sat in the back of a car and for the moment – possibly knowing it was our last day of filming – he was ‘off’ and being, for him, uncharacteristically obliging: listening, and answering questions.

‘Why do you say in interviews that you hate children when I’ve seen you with kids and you clearly enjoy their company and you have a good rapport with them?’

‘Because we live in a very funny world,’ he said. ‘And it’s easier for me, as a single man, to say, “I don’t like children” because that puts a lot of salacious tabloid people off the hunt.’

I’d asked if he was referring to rumours of paedophilia.

‘Oh, aye. How do they know whether I am or not? How does anybody know whether I am? Nobody knows whether I am or not. I know I’m not, so I can tell you from experience that the easy way of doing it when they’re saying “Oh, you have all them children on Jim’ll Fix It”, is to say “Yeah, I hate ’em.” . . . That’s my policy and it’s worked a dream.’

When we’d arrived at a fifty-minute version, Will travelled up to Leeds to show Jimmy, as had been agreed, as a professional courtesy.

It’s worth putting oneself in Will’s place, arriving back at the penthouse, joking to disguise his unease as he thinks ahead to the reaction that will greet the film. He pops the DVD into the machine and for fifty minutes the two of them sit through a strange parade of images showing Jimmy as a lonely, occasionally sinister figure – ‘Norma Desmond in tracksuit and trainers’, as one journalist later put it – tramping the twilit Scarborough seafront and trotting out the same one-liners and catchphrases to an ever-thinning audience of passers-by. Not to mention that in the film – in addition to the host of exaggerations, impostures and outright lies he is caught retelling, and the ridiculousness of his general deportment, the clothes, the jewellery, the jokes – there is also his confession of criminal behaviour in his nightclubs in the sixties.

‘That’s good, that is,’ he said when it had finished.

He then talked for some length about the ‘zero tolerance’ footage. His earlier explanation, that he’d been speaking figuratively, went by the board. Now he said, yes, he’d locked up some lairy characters in his boiler room, but they’d been asking for it, and the British public would understand.

When Will told me Jimmy’s reaction, I was mainly relieved that he wasn’t annoyed – not that it would have caused us to change anything in the finished film, but I don’t like to make any more enemies than is strictly necessary. Unlike other contributors who have raged or sworn vengeance, Jimmy took the punch. He swallowed whatever hurt he may have felt, and declared the documentary another triumph.

David titled the documentary When Louis Met Jimmy . . . When it went out, I had the sense that we had made something compelling and strange. There was a richness to the encounters – the endless game-playing and cat and mouse – that put it in a different class to our other documentaries: his evasiveness and unwillingness to let the mask drop; my stolid and literal-minded perseverance. We had managed to capture on television for the first time something we as a society had all known but never quite nailed down: the flat-out weirdness and sinister quality of a celebrity who until recently had sat close to the power centres of British public life.

Most reviewers were complimentary, many responding to the sense of pathos Jimmy projected, a man addicted to fame, increasingly left behind – as we all eventually must be – by fashion and tastes and without the consolations of a spouse or a close loved one. One or two dissenting voices came from people who found the film overly critical of its subject and insufficiently appreciative of his charitable endeavours.

Oddly, given how much debate there was later about ‘who had heard what’, what no one seemed surprised by – on TV, in reviews, out and about, or anywhere that I’m aware of – was the reference in the programme to ‘rumours of paedophilia’.