The BBC shrink who saw Savile for what he was
The Netflix documentary Jimmy Savile: A British horror Story is packed with compelling old footage of Savile on the BBC but, for some reason, nothing from the most revealing interview he ever did.
In 1991, 20 years before he died, and at a time when he was still courted and feted by the Great and the Good, Savile (pictured) was invited onto the Radio 4 series In The Psychiatrist’s Chair, with Dr Anthony Clare, who, as well as being a familiar media presence, had been Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin.
From the start, Savile was obstructive. As Clare read out his introduction, Savile kept needlessly chipping in, as if trying to derail him.
‘Sir James Wilson Savile . . .’ ‘Yes.’ ‘ . . .OBe . . .’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Was born on October 31st, 1926, the youngest of seven children...’ ‘True.’ Other broadcasters might have suggested they start again, this time without the interruptions, but Clare kept going, clearly sensing they revealed more than they concealed. Later, he compared Savile to a prizefighter, ‘exceedingly wary, edgy, anticipating a flurry of hooks to the head’.
Clare had been struck by Savile’s preoccupations: his emphasis on money, his denial of feelings, and his repeated and unprompted insistence that he had nothing to hide. ‘What you see is what you get . . . I’m not funny or weird or anything like that.’
‘Now what about your feelings?’ asked Clare. ‘I haven’t found them yet.’ ‘Seriously . . . ’ ‘No, I haven’t found them yet.’ Clare asked Savile why he had never married.
‘Oh, no, good heavens, no, couldn’t do that.’ he told Clare to give him a good reason for getting married.
‘Well, people get married because they’re in love.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Well, have you been?’ ‘Never.’ ‘Never in love?’ ‘I don’t know what it is.’ Later in the interview, Savile confirmed that the five days he spent alone with his mother’s corpse were the happiest of his life. ‘Once upon a time I had to share her with a lot of people. We had marvellous times. But when she was dead she was all mine, for me.’
They returned to his lack of emotional ties.
‘Would it be true to say,’ asked
Clare, ‘that you have no close personal relationships with anyone?’ ‘You’re in the business, you tell me.’ ‘But in your judgment, do you think you have?’ ‘In my judgment?’ ‘Is there somebody you’d say: “he or she knows me very well?” ’
Once again, Savile obfuscated, claiming that he was an open book. But Clare persisted. ‘So . . . everybody who sees you knows you as much as they’re ever likely to know you?’
‘But they know me very well ’cos that’s all there is to know. I mean I don’t go away from here and indulge in some wild fetishes or wild weirdo things or anything like that. I mean, if you turned my stone over there ain’t nothing underneath it.’
‘So the moral of this story is that if we search for something inside you we will not find anything?’
‘You’ve got to tell me, that’s your game... I mean you tell me. I mean I said to you: “Am I weird?” You got to tell me. I don’t think I am, but I mean you’re a specialist at your game and you could say: “You are the most weird person I’ve ever seen.” ’
A year later, writing an introduction to this interview before it was republished in a collection, Clare finally answered Savile’s question. he suggested Savile had ‘an unwholesome death complex... People with a distaste for emotions, who place great value on predictability and control, who see life as incorrigibly messy and death as a frozen model of perfection, are half in love with death. The dead won’t let you down, don’t make demands, don’t limit your freedom.’
He ADDeD that he believed Savile’s claims that he had no feelings: he didn’t like children, or the patients at Broadmoor, or the disabled at Stoke Mandeville. ‘Jimmy Savile says he is what you see. If he is to be believed, then he is a calculating materialist who does what he does because that is what gives him the greatest sense of control, freedom, independence.’
he had, he said, a ‘foreboding that [Savile’s] solitary, shifting life is but a manifestation of a profound psychological malaise’. There was, he concluded: ‘Something chilling about this 20th-century “saint”.’
The BBC Sounds app has a number of interviews from In The Psychiatrist’s Chair — all of them interesting — but, for whatever reason, not this one. Presumably the BBC is embarrassed by the memory of Savile. But, if this is the case, should it not also be proud of the way in which another of its presenters, Dr Anthony Clare, nailed him so presciently?