For decades Jimmy Savile was the “biggest thing on the BBC”, until an ITV documentary exposed him as a prolific child sex offender.
The landmark documentary, Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile, brought to light statements from victim-survivors who detailed years of abuse they endured from Savile during the peak of his fame.
Former detective turned investigative reporter Mark Williams-Thomas investigated the story.
Williams-Thomas unpacks his investigation into Savile on the Crime Insiders podcast:
After 11 years of working as a police officer specialising in child protection, Williams-Thomas started working as a reporter for Interpol, where he was approached by a producer to investigate Savile.
“The producer said to me, have you ever heard anything about Jimmy Savile being a sex offender? And I said, no, I haven’t. He’s a very strange individual. I wouldn’t want him anywhere near my children. But no,” he said.
Crime Insiders host Brent Sanders asked, “Jimmy Savile, at the time he was the biggest thing on the BBC, wasn’t he?”
“He was very, very untouchable,” Williams-Thomas said about Savile, “On a Saturday night when he had his channels or his programmes Jim’ll Fix It and others he was pulling in 12, 15, 20 million viewers.”
“He got very close to the royal family, in particular Princess Diana and Prince Charles and as a result of that, he curried favour,” he said.
“[The TV producer] talked about his aunt who was running a children’s home, and he used to come and visit this children’s home in Surrey, and that he’d heard rumours of him being inappropriate”.
Once his investigation was underway, Williams-Thomas started interviewing victim-survivors who exposed the truth.
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