Written In Pencil

Written in Pencil

Trigger warning: This piece discusses Jimmy Savile, child sexual abuse, grooming, and institutional failures.

I was a child in the seventies, when Jim’ll Fix It was everywhere, and children were encouraged to write in. In my case, quite literally. We were invited to write to Jimmy Savile at school, presumably as some sort of cheerful exercise in imagination. I was terrified.

Not of doing the work and not of writing the letter. I was terrified that I might be picked. The possibility that Jimmy Savile might read what I had written, decide my wish was sufficiently interesting, and arrange for me to appear on his programme was so horrifying that I actively looked for excuses not to do the assignment at all.

This was not, apparently, the intended response. The whole point was that children were supposed to want Jimmy to choose them. Adults thought the prospect was exciting, and the programme was built around children wanting access to him. I wanted the opposite.

I am not claiming that I knew what he was. I didn’t. I am saying that I knew I did not want him near me, and there is a difference.

I loved Top of the Pops, but if Jimmy Savile was presenting it, I didn’t watch it. I cannot remember conducting any great internal analysis of this decision either. I simply did not want to look at him or listen to him, even if it meant missing something I otherwise loved.

He was not the only television personality who frightened me. Rolf Harris did too. My parents decided this was because he had a beard, which seems unlikely because I have always liked beards. My partner currently resembles Ned Kelly.

What interests me now is not that my parents got the beard wrong. Parents get things wrong all the time. They were doing something perfectly ordinary: a child had expressed an irrational-seeming dislike of a famous man whom everybody knew to be harmless, so the adults supplied an explanation that made the discomfort comprehensible. It must be the beard. There. Solved.

Except perhaps the child did not need her reaction explained. Perhaps the adults did.

British childhood in the seventies and eighties came with an extraordinary level of institutional reassurance around certain people. There were only a handful of television channels, and the people on them did not occupy the fragmented celebrity world we have now. They entered everybody’s sitting room at once and, particularly when they appeared on the BBC, arrived carrying a kind of official approval.

Nobody had to sit a child down and say Jimmy Savile was a trustworthy man. The entire culture said it for them.

Television said he was safe. The BBC said he was safe. Hospitals said he was safe. Charities said he was safe. Politicians appeared with him, famous people knew him, important people laughed with him, and institutions opened their doors to him. Even schools were handing children paper and inviting them to make contact.

That is one of the things I had forgotten until I recently watched Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story. Not what he did, because nobody of my generation can now be unaware of that, but the sheer scale of the apparatus around him.

He was not simply a television presenter who turned out to be a sexual predator. He constructed an entire public identity around goodness: charity work, hospitals, fundraising, children, Stoke Mandeville, Broadmoor, connections, influence, and access.

The more access he acquired, the more respectable he appeared. The more respectable he appeared, the more access he acquired. Eventually, the fact that he was allowed into places became evidence that he ought to be allowed into places.

Broadmoor is where I find this almost impossible to comprehend. Here was a man with no relevant professional qualification acquiring extraordinary freedom and status inside a secure psychiatric hospital containing some of the most vulnerable people in the country.

Looking at it now, it is difficult not to wonder how much of Savile’s public life was altruism and how much was architecture. Broadmoor does not look merely like opportunity. It looks like infrastructure: access, authority, credibility, people unlikely to be believed, and an institution very keen to believe in him.

We tend to talk about predators grooming individuals, but Savile appears to have understood that institutions can be groomed too. You make yourself useful, raise money, cultivate important people, and do favours. You become familiar enough that people stop asking why you are there.

Then you make the eccentricity part of the package. You cross small boundaries so often that boundary-crossing itself becomes your personality. You make people laugh, you make objectors feel humourless, and eventually, suspicion becomes socially expensive.

That may be the most disturbing thing about watching Savile now. He was not a bland and reassuring man who concealed everything behind an immaculate mask of normality. He was strange, intrusive, sexually suggestive, boastful, grandiose, and spectacularly boundaryless, much of it in public.

Somehow, those qualities were repeatedly translated into charm. He was eccentric, mischievous, larger than life. It was simply Jimmy being Jimmy, which is an extraordinarily useful social designation if you happen to be Jimmy and would prefer people to stop examining what Jimmy is actually doing.

The characteristics were not necessarily invisible. They were reclassified.

But neither does it appear that everybody was completely taken in. That is another uncomfortable part of the story. People were asking questions. There was suspicion. There were people who found him disturbing, people who wondered about his behaviour, and people who appear to have seen parts of what was happening without anybody successfully assembling those parts into something capable of stopping him.

That makes the story worse rather than better. A system does not have to persuade every person within it that someone is safe. It only has to make doubt ineffective. Suspicion can exist for years if it remains fragmented, informal, embarrassing to voice, easy to dismiss, or somebody else’s problem.

Perhaps that was another function of Savile’s extraordinary status. The more implausible it seemed that somebody with that degree of approval could be what people suspected, the easier each individual suspicion was to explain away. The institution did not need to silence every question if its existence made the question itself seem unlikely.

And then there is his access to the Royal Family, which still baffles me. I am not suggesting that members of the Royal Family knew he was sexually abusing people, because there is no evidence that they did. What I find astonishing is that he managed to become sufficiently embedded in the establishment that the then Prince Charles corresponded with him and sought his advice.

How does Jimmy Savile become somebody a future king consults? How does a television personality with no particular expertise in these matters acquire that sort of access, and why did apparently so few people stop to wonder what qualified him to have it?

Perhaps the answer is the same one as everywhere else. By then, Savile had become self-authenticating. He knew important people because he was important, and he was important because he knew important people.

The BBC could look at his charity work. Hospitals could look at the BBC. Politicians could look at the hospitals and the millions raised. The establishment could look at the politicians, broadcasters, and institutions already welcoming him. Everyone could take everyone else’s acceptance of Jimmy Savile as evidence that somebody, somewhere, must surely have established that Jimmy Savile was a good man.

Apparently, nobody had to establish anything at all. Trust had become circular.

That is also why the relative absence of much public reflection from some of those circles troubles me. I am not interested in retrospectively accusing people of knowledge they may not have had. I am interested in how a man like that acquired that degree of proximity to power in the first place, because that is part of understanding how the whole system worked.

Perhaps that is why I found him frightening as a child. Children can dislike perfectly decent adults, and children can be frightened of completely harmless things. A child’s instinct is not a criminal records check.

What I did know was that something about this man made me want distance while the culture around me was saying the opposite. Come closer. Write to him. Perhaps he will choose you. Perhaps Jimmy will fix it. I was sitting in a classroom actively trying to make sure he didn’t.

That memory has become much stranger with time because we spend a great deal of childhood teaching children to override exactly that sort of discomfort. We teach them to be polite, answer adults when spoken to, stop being silly, give people a chance, and accept the adult explanation for what they themselves are feeling.

It’s just the beard, they said. Solved.

Sometimes the child will simply be wrong. But sometimes adults are so invested in their own explanation of a person that they stop listening to the much simpler thing the child is saying. I don’t like him. He scares me. I don’t want to go near him.

I would like to think we are better at this now. We have safeguarding policies, background checks, and a vocabulary for grooming, coercion, and boundaries that most ordinary families did not possess when I was a child. A famous man behaving strangely around children would surely attract scrutiny much earlier now. I am not entirely convinced.

The mechanisms that protected Savile did not depend upon everybody being stupid, or even upon everybody being unaware, and they did not disappear with the seventies and eighties. We still confuse visibility with familiarity, familiarity with trustworthiness, and status with character. We still assume that if somebody has been welcomed into enough respectable places, somebody else must have checked them out.

We still enjoy charismatic people who break small boundaries. We still excuse behaviour because somebody is funny, talented, useful, famous, generous, or well-connected. We may have become much better at recognising the pattern once it is exposed, but I am less certain that we have become immune to the pattern itself.

I think about that now when I remember Jimmy Savile and the child I was, sitting in a classroom trying to find some way out of writing to him. I knew only what he felt like from the other side of a television screen, and I wanted absolutely nothing to do with him.

The great horror of Jimmy Savile is not that Britain once contained a man like Jimmy Savile, because every society contains predators. The horror is that we constructed a machine around him which transformed access into virtue, strangeness into charm, celebrity into credibility, and credibility into permission. And then we invited the children to write to him.