There was one shot in Netflix’s disturbing new documentary Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story which offered an irresistible visual metaphor; it showed Savile, dressed in one of his flamboyant shell suits and over-sized sunglasses, jogging down some northern street pursued by scores of adoring women and children like some depraved Pied Piper of Hamelin. By this stage in his career he was one of the most famous people in the country and a serial abuser of children and other vulnerable people.

It is to the enormous credit of director Rowan Deacon and the production team responsible that it so clearly lays out Savile’s enormity and in doing so makes us confront some deeply troubling questions. How was it that someone so obviously weird (interviewees repeatedly use the word “creepy”) climbed to the very summit of British public life? 

Why were so many Establishment figures in thrall to the ex-miner who became a DJ? And why did his crimes go undiscovered until after his death in 2011? There’s another question too; how did the BBC come to create this monster and did it try to cover-up his crimes?

Born in 1926 as the youngest of seven children, Savile had a tough childhood redeemed by the devotion of his pious mother Agnes. Leaving school at 14 he was drafted into the coal mines during the war but suffered injury from a shot-blast and was invalided out. He then tried his hand at being a disc-jockey (he later claimed to have been the first-ever DJ), a professional wrestler and semi-pro cyclist but it was in the late 1950s that his career began to take off. Savile was taken on by Radio Luxembourg and he caught that first, great, powerful wave of pop culture that propelled him, by 1964, to become the presenter of the first edition of the BBC’s Top of The Pops. 

It requires an imaginative leap now to remember how that one programme became so central to youth culture. Nothing comparable exists today. In Northern factory towns, down-at-heel seaside resorts and sleepy villages teenagers tuned-in to TOTP to watch a glittering parade of pop stars playing for a studio audience of young people selected for their good-looks and modern style. It was deeply seductive; we (I was 12) looked-on agog.