Jimmy Savile, Israel, and the BBC

I’ve recently watched The Reckoning, the BBC’s docudrama series about the life of Sir Jimmy Savile, the DJ, media personality, charity fundraiser, knight-of-the-realm and serial sex abuser. There was a three-part Netflix series, released in 2022, called Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story, which I’d recommend if you want to investigate further. Both series are grueling to watch, but The Reckoning takes the story into deeper realms. Steve Coogan’s depiction is uncanny. It’s less an impression of the man, more a channelling of his unquiet ghost. Coogan has Savile’s voice and mannerisms down to perfection. I hope that he doesn’t suffer permanent psychological damage from having invited such a monstrous personality into his psyche for the time it took to make the series.

For British people above a certain age, Savile was a part of our growing up. He was a radio DJ at first, then a TV personality. He was a stalwart of the BBC from the 1960s to the 2000s. He was the first DJ to host Top of the Pops, the BBC’s pop music program that ran from 1964 to 2006. He opened the first show, and ceremonially switched off the lights on the last. He also had a long-running series called Jim’ll Fix It, in which children wrote to him with their wishes, which he’d appear to fulfill in the course of the program. It was the production team who did the work: Savile was merely the presenter. Later it was discovered that he’d abused a number of his underage guests in his dressing room during the making of the series.

He was known for his flamboyant dress sense, his bleached blond hair and his expensive cigars, which he puffed on continuously. He had a pronounced Northern accent and a number of catchphrases. There was a noise he made, like a demented yodel, that every person in the UK would recognize. He projected the persona of an eccentric uncle and was known for his charity work. He was knighted at the behest of Margaret Thatcher in the 1990 Queen’s Birthday Honours. He also had an OBE and was made a Knight Commander of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of Saint Gregory the Great (KCSG) by Pope John Paul II. He counted Prince Charles amongst his friends. He was from a poor, working-class background. He was a miner before launching his career in show business. Whenever members of the British establishment wanted to know how the working class thought or felt, they’d consult Savile, who’d tell them what they wanted to hear.

Behind his colorful facade he was systematically abusing people. He acted as a porter in Stoke Mandeville hospital for many years, where he abused the patients. He volunteered at Leeds General Infirmary and Broadmoor Hospital where he did the same thing. The latter is a high security psychiatric hospital, full of confused and vulnerable people. He hung around the women’s wing and attacked the inmates on a regular basis. So confident were the authorities of his reliability that he had his own suite of rooms in the hospital and could come and go when he pleased. He abused disabled people in their wheelchairs. He abused children and adults, girls and boys, the mentally ill and the emotionally disturbed. He even abused corpses in the hospital morgue. He was probably the most prolific serial sex offender in modern British history, but knew how to cover his tracks. He was very clever. There were numerous complaints. He would brush them off with a joke and a catchphrase. The people who made the complaints were anonymous. He was very rich, very powerful, with friends in high places. His abuses always took place behind closed doors, so it was always their word against his. He said that it was all just rumors and that people were targeting him because of his fame. In reality it was the other way round. He was using his fame to target vulnerable people.

The BBC was enamored of him. Despite the rumors, which followed him everywhere, the corporation continued to support him. After his death there was a Newsnight investigation which was suppressed in favor of a celebratory program about his life. The truth was finally revealed by the BBC’s rival, ITV, in a documentary aired on October 3, 2012, a year later. Not only was the Newsnight program suppressed, but, according to one of the journalists involved, the corporation forced out the entire team. They were seen as traitors.

But the truth could no longer be hidden. In the end there was a report, by Dame Janet Smith, into Savile’s activity at the BBC. It found that at least 72 people were abused by him at the corporation, including eight victims who were raped. The youngest rape victim was 10. The offenses took place from 1959 to 2006, most of them in the 1970s, the largest number during his tenure at Top of the Pops. There were many complaints which the BBC ignored. It had the opportunity to stop the abuse, but failed to do so on at least five occasions.

The BBC wasn’t the only powerful organization that allowed Savile such extraordinary power over his victims, but it was the most culpable. It was the BBC who provided him with his status as a national figure. It was the BBC who made him a household name and which provided him with a platform for his activities. He was particularly appealing to children. The shiny shell suits, bleached blond hair and simple catchphrases were the perfect camouflage for his predatory behaviour, and yet the BBC gave him a show targeting children. He openly boasted of his sexual conquests. He saw himself as—a term that he would often use—“a ladies man.” When he appeared on the TV comedy panel program Have I Got News For You in 1999, he made several jokes which, in hindsight, read like confessions. He joked that he was feared in every girl’s school in the country and, when asked what he did in his Motorhome, said, “anybody I can lay my hands on.” He was hiding in plain sight.

This isn’t the only occasion when the BBC has acted as cover for abuse. The next, and most heinous, is its cover for the ongoing Israeli abuse of the Palestinian people. It has consistently skewed the narrative to make out that every outbreak of violence has been caused by the Palestinians. It emphasizes Palestinian violence and plays down Israeli violence. Israel is always the victim, the Palestinians always the instigators. The timeline for any violent upheaval is always portrayed as a Palestinian attack upon innocent Israelis. We’re never given the context, which is the brutal occupation and suppression of the Palestinian right to self-determination. We never hear of the deaths of Palestinians that inevitably precede the attack. In the BBC's mind, the Palestinians are an inferior people who deserve their own collective punishment.

The latest paroxysm of extreme violence is only the most recent example. Gaza is a concentration camp in which 2.3 million people have been kept incarcerated for the last 16 and a half years. Half of them are children. The 1500 dead Hamas fighters, who breached the security wall on their suicide mission on October 7th and committed such brutal crimes, had spent much their lives imprisoned in that ghetto. They’d never known anything else. They’d never breathed free air. They’d never known peace. They’d only known violence, having suffered an endless series of aggressive incursions by the Israeli army since the blockade of the enclave began in 2007. Thousands have been killed, men women and children: the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and children of the fighters. There’s one difference between the violence committed by those crazed individuals in their desperate prison break, and the violence proposed by the Israeli government in retaliation: that Hamas’ violence is at least understandable. We can see where it comes from, obscene and regrettable though it was. The Israeli violence is of a different order. It’s a cold and calculated act perpetrated, not in the heat of the moment, but in advance, according to a schedule, on an innocent population, as part of a long-term plan. If Israel can defend itself, then why can’t the Palestinians? If we can appreciate the Israeli hunger for revenge, then why not the Palestinians’?

We’re not looking at two equivalent armies here. Hamas has no air force, no navy, no command-and-control, minimum communication equipment and no guidance systems. The Israeli army is the fourth largest and one of the most advanced in the world; second only to the United States. Israel often says that Hamas uses the population as human shields, but in that tiny enclave—25 miles long, by six to seven miles wide, the size of the Isle of Wight or Philadelphia, in which 2.3 million people are crowded into bombed out apartments blocks, and the ruins of schools, hospitals and mosques—where else are they supposed to go? Israel has cut off their food, fuel and electricity in preparation for the invasion. The strip hasn’t seen clean drinking water for years. This, by itself, reveals the real balance of power between the two sides. Every aspect of Palestinian life is controlled, even down to estimating how many calories are needed to keep the population barely alive.

Israel is the Jimmy Savile of nations. It’s hiding in plain sight, a serial abuser about to enact one of the worst crimes in modern history. Everyone who’s currently cheering them on, governments and media outlets alike, are complicit in those crimes. The Labour Party, once a home to people with pro-Palestinian views like me, including many Jews, has been comprehensively purged, along with Jeremy Corbyn, its one-time leader. You are thirteen times more likely to be thrown out of the Labour Party for anti-Semitism if you are Jewish than if you aren’t. We’re treated to the unholy spectacle of non-Jews accusing Jews of being anti-Semitic. There’s no longer any political opposition in the UK. All political parties are repeating the same lies.

Meanwhile the people of Gaza are trapped in their open air prison, unable to escape. Cutting off essential supplies to a civilian population is a war crime, and yet governments around the world cheer them on, while the BBC and other news outlets misreport the facts. Collective punishment, the bombing of civilians, the driving out of populations, these are war crimes. If you want to know what your own government would do to you if they could, just look to Gaza. There lies your future, unless you stand up now, in solidarity with an oppressed people, and make your voice heard. The future of humanity is in your hands.

—Follow Chris Stone on Twitter: @ChrisJamesStone