How Louis Theroux was duped by Jimmy Savile
Jimmy Savile used to fantasise about the perfect crime. For it to be truly perfect nobody must ever know, and yet where would be the kudos in that? It was Savile’s lust for kudos which, in 2000, found him daring Louis Theroux to uncover the sexual abuse he had been perpetrating for decades. When Louis Met… Jimmy Savile was a profile of a manifest creep, but it didn’t expose a child molester. Revisiting the story last night in Louis Theroux: Savile (BBC Two), the documentary maker grappled with the shaming truth that he was duped, even intimidated, by Savile.
“Poor Louis, he’s really been hoodwinked,” Kat Ward, a victim of Savile’s who waived her anonymity in 2012, remembered saying when she watched the original film. As a schoolgirl, she told Theroux, she was forced to fellate Savile until she vomited. “Not in the car!” he ordered, thrusting her out of the Rolls.
There was plenty of such stomachchurning testimony. He thrust his cigar-flavoured tongue into the mouth of Cherie Wheatcroft, who was a patient at Stoke Mandeville following an unwanted pregnancy. “You’ve been a naughty girl, you’ve been a naughty girl,” Savile said as he leered at her.
Others who worked with him – all of them women – saw nothing or chose not to. To do otherwise would have required them to ask difficult questions about their own lives (and, in one case, chuck out a Savile portrait in Lego). Janet Cope, Savile’s PA, devoutly believed in his asexuality. Theroux wondered if she may have lost her objectivity. “No! What makes you ask that?”
Theroux is a polite inquisitor who in a previous film earned the trust of incarcerated paedophiles. Although his kindly style couldn’t cut through Savile’s smokescreen, it worked with the women he met here.
But in the end he didn’t quite know how to place himself in a story of which, for once, he was the subject.
The most penetrating question was put not by Theroux but to him. “Do you feel like you were groomed?” asked Sam, abused at 11 by Savile in church. He wasn’t sure. Weren’t we all groomed? If this depressing epilogue explored the gulling of Theroux, it also documented a national failure to see through that all too transparent string vest.
The history of royalty is the history of ordinary mortals tending to get slightly above themselves. No monarch has ever put this quite so succinctly as Jenna Coleman’s Queen Victoria when a new-fangled locomotive puttered across 1840s England, apparently without royal assent. “I decide what is the future!” she, er, railed at her trainspotter husband Albert (Tom Hughes).
The last head of state to enjoy such an adamantine self-belief was Charles I, and look at the state of his head.
There’s only one more episode to go in Victoria (ITV, Sunday), Daisy Goodwin’s eventful skip through the young life of Britain’s second most enduring queen. Its relationship with the known facts puts one in mind of a pupil sitting a history exam in which they spin charming fictions, now and then nipping out to the loo to consult a crib sheet they stashed in the cistern. The whole series has had the sugary flavour and creamy consistency of Mr Francatelli’s bombe surprise.
This week, Victoria and Albert announced that they were pregnant, although that wasn’t any sort of word to use at court. They were applauded by a roomful of extras while Wellington (Peter Bowles) scowled at Peel (Nigel Lindsay) as inchoate Tory fears of a German regency took root. “And so the torpid Teuton wedges himself yet further into the sagging cleft of power,” volunteered the Duke while casting tired eyes around the room for a better scriptwriter.
The royal couple spent much of the episode up in Staffordshire as guests of ghastly snob Sir Piers Gifford (James Wilby), who deplored Albert’s habit of literally shooting from the hip. This may have been intended as the subtlest visual symbol but it made you root for Albert as a sort of Victorian forerunner of Clint Eastwood’s man with no name.
Coleman’s queen is pert, witty, sparkling and possibly better company than the original. She joins a pantheon of thesps who have made a Windsor, or a Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, all their own. Next week she’ll give birth to the boy who grew up to become Timothy West, who begat Tom Hollander, who sired Edward Fox and Colin Firth, who fathered our own dear Helen Mirren. We are amused.