A creepy interlude

[dem bones]

Ken Irwin (ed.) - Top Of The Pops Annual 1975 (BBC, World Distributors, 1974)

Welcome to Top of the Pops
Jimmy Savile — The Daddy of the DJs
Adding the Curves to the Pop Scene
Touring America ... with Slade
Osmond-mania! The Osmonds in Britain
It Ain't So Easy — Putting The Show Together
Roy Wood — The Wizzard "One-Man Band"
Quiz — "I Recognise That Face!"
"The Backers"
Rock 'n' Roll — It's Still Alive and Kicking
Top Deejays: Noel Edmonds — The Man Who Hates To Stand Still
Dave Lee Travis — The Hairy Monster
Tony Blackburn — Branching Out
Wings — Paul McCartney. The Beatle Who Began to Fly
If It's Black, It's Really Beautiful!
"Top Thirty" Quiz Time
Carpenters — Masters of their Craft!
Suddenly, It's Middle-of-the-Road Music
What the Stars Say
Letters from Top of the Pops Postbag
Rolling Stones — They Keep on Rolling
Top-of-the-Pop Heart-throbs on Parade
Quiz Answers

It's easy with hindsight, but I wonder if anyone found any of these selected highlights from Jimmy Savile — The Daddy of the DJs even a little disturbing at the time?

"I now do all kinds of different programmes - party political broadcasts, "Songs Of Praise", "The Epilogue", "Savile's Travels", "Speakeasy", "Clunk-Click"", religious programmes, as well as dear old "Top of the Pops" ... I only like to work one day a week. I've become so involved with life - like working at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, Leeds Infirmary and Broadmoor, and all these ancillary things that I do. That's where I meet the people in trouble. And that really is life.

In a hospital, for instance, I think I can give a great deal of pleasure to patients merely by being in there, and meeting them. I'll take my trolley in and wheel someone down to the X-ray department. Now before I've opened my mouth, they re say, "Ooh, it's Jimmy Savile. Wait till I tell my of nephews and nieces about this, they'll be mad with jealousy!" This sort of thing gives me a great thrill, naturally.... I don't go in there as some Flash Harry for seven minutes or so. I've been doing this for seven years or more, which is longer than a lot of people who work in the hospitals.

'That reaction from hospital patients is fantastic.

I'll let you into a little secret. Nothing ever upsets me. Ever. I've never in my life lost my temper. Never. I'm far too rational a person. Because when I get faced with an awkward situation, I always rationalise it. I find I'm incapable of ever losing my temper. Some people say how boring life must be, never losing your temper. I've got news for them - it's fantastic. At all times, you're totally sober. At all times you're in command of the situation, generally speaking.

Another little secret. I got past needing the money years ago. It's ten years or more that I stopped working. Financially, there's been no problems for me .... It just doesn't matter. It's not important to me. I've already got money. Plenty of it.

It is far more difficult than it looks, standing there, introducing a show like "Top of the Pops", with lots of kids screaming around you. That, again, is where my animal cunning comes in. I'm a great believer in animal cunning.

Animal cunning means that, short of a direct bullet through the heart, you'll always escape with the bone. And the least you can fear is a swift kick from the butcher of life. But you escape with the juicy bone.

Now I've escaped with a few juicy bones in my life. And a few kicks. But animal cunning has given me very devious footwork - 'cos I'm a great politician."

[junkmonkey]

I met the man several times (he had a house just up the glen from us) and he always gave me the creeps. It was really sad seeing him in one of the local coffee shops 'working the crowd' who, for the most part had no idea who he was. Either too young to know, too foreign - we get a lot of tourists around here, or, being local, avoiding him like the plague. Apparently his opening line to women was, "I dreamt about you last night. I just want to say thank you." He said it to one friend of mine several times. Much as I hate the thought that he did all those awful things, it's reassuring to know my inbuilt creep detector works.

[andydecker]

I am sorry. One shouldn't comment on things one doesn't know anything about, really. After seing junkmonkeys comment I researched Saville. Ugh! No joke material.

So I deleted my post ASAP.

[dem bones]

My fault entirely, Andy. Because the increasingly vile revelations have been headline news over here every day since the end of September, I tend to forget that's not the case outside of the UK.

"It is also a well known fact in the Corperation that I'm a lot better at the job of compering Top Of The Pops than anyone else they've ever had on the show." It's astonishing how incongruous Savile's contribution is in the context of the annual. Everything else is the good time fluffy pop nonsense any self-respecting teeny-bopper would demand from such a publication - a double-page Alvin Stardust pin-up, "How can I be in Pan's People?", Tony Blackburn's Top Eleven, a three page gallery of your favourite dishy Heartthrobs (Noel Edmonds, The New Seeker, Peters & Lee, Mott the Hoople, John Coglan of Status Quo ...), Osmonds, lots of little Osmonds, everywhere, everywhere ...., etc - but right at the start, this ugly, introspective three page rant of self-justification from some fifty-year old DJ.

All the edgy macabre literature I've read this year, and it's taken a narrative in an innocent Top Of The Pops annual to creep me out for real. My every sympathy to the victims and the relatives of this monster.

[Shrink Proof]

"I'm a great believer in animal cunning." - J Saville.

Need I say more??

[valdemar]

It's quite obvious that this deeply weird man had been up to his dreadful 'work' for years. I recall reading that the normally placid John Le Mesurier disliked him intently, to the point of seeing one of Savile's British Rail 'This Is The Age Of The Train' posters at a railway station, and exclaiming: "C**t!". By the way, John Le Mesurier's autobiography, 'Do You Think That's Wise?' is a great read, I recommend it heartily. Another book [which I refer to a lot], is the most recent collection of gutter language, the mighty 'Das Krapital', the Viz Profanisaurus. It was published several years ago, but has an entry for Jimmy Savile, which is curious in the extreme. The first part reads: 'Yorkshire-born ex coal miner, who went on to be a founding Radio 1 DJ, and hosted the first edition of 'Top Of The Pops', as well as 'Jim'll Fix It. [The rest of this definition has been cut in anticipation of a substantial amount of legal advice]' Prescient or what? For the record, Savile always made me feel uneasy, and I wasn't that keen on his shows. A rather unfortunate aside to the whole affair was pointed out to me by my brother, who is a well-liked club DJ in his spare time. Savile was the first DJ to use two turntables and a microphone, and the first to purposely open a 'disco' in the sense that we know them today, where punters dance to records, and not a live dance band. Somehow, Savile's evil has tainted the dancefloor.

[dem bones]

He was back again in the 1977 annual with "So You Want To Be A Disc Jockey ... Well, Here's How. No mention of his twin-tables, and less full-on creepy than the Daddy Of The DJ's horror, but in view of everything that's come to light (and was obviously common knowledge within media circles for decades), even possibly innocent remarks pertaining to "caring for the kids" take on a hideous significance. He's scathing of his contemporaries - who, unlike him, are just "extensions of the stylus" - because "they don't accept responsibility for their audiences, which is wrong."

"I would know the time of the last buses. At ten o'clock or thereabouts, I would put on a record that was a bit duff - and I would immediately see twenty or thirty kids go off to the cloak-room, on their way home. I would then play the right kind of records to make them all go home, but switching them carefully, so that there wouldn't be a packed crowd waiting in the cloak-room at the same time.'

"Those kids were my bread-and-butter, so I'd look after them, water them, feed them, and then send them off home in time to catch the last buses. But most of all, they'd be happy - not just with the records, but with J. Saville, the best deejay in the business."

Elsewhere, Saville hints at "my lads" - presumably this "Leeds Mafia" we've been hearing so much about - dispensing a kicking to a youth accused of stealing "the family rates" from a girls handbag, "and there was no more thieving at any of my discos!"