How the BBC failed Savile’s victims

array of tribute programmes, I was working with investigations producer Meirion Jones on a story he’d had in his sights for many years: an exposure of who Savile actually was.

As a teenager, Meirion had visited his aunt who ran an approved school for girls in Surrey. These girls were held under lock and key but could earn privileges. One of these was to be taken out, under a cloud of cigar smoke, by one of the country’s most glittering DJs in his golden Rolls Royce.

We contacted some of those girls, now middle-aged women. Some had never spoken of their experiences; others had complained to the police during Savile’s lifetime. All had been afraid he might sue them, with good reason; Savile was notoriously quick to threaten potential complainants with his lawyers. The women told us how he’d cajole and badger them into giving him oral sex. In return for their co-operation, they’d be taken to see his shows being recorded live at the BBC. There, the abuse continued; an inquiry would later identify 72 victims of Savile at the BBC alone.

The victims we spoke to were disillusioned, accustomed to being ignored. Karin Ward, who gave us the first on-camera interview about her experiences with Savile, told Meirion and I as we left her house “they’ll never use this”. We disagreed. On our way back to London from her home in Shropshire, we heard on the car radio that the BBC would be including tributes to Savile during Christmas. No they won’t, we said. Initially, our interview with Ward and the anonymous testimonies we’d gathered were met with enthusiasm on the programme; editing was booked and a date for broadcast identified. But then there was a change that to us was inexplicable. Jeremy Paxman, in his memoirs published last week, recounts this abrupt twist on from the story being supported to the about turn in editorial emphasis that was then used to discard it. As Paxman remembers it: we “bit our tongues and accepted” the decision. But in fact, we’d argued strongly for our story to be run, convinced that not only was it accurate but that we’d barely scratched the surface. When word got out that the story (which subsequently ran on ITV) had been dropped, the BBC insisted that was not investigating Savile, but variously Surrey Police or the Crown Prosecution Service. In the eyes of the women who had trusted us to tell us what had happened, not only had we not run the story, we’d apparently lied about what we were up to in the first place. The BBC’s publicly stated rationale, including the fact that the story was “celebrity tittle-tattle”, not material at all, speaks of a total lack of concern for people who’d overcome decades of silence to tell us what had really happened. The reason for dropping story was never explained, even by the multi-million pound independent inquiry that later found the story should have run. Meirion and I were isolated and the BBC had come to feel like a hostile environment. The new director-general George Entwistle’s brief tenure would be buried under the fallout from the false naming of Tory politician Lord McAlpine as a paedophile. This followed a report on that should never have seen the light of day, but in the weird aftermath of the Savile scandal had somehow got on air. In a meeting with the acting director-general, Tim Davie, I’d asked why there had been no acknowledgement from the top that our story should have run, much less an apology for how it was dropped. He reminded me that: “We have lost a director-general over this.” Uncomfortable with the coldness of previously warm colleagues, I took voluntary redundancy. A short time later, working for

on Channel 4, my team investigated the late Cyril Smith MP who, like Savile, died a knight of good character, in the eyes of the law anyway. They knew each other a bit and would almost certainly have recognised a kindred spirit; charismatic and streetwise working-class men, charming if that worked best and bullying if not. They wore their eccentricities like an armour, shielding their cruelty from view.

Never had I met so many grown men moved to cry; not just because of what Smith put them through, but from a lifetime of asking themselves: why didn’t I just hit him? What they forget is that they were terrified boys. Like the women we’d spoken to on who’d been abused by Savile, they were in care and on the back foot in every way.

So why did no one listen? In this case, not only did the damaged boys speak out, they were believed. We interviewed retired detectives, sickened by the decision of the then director of public prosecutions to drop the case: “Not in the public interest,” he had ruled.

Theroux’s programme will be a reminder not just of the extent of Savile’s deceit, but how we were collectively blinded by stardust.

Five years after the story was dropped, there has been a shift in attitudes: the convictions of Stuart Hall, Max Clifford and Rolf Harris show that victims can come forward and expect to be heard.

One of the first things I did after leaving the BBC was to accept an invitation from the former director of public prosecutions, Keir Starmer, to discuss ways to improve the handling of historic child abuse complaints. The revolving door of senior figures at the national abuse inquiry does not inspire hope. But the inquiry’s enormous scope surely reflects the scale of an issue buried for so long. One of the curses of child abuse is that children are left to cope in silence: as adults it’s right they should be heard.