ITV were of course responsible for the original source of the Savile deceit with the broadcast of the Exposure programme in October 2012 fronted by the former Surrey detective and self styled ‘child protection expert’ Mark Williams-Thomas. A summary of the extensive fabrications included in this travesty are outlined in this earlier post http://bit.ly/2dybGYs compiled from extensive research carried out by several indefatigable internet bloggers, most notably Moor Larkin and the late Anna Raccoon.
The main focus in this latest programme featured what appear to be the personal opinions of detective Gary Pankhurst, who was one of the team involved in the Metropolitan Police Operation Yewtree, which co-ordinated the accusations against Savile. Pankhurst’s default position is invariably to always accept the claims of any Savile accuser without having to go to the bother of carrying out any investigation into their allegations. He additionally never misses an opportunity to present all of Savile’s activities in the worst possible light, whether as manager of a dance hall, disc jockey, TV and radio presenter, voluntary hospital porter, fundraiser for Stoke Mandeville hospital, his role at Broadmoor psychiatric hospital, and his close association with royalty and politicians. Pankhurst maintains that all of these activities were a front for Savile’s ‘predatory behaviour’ which allowed him a cover to present himself in a favourable light to deflect attention from his nefarious behaviour and thus render him ‘untouchable’ through his ‘controlling and coercive’ character.
It should be remembered that (apart from the convicted false accuser Carl Beech) none of the allegations received by the Metropolitan Police in Operation Yewtree were investigated, as it was considered that since he was deceased such investigations would serve little purpose. Once this knowledge became known it allowed several hundred claimants to come forward with accusations against the safely dead Savile, aware that they would receive little scrutiny from the police, whilst at the same time rightly believing that their claims would be assiduously promoted by the NSPCC and compensation seeking lawyers. As a result the Savile estate of several millions was emptied by these compensation claimants as were the coffers of the BBC and NHS.
Another contributor was the ‘investigative journalist’ Meirion Jones and former producer for the BBC Newsnight current affairs programme, in which role he was responsible for investigating claims made against Savile by former Duncroft approved school pupils. However, the proposed programme was shelved when it was discovered that the claims involving the police included a forged letter. Jones strongly disagreed with this decision and later colluded with Mark Williams-Thomas in the preparation of the ITV Exposure programme. So he is hardly a neutral witness, since he continues to parrot fabrications arising from the Exposure programme.
The programme first turned its attention to Top of the Pops. A member of the 1970s pop group Sparks claimed that back stage Savile strutted around in a ‘menacing’ manner with his ‘heavies’. Another witness was a woman who as a young girl in the audience claimed that Savile ‘inappropriately’ touched her when he was presenting the programme. When she complained to the floor manager he brushed her concerns aside. For once, this claim has the ring of truth as Savile was undoubtedly a touchy-feely person in the presence of the opposite sex. Unfortunately, this was commonplace behaviour at the time and was not regarded as particularly unusual by many people, although it is of course invasive. It should be remembered that many women also engaged in this practice at the time and some probably still do so, with little public censure. More seriously, the programme alleged that Savile ‘sexually abused’ many of the teen girls on Top of the Pops, without providing a shred of evidence to back up this claim, other than the Dame Janet Smith BBC report whose ‘findings’ were comprehensively debunked in this previous post http://bit.ly/2mMrQza, again with research provided by the aforementioned intrepid internet bloggers.
The programme then moved on to a new witness Kelly who was a regular dancer at Top of the Pops from the age of fourteen. She clearly enjoyed her time there, being invited to bars at BBC Television Centre where she was ‘plied with champagne’. Later the girls would be invited back to Savile’s dressing room, which according to Pankhurst provided an opportunity for Savile to ‘groom’ them. Kelly claimed that Savile made advances to her but she rebuffed him and left. Pankhurst interpreted this as Savile ‘testing’ the girls to discover who was ‘compliant’, and example of the mind reading of which he appears to have quite a talent.
Although Pankhurst’s ‘insight’ is pure speculation, we can be sure there was never any shortage of teen girls willing to enter Savile’s dressing room, and they would all have been old enough to be well aware of why he might be seeking them out. It was common knowledge that these ‘groupies’ were only too willing to throw themselves at popular DJs and pop bands (excepting Sparks of course). This would have attracted little censure from BBC management at a time when sexually permissiveness was at the vanguard of the ‘progressive’ counter culture, to the consternation of ‘conservative reactionaries’ such as Mary Whitehouse who was regularly lampooned as a repressed prude by BBC top brass.
Dame Janet’s report into the BBC speaks of the ‘moral danger’ faced by the teen girls, in language little different to the outlook of Mary Whitehouse. A self flagellating BBC management accepted the Smith report in its entirety, and so have u-turned completely from ridiculing the anti permissiveness of Mary Whitehouse to fanatically embracing the ‘moral danger’ espoused by Dame Janet. So which of these two outlooks is correct, both adopted in different eras by self styled ‘progressive’ liberals.
Kelly was friendly with another Top of the Pops dancer Claire McAlpine, claiming that Claire went back to Savile’s dressing room on several occasions. Kelly became aware that Claire was pregnant, suggesting that Savile was responsible. A picture of Claire standing next to Savile is juxtaposed with the revelation that Claire had committed suicide. The clear implication behind this disgusting smear is that Savile was the culprit responsible for her death. However, as revealed in the Dame Janet report the individual concerned was another DJ. This segment demonstrates the depth the programme was prepared to sink in order to mislead viewers.
The programme then moved on to Jim’ll Fix It with Pankhurst again repeating his trope that this was done to allow Savile access to children with the connivance of BBC management. However, as the investigative blogger Moor Larkin has revealed in some depth, Savile’s involvement in the programme was normally kept to the bare minimum, confined mostly to the show’s presentation. Once again Pankhurst is given free rein to make the most outrageous evidence free assumptions about Savile’s motivations and behaviour. The programme then goes on to cite various opportunities Savile supposedly had to continue his ‘offending’ all of which are pure speculation without evidence. As one former BBC employee said ‘everybody knew what Savile was up to but nobody knew what to do about it’. So there we have it, all you needed was rumour and hearsay to condemn and convict Savile as a sexual predator. For the record the BBC never received any complaints about Savile’s behaviour during his lifetime.
The programme then moved on to denounce his charity work with the smear that it ‘protected him from suspicion’. According to Pankhurst ‘Savile’s association with hospitals was particularly concerning because of the vulnerability of people he preyed upon’. A former Stoke Mandeville patient called ‘Pauline’ (shown only in silhouette) was confined to a wheelchair. She claimed that Savile entered her room, put his hand up her skirt and indecently assaulted her. She froze and was unable to scream, realised she could do nothing about it as Savile was widely regarded as some ‘God sent angel’ and then ludicrously blamed herself for what he had done. She claimed that this incident had ruined her life and that she could no longer stand people touching her. It was then suggested that nobody would believe ‘victims’ but would instead believe Savile, a position incidentally which has now been completely reversed.
It seems beyond belief that ‘Pauline’ would have failed to mention a violation such as this at the time, either to nurses or to her family. If it had such a devastating impact as she claims her change in behaviour would have been noted by her parents who would have sought an explanation. There were over sixty complaints made about Savile in the NHS report relating to Stoke Mandeville hospital authored by Kate Lampard, all of them having one thing in common, they were made as a consequence of trawling after the ITV Exposure broadcast. It should be noted that Sylvia Nichol, who worked for over forty years at the Stoke Mandeville Trust, stated that in the many years she had known Savile, she had never seen anything but ‘good honest behaviour’ from him, and confirmed that nobody else working there had mentioned anything being amiss. Janet Cope was Savile’s secretary at Stoke Mandeville for twenty eight years until he sacked her. Although admitting he was not always an easy man to work with, she also refutes all the claims made in the Lampard report, insisting that they could not be true.
Next up is Savile’s association with the royals. A clip of Prince Charles visiting Savile’s Glencoe cottage in Scotland is shown, dismissed as a ‘publicity stunt’. Predictably Pankhurst condemns Savile’s relationship with the royal family as ‘giving him a veneer of respectability’, thus providing him with a high degree of protection since ‘if you attacked Savile you would be attacking those who surrounded him’. His strategy was ‘to latch on to powerful people, including politicians, to hide the dark secrets that surrounded him’ so that ‘those with suspicions were powerless to challenge him’. Because of these high profile connections Pankhurst claimed that this prevented the police from investigating him. The reason that all of this shameless nonsense can be repeated unchallenged is a result of the collective groupthink arising from the original Exposure programme, which has been swallowed by the mainstream media without investigation. In reality, nobody at the time thought that Savile’s behaviour was in any way untoward, despite being sometimes eccentric. It is only in retrospect, through the prism of his continual demonisation as a predator, that his behaviour can be presented in these twisted terms.
The programme ended with the allegations relating to Duncroft approved school with Meirion Jones falsely claiming that Savile had regularly spent the night there, that he had abused girls, and that he was allowed to get away with his ‘predatory behaviour’ by inviting girls to his TV show. None of this has any basis in fact as explained in detail by the former pupil Susan on the Anna Raccoon blog. She was the Duncroft girl who was responsible for Savile being invited to the school in the first place. She has debunked all of Meirion Jones’ false claims, which demonstrates again how desperate this programme was to mislead viewers about Savile. Additionally these claims were investigated by the Surrey Police who found no evidence to back them up. Moreover, Margaret Jones (Meiron Jones aunt), the headmistress at the time confirmed that neither she, nor any of her staff, had received any complaints about Savile arising from his visits.
The programme finished by demonising Savile ‘for casting a long shadow over the nation’ and who had ‘a catastrophic effect on the lives of hundreds of people through his offending’, concluding that Savile ‘was a prolific sexual predatory offender’. All of this without a shred of evidence, or any pretence of carrying out even the most cursory investigation into any of the claims or accusations. All the evidence obtained by those who (unlike this programme) have researched this matter suggests that Savile was careful to restrict his sexual advances to those over the age of consent (and with their consent), since to do otherwise would risk destroying his reputation and celebrity status.
