“Jimmy Savile: the people who knew” (Discovery +:En)

“In the hall lit by a hundred candles, little Zinnober stood in a scarlet embroidered suit, draped in the large ribbon of the Gold-Spotted Tiger with twenty buttons, épée at his side, plumed hat under his arm. Beside him the fair Candida, in bridal array, radiant with beauty and youth. Zinnober had grasped her hand, which he pressed to his mouth from time to time, while grinning and smiling very unpleasantly.” (Klein Zaches genannt Zinnober, 1819)

The story of notorious predator Jimmy Savile is well known in Britain, but it’s still mind-boggling to an average person who is not a huge believer in conspiracy theories to think how exactly this creepy and sleazy looking man gained power to the extent that he remained completely untouched until his death in October 2011.

The new documentary (Discovery +), “Jimmy Savile: the people who knew,” doesn’t give the straightforward answer to the main question “how did it become possible that an individual with a reputation of a completely sick and twisted criminal had got free access to children and teenagers and nobody stopped him?”, but instead shows the detailed chronology of his crimes that started in the middle 50s and continued for nearly 50 years.

The authors carefully juxtaposed archival footage from “Top of the Pops,” “Jim’ll fix it,” where Saville is freakishly groping young women in front of the camera being seemingly unbothered, laughing evily, and the awkward smiles on the women’s faces unquestionably hide their horror and disgust, with the interviews with several of Savile’s victims who were too young and too scared to reveal what happened to them. Their confessions are devastating and painful to hear.

One of the most paradoxical moments of the documentary is the fragment from the interview with Johnny Rotten, that second one from the “Sex Pistols,” a boisterous poster child of the “punk’s not dead” movement who was courageous enough to call Savile a con man and a hypocrite in 1978. But who would believe a punk whose Mohawk wasn’t washed for weeks?..

Savile died 10 years ago, but the first public announcement of his wrongdoings and crimes against children and vulnerable wasn’t made until 2012: I moved to the UK the very same year, and the avalanche of the information about him was shocking. Yes, it was an open secret. And no, one of the oldest democracies in the world didn’t manage to “fix it,” i.e. to put the dirtiest of the criminals in jail where he belonged and threw away the key. It feels like Savile’s malicious audacity and his way of escaping responsibility for his crimes (his funeral was broadcast, and one of his victims called his golden casket obscene) will haunt Britain for many years ahead.

…Zinnober smirked unpleasantly and chomped his cigar at the end.