‘If this guy was walking down the street, you wouldn’t want to talk to him,” says Selina Scott, watching footage of herself in her 80s-presenting heyday interviewing Jimmy Savile in his “flirtatious” mode. Young Selina masks her discomfort with a professional charm and veneer of bonhomie (“The camera lies,” she notes now) as Savile skates ever closer to the boundary between what was then acceptable banter from a celebrity in the company of a hot blonde – an already generously allotted area – and outright creepiness. He is, as the two-part Netflix documentary Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story shows time and again, the very definition of a predator hiding in plain sight.
A decade on from his death and the investigation – which alas succeeded rather than preceded the passing – into what turned out to be crimes extending over half a century and more than 50 children’s homes, schools and hospitals around Britain, the story is no less shocking or confounding. Somehow, the meticulous piecing together of the Savile phenomenon by the documentary makers only makes it more so.
