“He looks like that disc jockey.”

Britain, 1966. So ‘that disc jockey’ would, of course, be Jimmy Savile... malheureusement.

The War Machines - season 03 - 1966

Just a little bit creepy.... (eventho he's cute as hell!!!)

King Charles III + friend

Oh gosh it's just hit me, we're going to have a king's coronation for Jimmy Savile's best friend, ohhh 😳

First official image of Steve as Jimmy Savile in The Reckoning

Still not sure if I will watch this 😕

The similarities between Jimmy Savile and Dan Schneider are astounding, these two men were allowed around young children for years and the networks allowed this to happen. The BBC and Nickelodeon are equally as responsible for letting these men have access to children due to their celebrity and influence. Dan Schneider was running children’s television at Nickelodeon for almost thirty years, Jimmy Savile started his career in the 60s and was active until the 2000s. And the allegations against Savile were there from the beginning, yet were ignored by the police and general public until he was dead. Schneider has been under scrutiny for years as well, as I remember being a child and it always being something that popped up every now and again before being dismissed. The world of children’s entertainment has not changed at all, as men like this are allowed to prey on children for decades with very few repercussions.

Just found out why my parents didn’t like the nickname “sav” for me

Jim’ll Fix It to deceive you - The Reckoning TV series (2023)

As a child of the seventies, my eyes tuned in to Jim’ll Fix It like two full moons.  I thought it was brilliant.  The letter-writers’ deepest under-ten wishes felt like my wishes too.  The innocence of the neatest, most practiced handwriting:  the full stops, the trust and the hope, all written to dear uncle Jim.  The show was a highlight of Saturday night.  I was fascinated by Jimmy’s special chair with the drawers and the gadgets, and of course, the badges. ‘Your letter was only the start of it!’  sang the theme tune, and I’d sing along, knowing all the words, and watch as he made dreams come true:  a young boy got to meet K9 from Doctor Who, a girl got to sing with Amazulu, another girl got to dance with Bonnie Langford, a boy went up in a plane, another boy was chauffeur-driven in a Rolls Royce. From time to time there was a school or a group wish, such as that of the cub scouts.

Some of the most iconic Jim’ll Fix Its featured the scouts.  One highly unique wish was for a pack to ride The Revolution rollercoaster whilst eating their lunches.  I remember vividly rolling with laughter on the carpet at home as bottles of milkshake and orange juice spilled over their heads, a cream cake got mashed in a face and crisps went flying.  I looked it up on youtube the other day.  As I watched I thought this sort of thing wouldn’t be allowed now, would it?  At surface level the risk of choking wouldn’t pass the health and safety regs. 

If only that had been the only worry. 

In 1976 another cub scout pack wrote in asking to race milk floats at Brands Hatch.  After the studio shoot Savile took nine year old Kevin to a dressing room and asked him, ‘Do you want to earn your badge?’  When I watched this haunting reconstruction in The Reckoning played so terrifyingly by Steve Coogan I felt physically sick, again and again throughout, as virtually every scene was predatory Savile looming over a victim, his eyes calculating, searching and landing quietly on a child.  Kevin was nine.

I was around the same age as Kevin when I watched and loved Jim’ll Fix It.  Now I don’t know how to reconcile it.  I’m angry.  Savile held those precious letters between his yellow fingers with another agenda.  He tainted all those childhood dreams.  Worse than tainted, he blackened them.  The memory, their memory, their greatest wishes… he blackened it all, and it will haunt the victims forever.

People say, you must have known when you watched it - look at him - he’s creepy.  I honestly did not know.  The man I saw on Jim’ll Fix It seemed to love kids, he was warm, avuncular, kind, thoughtful. He asked his young guests questions about their lives, he seemed interested in what they had to say.  He made wishes come true then awarded them with the most coveted prize of all, a Jim’ll Fix It badge.  Jim wore a mask I believed.

I was protected by a television screen.  Television was dreams, a land far away full of balloons and dancing and colour and fantasy.  Jimmy Savile was at the heart of all of it; he was everywhere at the time, in Jim’ll Fix It, Top of The Pops, he was running marathons, on the news, he was raising money, he was standing beside royalty.  I wonder now, if he’d been alive during this time of social media, how much further damage he could have done.

It wasn’t a wish he granted, it was a nightmare.  What he did to the children that loved him was a gross abuse of power that cannot be reconciled. He even roped in his pal Gary Glitter from time to time to grant a wish, both of them trying to kiss teenage girls on the lips in front of the camera.  That particular show, Jim’ll Fix It, dominated our screens for nineteen years from 1975 until 1994, but Savile had been abusing children since the 1950s.  Lots of important people knew about it, and they covered it up for sixty years. 

I feel an entire spectrum of emotions after watching The Reckoning.  It is horrific what he was permitted to get away with.  As an adult I am broken hearted for the hundreds, maybe thousands of victims.  I wish they could get their justice.

Echoes of Savile’s sinister abuse reach far and wide. 

Steve Coogan as Savile is a sickening and truthful watch. As for Jim’ll Fix it, I was hoodwinked.

Pictured: Jimmy Savile's house in Glencoe and Steve Coogan in The Reckoning

Ppl in 2011: OMG Who could have known J*mmy S*ville was a p*dofile. Why were we not warned?!?

John Lydon back in 1978: J*mmy S*aville is a pedofile, he is abusing young girls on live TV!!!

Same ppl: You are lying! You are just jealus of his succes! He is a national treasure!!!

Times the other weekend had features on The Reckoning (new BBC drama about Jimmy Savile) and Tina Sinatra on Sinatra the Musical plus features on the relationship between Madonna & Sean Penn and an interesting piece about how the world's super rich are flocking to London. There was also an interview with Sophie Dahl talking about her dressing table she'd inherited + her dressing table essentials. (I really want to get a dressing table for my bedroom).

The film-maker Louis Theroux said he felt obliged to support individuals who had accused Michael Jackson of being a pedophile, partly because his own programmes had helped to "rehabilitate" Jimmy Savile's public image.

Theroux accused Jackson's fans of being "willfully blind" after they denied detailed claims made in the Channel 4 documentary entitled "Leaving Neverland" that the singer was a child abuser.

Theroux, a journalist and documentary maker, told the Edinburgh TV festival that his decision to speak up was partly influenced by the relatively friendly relationship he had had with Savile after the pair made a documentary in the early 2000s, years before the former DJ and entertainer was exposed as one of the UK's worst child sex offenders.

He said the experience had made him feel obliged to "stick his head above the parapet" and defend Wade Robson and James Safechuck.

"I suppose I felt I had a little bit of a responsibility. One of the most upsetting things for me is when you go through Twitter and see the abuse directed at Dan Reed, the director of Leaving Neverland."

He suggested that fans were suffering from a combination of "ignorance and a sort of self-grooming" which left them unable to understand that it could take a person years to recognize that they were a victim of sexual abuse.

The Reckoning will air on Monday 9th October at 9pm on BBC1. The second episode will air the next day at the same time.

I'm still torn about this project, but I think I am going to try to watch it.

‘This made 2023 the next logical landing zone, until last September, when the Queen died and was replaced by an associate of Savile. Those familiar with the scripts insist that they feature Charles “minimally”. But this still leaves the possibility that this minimum was enough to panic BBC bosses who, David Dimbleby has said, are far more frightened of the royals than of the government. I would bet several licence fees that sensitivities around coronation scheduling are a vivid issue at the BBC.’

Merry Crimbo guys & gals!! Eurgh! Eurgh! Eurgh!

Yes, it would 😃😅

That royal family is filled with creeps