Savile’s role as cheery national benefactor was further reflected in his tireless charity work.
It was once estimated that Savile had personally raised more than £40m for various charitable causes, and that up to 90 per cent of his own income was given away, although Savile never disclosed the extent of his own charitable donations. He took part in more than 200 marathons and innumerable "fun runs" for charity, without ever bothering to train: "I just turn up and run." He completed the London Marathon in 2005.
He worked as a volunteer porter at the Leeds Royal Infirmary, and enjoyed a particularly close relationship with the Stoke Mandeville hospital, raising £12m to contribute to the rebuilding of the hospital’s National Spinal Injuries Centre, which opened in 1983.
He also worked as a volunteer at Broadmoor, the hospital for the criminally insane, where he was given his own room, and referred to the staff and patients at the hospital as "my people" and himself as "the Godfather".
Savile once described his role at the hospital as honorary entertainments officer. "I ask them, what do you want to go round strangling crumpet for?" But his flippancy belied a shrewd understanding of inmates’ problems and how best to win their trust. In 1988 he was chosen to head a Department of Health task force to advise on the running of the hospital when it suffered a crisis of management and a nursing dispute. By some accounts, he ended up virtually running the place.
James Wilson Savile was born in Leeds on October 31, 1926, the youngest of seven children in a Catholic family. His father, Vincent, was a bookmaker’s clerk. Savile would later claim that the family were so impoverished that his Christmas present was to be taken to look at the toys in a Leeds department store, never expecting to be given one himself.
At the age of two Savile fell desperately ill, probably with pneumonia, although he was never sure of the exact diagnosis – "in those days if you were poor you just died". In anticipation of his passing, the doctor left a signed death certificate on the sideboard. Savile’s mother Agnes hurried to Leeds Cathedral to pray, and by the time she returned home the child had started showing signs of recovery. His sister Joan always believed it to be a miracle.
He attended the local school, St Anne’s Roman Catholic School, where he was taught "the 4 Rs: reading, 'riting, reckoning up and the difference between right from wrong". He left school at 14 and began work as an office boy. At the outbreak of war, he hoped to go into the RAF, but instead he was sent to work in the mines as a Bevin Boy under the Emergency Powers Act, earning £1.1s a week for six shifts. He might have remained there for the rest of his life but for a accident that was to prove strangely fortuitous. An explosion intended to dislodge a rock face almost killed him, and he was told he would never walk properly again.
A passion for music and a talent for entrepreurialism provided a fresh start. With a collection of swing records and a turntable Savile began putting on shows at local parties and pubs, and in 1948 he organised what he would later claim was Britain’s first disco, in an upstairs room in Leeds owned by the Loyal Order of Ancient Shepherds, where customers were charged a shilling each to dance to records by Glenn Miller and Harry James.
This led to Savile becoming a Mecca dance-hall manager, and by the late 1950s, he was responsible for the entertainment at 45 Mecca ballrooms across the country. At that time, Musicians Union regulations stipulated that entertainment in dance halls should be provided by live bands, with records played only in the interval between performances. Realising that the records were invariably more popular than the band, Savile would circumvent the rules by paying the musicians not to perform. His policy of what he described as "zero tolerance" over drunks and troublemakers revealed him in a somewhat less benevolent light. In later years, he admitted that they would be taken to the boiler-room, tied up and left for a few hours to reflect on their misdemeanours.
At various times, Savile also worked as a professional cyclist and a professional wrestler. But he first came to broader public attention in the early 1960s as a Radio Luxembourg disc-jockey. In 1964, he presented the first ever edition of Top of the Pops on BBC television. He would go on to host 300 episodes over the next 20 years.
It was here that Savile developed his uniform of track suit and jewellery, and the exaggerated vocal mannerisms that were to be become his trademark. The yodel was to prove a particularly useful device in the event of Savile’s script falling short; he could fill any embarrassing silences by the expedient of making a lot of noise without saying anything much at all, while furiously waggling his cigar.
Savile’s popularity as a disc-jockey lent him an apparently oracular power, and he worked as a consultant for a number of a companies advising on teenage trends and tastes. He also found himself in great demand for personal appearances. He described himself as "a self-punter": he had no manager or agent and would negotiate all his own contracts. A favoured ploy in his early days was never to quote a fee, but simply to tell his clients to pay "whatever you think I’m worth". The remuneration was invariably generous. In later years, he refused to appear anywhere for less than £10,000, arguing that a large fee would ensure that the event was properly organised.
But it was Jim’ll Fix It that made Savile a national institution. Over the course of 19 years, the programme received more than 3m requests.
Savile always claimed that the key to his success on Jim’ll Fix It was that he actually disliked children, although in later years he maintained that he had offered this explanation to allay any untoward suspicions that he liked them too much. Rumours of under-age sex circulated for some years, although the fact that no allegations of impropriety ever appeared in print seemed to confirm Savile’s own insistence that he had "no past, no nothing". (though the threads on DS were always...interesing)
But he was always careful to guard against the possibities of any misunderstandings, and the predatory intentions of parents or the press. When children knocked on his door for autographs, he would refuse to open it, instead passing the signed photographs and scraps of paper back through the letterbox. In later years he even refused to have a computer in his home, explaining that he did not want anybody thinking he was downloading child pornography.
Savile never married – claiming variously that the bad marital experiences of his siblings had discouraged him from matrimony, and that he was "married to the whole bleeding country, and it’s marvellous".
In his early years as a dance-hall disc-jockey, Savile displayed an indefatigable enthusiasm for the opposite sex, employing a faux-gallant approach to seduction which would involve him ostentatiously kissing a woman’s hand, turning it over and planting a kiss on the palm, then slowly running his eyes up the arm until meeting his intended victim’s eyes. "It worked like a charm," remembered one assistant. But he professed never to have been in love, nor to have even spent so much as a night with a woman. "My logic," he once explained, "has always been to sip at the cup of life and never gulp at it." Women, he maintained, were "lovely if you sip at them. They will enjoy you enormously, you will enjoy them enormously. Then you go to bed on your own and you wake up not disillusioned. You wake up with no brain damage".
His closest relationship was with his mother, Agnes, whom Savile called "the Duchess". Following the death of his father in 1953, Savile continued to live with his mother first in a terraced house in Leeds and then in a flat in Scarborough, keeping a caravan parked nearby where he would entertain lady friends.
Agnes was his constant companion, at film premieres, and on holidays at the Imperial Hotel in Torquay, where her favourite pastime was playing the one-armed bandits in amusement arcades. Despite their closeness, Savile always maintained that she never watched him on television or congratulated him on his acheivements, and lived in constant fear of the police knocking at the door. "She thought I was stealing all the money."
Following her death in 1973, Savile sequestered himself away with her body for five days, which he subsequently claimed were the "best five days of my life... She looked marvellous. She belonged to me. It’s wonderful, is death". In later years, he felt obliged to explain that he hadn’t buried her sooner "because the ground was icy". He continued to keep her room exactly as it was, and would have her clothes dry-cleaned once a year.
Savile was awarded an OBE in 1971 and a knighthood for services to charity and the entertainment business in 1990. It was also in 1990 that he received the honour of Knight Commander of St Gregory the Great from the Vatican.
He relished his association with pillars of the establishment. The Pope, he said, thought he was "a nice fellow". He referred to Prince Philip with a cosy familiarity as "the Boss", and once reportedly asked the Queen Mother, "Will you send me to the Tower if I said you were beautiful." He also formed an improbable friendship with Margaret Thatcher, and was a frequent visitor to Chequers for Christmas and the New Year during her tenure, although he claimed to have no political allegiance and explained that he and Mrs Thatcher had "marvellous arguments".
Savile spent copiously on jewellery and holiday cruises, and owned a succession of Rolls-Royces, which he seldom drove, but otherwise led a spartan, almost ascetic life. He maintained a series of residences throughout Britain although he seldom spent more than two consecutive nights in any of them, using them as mere stop-overs in his endless round of engagements.
Cleaners would come in once a week and leave a basket of food, but Savile claimed that if he was catering for himself his favoured meal was a tin of baked beans microwaved in the same pint mug which he would use to wash his hair. He dressed only in tracksuits, and claimed to have just one suit, for wearing to the Athenaeum Club, of which he was a member. When travelling he would carry only one pair of underpants which he would wash each night.
Savile always insisted that left to his own devices, he would happily sit in a chair, smoking a cigar and watching Teletext; his peripatetic lifestyle and ferocious activity was merely the consequence of the endless requests for public appearances and good deeds.
He claimed to have "thousands" of acquaintances, yet seemed to have few close friends or confidantes. Away from public view, he could be prickly, impatient with journalists who attempted to get too close or pry too deeply into his affairs; he was a man who distrusted displays of emotion, and eschewed introspection or self-analysis, which he regarded as "soft". A member of Mensa, Savile prided himself on being "logical": in his own words "the essence of boring common sense", in one commentator’s phrase "the smartest person he had ever met".
His public persona was his best camouflage. Long after his television fame had waned, Savile continued to give the impression of being instantly animated by the spotlight, no matter how dim it may have become, a man who regarded it as his bounden duty to brighten everybody’s day, collaring passers-by to whom he was at best a distant memory and regaling them with his jokes and catch-phrases, making a beeline for anybody in a wheelchair.
A man who divided opinion without ever appearing to care much what anyone thought of him, he was simply an odd chap.
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