Robert Evans and Courtney Kosak examine Jimmy Savile's trajectory from a celebrated BBC star to a predator, tracing his 1926 Leeds origins through wartime profiteering and coal mining exploits. The discussion highlights how UK age-of-consent laws enabled his crimes after his 2012 death, while analyzing his manipulative persona developed during his cycling career as "Oscar the Duke Savile." Ultimately, the episode reveals that Savile's lifelong obsession with control and power, cultivated since childhood, created an unending nightmare for British society. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Fame And Its Consequences00:08:50
Hey, everybody.
Robert here.
And the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences have announced that three different Cool Zone Media shows have been nominated for awards at the 30th Annual Webby Awards.
You can vote on these now if you just Google the name of the podcast and the category.
Behind the Bastards has been nominated in the Experimental and Innovation Podcasts category.
It Could Happen Here is in the News and Politics Podcasts category.
And James Stout's podcast. Mini series, Migrating to America, A Dream Worth Dying for, has been nominated in the podcast's documentary category.
And you can find links to vote for each of these podcasts in the episode description and in the posts on social media for episodes of It Could Happen Here and Behind the Bastards.
Thank you.
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history.
I'm Robert Evans.
What?
What were you saying?
I couldn't hear you.
I was just so enthralled with this book I read.
Oh, is that a copy of Girl Gone Wild by Courtney Kosak?
Oh, man.
I'm excited to read that myself.
I wish we could get Courtney on the show.
I'm here.
I'm here.
Oh, I probably could have told that by looking at my screen at any point in time, but I never do.
Welcome to the podcast, Courtney.
How are you doing today?
I'm good.
Thank you for having me.
I'm excited to be back.
So, your book is coming out.
That's exciting.
It's exciting.
It's nerve wracking.
Yeah.
It's all the things.
It's really good.
I haven't finished it yet, but it's really good so far.
You want to up top here plug what your book is before we get into the subject of our episodes for this and next week?
Yeah.
It is an unwitting feminist coming of age about trying to make it in Hollywood.
It's called Girl Gone Wild.
It's about all the mistakes, quote unquote, I've made.
Yeah.
Well, and about like your time working for.
Girls Gone Wild, which you've talked about on our show a couple of times in the past.
And unfortunately, it's going to be kind of relevant to these episodes.
Do you know who we're doing this week?
Did Sophie inform you?
No.
No.
Good.
Good.
What do you know about Jimmy Savile?
Oh, okay.
Vaguely, I thought you were about to say Joe Francis.
No, I was not saying anything about Joe Francis, but we're talking about Jimmy Savile, who was a.
I mean, he was everything in UK pop culture for quite a while, right?
Like, he started out as a DJ, he became like a television star, and he was ultimately just famous for being extremely famous and being the guy who was like always on TV.
If you grew up in the UK from like.
Really, the mid 70s up through the late 90s, like he was the face of the BBC.
Um, do you know anything about this guy?
Is he raunch?
I would the first thing that came to mind was like the stories about, um, you know, Robert Plant sticking or Jimmy Page, but did he have any connection with those bands or, yes, he was connected to every band that was big in the 60s and 70s, pretty much.
Like, there are very few major pop musicians from that, like.
I think people tend to call it like the golden era of pop music, of rock and roll and whatnot.
There's almost no one that he wasn't connected to, from like Elvis up through the Rolling Stones, the Beatles.
Like he knew all of those guys.
And, you know, didn't necessarily, wasn't necessarily in good with all of them, but because of his position as like Britain's top DJ, like he was connected to all those dudes.
We'll be hearing some stories about those people.
But this guy, Jimmy Savile, is probably the number one request.
I get from British listeners is like, you need to do Jimmy Savile.
And I've noticed that Americans tend to be either completely unaware of this guy or they only kind of heard a couple of things.
And most of what they heard is that after he died, it came out that he'd been a massive pedophile for years, right?
This is a guy who committed sex crimes on like an industrial scale.
He's kind of, in some ways, he's kind of like the British Jeffrey Epstein, or at least he's like one of the guys you could accuse of being that.
But this is, you know, what's when I first, because I didn't know much about Jimmy Savile.
I think I was kind of vaguely aware that he had existed.
And then, you know, he dies in 2012.
It comes out that there are all these allegations of horrible sex crimes he'd committed.
And when I started reading it, initially it was always framed as like, and no one knew.
He kept it a secret his whole life.
It was this, you know, there was no way anyone could have realized that, like, the whole time he was this famous power broker in the music industry and in, you know, British television, he was also abusing women and boys.
And what's really interesting to me is that, like, that's all bullshit.
It was entirely obvious the whole time.
He, like, bragged about it.
There were numerous interviews where he talked about at least aspects of his behavior.
Like, there actually was never any excuse for people to be surprised that Jimmy Safel was a massive sex pest.
I mean, we'll pull up some photos of him later, but I hate to be like, oh, that guy looks like a pedophile, but Jimmy Safel is the most, that guy looks like a pedophile, pedophile in the history of fucking pedophiles.
Oh, I can't wait to see.
Yeah, I feel like, I mean, there was so much of that in this era, too.
Like in Woody Allen films where he's like dating 17 year olds, and that's like not even considered bad.
Well, no, and it's.
One of the things I will be using both the terms, like when we talk about what he did, like had sex with, and the terms molested or raped, because it's often unclear.
The age of consent in the UK is 16.
So, him having sex with a 16 year old is not inherently legally rape in the society that he's doing it, right?
Like, we can have the opinions on that that we have, but that's part of what camouflages this.
And at the start of the pop industry, there's a lot of people, including probably most of the musicians from this era whose music you like.
Who had sex with teenage girls?
Sometimes illegally, because there were a lot of 12, 13, 14 year olds got in there, but often very legally, because again, the age of consent was like 16, right?
And, you know, this is, there is an element of, at the start of his crimes, this was a really different time.
And the moral values around that were a lot different.
Part of what happens with Jimmy is that the period in which he gets famous and starts getting access to all these teenage girls is also the period in which birth control.
Becomes like, particularly the pill becomes normalized, right?
So there's just this explosion in people fucking, right?
That's based on, oh, suddenly there's no consequences to it that doesn't really get curtailed until the AIDS crisis, right?
And so part of what's interesting to me is that this is not just a guy who is.
This is part of the story here is this is a guy who kind of comes of age as a famous person during that era where it's really easy.
For men at a certain level of fame to have access to a lot of teenage girls and quote unquote consequence free.
It's not consequence free.
There's a lot of people that he harms permanently.
But that's the way it's seen widely.
And then he has to figure out a way once that era ends and once his kind of fame as a DJ ends to continue having access to people of that age.
And that's when he goes from a really gross guy in an industry filled with gross guys who all did very similar gross things to a.
A unique kind of predator, right?
And that's the story of Jimmy Sapple.
Margaret Thatcher is also heavily involved.
Oh my God.
So, like, how old is he in this B side of the story when he gets really creepy?
I mean, beyond.
He's pretty creepy the whole time, but like in his 40s and on, that like things start to get really creepy and evolve as a predator in a unique way.
A lot of what's interesting to me about this case is that.
Savile's not just abusive to individuals, and he is, but he's like, he's grooming institutions, including the BBC and most of the major hospitals in the United Kingdom, in order to get access to victims after a certain point.
The Creeping Predator00:02:40
But I'm getting ahead of myself here.
All right.
Robert?
Yeah.
All right.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Listen to Nora Jones' Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Yeah, let's start the story.
James Wilson Vincent Savile was born on Halloween night, October 31st, 1926.
Fucking Halloween.
Like, just.
Oh, my name is Six.
A Dark Family History00:14:59
Yeah, his hometown was named Consort Terrace, which Wikipedia informs me is in the Burley area of Leeds in the West Riding of Yorkshire, because for whatever reason, people on that island cannot give normal place names to places.
Like, fucking, hey, British people, here's a town name for you.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
See?
Williams, there is that.
That's how place names should sound.
I don't know what the fuck you guys have been doing over there, but it's nonsense.
Yeah.
Oh, no, he's in the Burley area of Leeds in the West Riding of Yorkshire.
Fuck you guys.
Come on with your J.R.R. Tolkien bullshit here.
Get out.
Give it a normal name.
I'm sorry, British people, but also I'm not.
So in his own autobiography, which was published under both the titles, As It Happens and.
Love is an uphill thing.
Jimmy writes this of his own birth.
He's a sickly kid, right?
And his family members, people who knew the family around that time, confirm that he was ill as a child and suffered from regular health problems.
He exaggerates these.
As part of his personal mythos and narrative.
For his part, Savile claims that he nearly died when he was two years old and was so sick that a priest was brought in to administer last rites while his mother prayed feverishly to a then unconfirmed saint, Margaret Sinclair.
And things were so bad that the doctor just leaves at one point and says, Just tell me when he dies, and I'll fill in the death certificate the rest of the way.
I don't want to keep coming back here.
At one point, his relatives.
Think that he's actually passed on, and his grandmother does like the old timey thing where you hold a mirror up to his tiny mouth to see if he's breathing.
And in his book and in numerous interviews over the years, Savile took great pleasure in delivering the punchline to this joke, which is that as she puts the mirror down, he pisses, hitting his grandmother in the eye.
And this story, and proving he's alive, right?
This story is a foundational part of the Savile myth.
And in his own autobiography, he follows it with this very strange passage.
Hardened by my urinary success of catching my grandmother fair and square, I continued in my infancy to pee on anything or anyone who unwarily came into range.
And my first recorded applause were for direct hits on guests, fires, tea tables, priests, and other such targets.
I wasn't very popular for a number of years.
That's weird.
That's just an odd thing to say.
It is interesting how early, even in his autobiography, when he's a children's entertainer to a major extent, right?
Oh.
He's writing to such an extent about like his penis, you know.
Again, there's a lot of in these, in his autobiographies and the things he'll say, he will tell like 80 or 90% of the truth.
He doesn't quite go all the way, but he focuses a lot on stuff to where like people should have known this is a guy with a weird fascination with his penis and like what it's doing.
And it'll get a lot more, he'll talk a lot more obviously about actual, at least obviously he's not talking about sex crimes here, but it is weird the degree to which he focuses on this in, in, As he's talking about himself as a two year old.
Now, his mother, Jimmy's mother, Agnes, gives a very different account of his infant illness when she was interviewed in 1970.
Per the book In Plain Sight by Dan Davies, she recalled the illness struck when Jimmy was two and a half.
My oldest daughter had him out in the pram and stopped at a shop, leaving Jimmy outside.
He was strapped in, but jumped about so much that the pram overturned and the hood caught the back of his neck and severed one of the muscles.
That's a completely different story.
He's not like a sick kid who's dying in bed or whatever.
He's like a kid who has an injury, a pretty normal kind of injury.
His pram falls over and he gets a muscle that's severed, and the injury heals badly.
Jimmy can't sit up or properly shut his eyes for six months, even while sleeping.
He was admitted to the hospital.
Yeah, it's really a scary thing if you're the parents.
He's admitted to the hospital, who are like, We don't really know what to do.
You know, there might be, we could try surgery, but we don't know if that'll actually work.
And his family says, No, we don't want to like risk that.
On the way back from the hospital, Agnes stops briefly to pray at a cathedral.
And then later that day, Jimmy goes to sleep and Closes his eyes, which initially terrifies the family because they think he's died because he hadn't been closing his eyes.
But he was actually fine.
The injury had just finally healed, right?
That's a much less dramatic story.
We're like, and we all, we were clustered around.
Then they put the mirror up to see if he was still breathing.
No, he had a weird injury and they were scared because when he closed his eyes, they thought he was dead, but he wasn't.
So it's not both.
It's one was a lie and the other was a lie.
Okay.
Gotcha.
I can't think of why Agnes would have lied about this.
I can think of a lot of reasons why Jimmy would.
Um, okay.
Now, Agnes did later write to the Catholic Church urging for the beatification of Margaret Sinclair, but again, this is just a very different story.
His family was very poor growing up, um, although not unusually, they were like the normal level of poor for the town that they lived in.
So it's not like he was the poor kid in town and had to watch all of these other kids who had more.
It was this is England in like the 20s and 30s, and he lives in like the north in a mining town.
Everybody's broke, nobody has money then.
Yeah.
Um, Now, again, he was the youngest of seven and he was an accident.
His mom's like 40 when she has him, which is, I mean, that's an old pregnancy today, especially in like the 20s.
That's fairly uncommon.
And he was dubbed, he claims, the family's not again child.
That's the term he uses of like, they were like, ah, this was, we really can't ever let this happen again.
And he's going to grow up with a chip on his shoulder about this.
He was never very close to most of his older siblings and he will later become a mama's boy and a Deeply weird way.
We're not really going to talk about it enough in these episodes, but he's like veering towards Patrick Bates levels of like very strange mom issues.
But initially, he feels like he's ignored, like he doesn't get a lot of attention.
And he'll write about this both as if it frustrated him and also he'll talk about like, and I really like that because I'm a loner and this really worked out for me.
I like not getting a lot of attention.
I can't tell which is coping and which is the truth.
That said, His other family members don't seem to agree that he was ignored and not given a lot of attention.
His sister Joan actually says that she and the rest of the family considered Jimmy their miracle baby and that he was kind of fawned over by all of his older siblings and everyone else in the family because he'd had health issues as a kid, right?
And Davies points out in his book about Savile that while Savile preferred to portray himself as the not again baby, as this kid that wasn't wanted and was kind of ignored, his family insists that he was treated as the miracle child, the chosen one, right?
Which makes a lot more sense based on his subsequent behavior.
Yeah.
Some people cannot get enough attention.
Like, there's an endless hole.
And it's interesting to me that he feels a need to lie about this, to complain, to be like, oh, and they didn't even really want me.
You know, I had to deal with the fact that I didn't really belong.
Whereas his family's like, no, we were obsessed with him because he nearly died.
Now, Jimby's father, Vince, was a tall and gangly man who never made a lot of money, but was employed consistently.
And seems to have been like a pretty responsible parent, although not necessarily in what you'd call a reputable industry.
His boss was the town bookie, a guy named Jim Windsor, who young Jimmy seems to have grown up admiring.
Windsor once bragged to a newspaper that he'd been arrested once a year for 20 years.
So his dad's, Jimmy grows up connected to at least a low level organized crime.
You know, this guy's running like numbers rackets and stuff.
And his dad is kind of his gopher, but his dad's also not a Bigwig, his dad is handling like very basic jobs for this guy.
Like, he's so Jimmy sees this dude who is like kind of the patron of the family who is a criminal and who's doing really, really well.
But his dad's never doing really well, really well.
His dad's just kind of for you, Robert.
Windsor, like house of like royalty, yeah, yeah.
But no, he's not royal, it's just also a name.
Oh, he's named Windsor.
I was like, I was like, British Windsor, the Queen's corgis, what's happening.
No, he's not.
There will be royal family connections later, but not at this stage.
This is just a guy with that last name.
Got it, got it, got it.
My bad.
So, from the jump, Jimmy grows up close to and comfortable with some of the more mainstream elements of organized crime in his society.
And he probably grows up aware that the people who do best are the people who are willing to break the rules.
And because my dad is kind of scared of going too far, we never had a lot, as opposed to his boss, right?
It was a bolder man who was willing to commit crimes and get arrested.
So the family is like working lower middle class, but he does get to see how the big shots do, and he kind of comes to want that for himself.
Now, despite the fact that Jimmy often portrays his family as being quite poor and like unusually poor, it's noted by people who knew them that Agnes actually owns an unusually large home.
His mom makes them buy a larger home than they can really afford.
So, like, a lot of the rooms are kind of empty.
I think because she wants a big, nice house as like a status symbol, right?
So she has to budget really carefully, but they're able to afford the house.
So they're doing okay.
He goes to school.
I was going to ask you if they lived in one of those council estates, but no, not.
Nope.
They're not that poor.
No, they're not that poor.
They're certainly not the bottom rung in terms of like poverty.
They're not like comfortable, I wouldn't say, but they're getting by.
And even though this house is kind of bigger than they could afford, his mom is really good with stretching their money and he's able to like, they're able to afford it.
And this is kind of, he becomes like a hand me down kid.
He's known in town as like, he does, he never, no one ever buys clothes for Jimmy.
He wears, All of his older siblings' clothes, which a lot of people, you know, grew up with that experience.
Yeah.
He goes to school in town.
And the main method of discipline in Jimmy's era and the place where he's going to school is that the headmaster will beat you with a bamboo cane if you're bad.
This is not, again, weird for the time.
Oh, but ow.
But ow.
Because Jimmy is so sickly, he qualifies for free milk and a free spoonful of malt at school each day, which I think they're trying to help him avoid getting rickets.
I think that's why they give him a spoonful of malt.
But I forget exactly why.
Spoonful of medicine and go to apple.
Yeah, yeah.
It's a very like 20s, 30s thing.
Yeah.
Right?
The sick kids get free milk and malt.
This is also something he writes and talks about constantly because it reinforces his underdog narrative.
Agnes drove the family, and they were, Agnes is like wearing the pants in the household, right?
His dad is a very retiring and kind of shy figure.
He's going to die much earlier than Agnes, and she is the force to be reckoned with.
They are extremely Catholic.
Jimmy Savile is raised Catholic and is a hardcore Catholic his entire life.
They almost never miss Mass.
And she makes sure that even with the family budget as tight as it was, they always have money to put in the collection plate for arguably the wealthiest institution in human history at the time.
Yep.
Yep.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The Catholic Church couldn't have gone by without that tuppence that you dust in there.
They wouldn't have been able to afford to move all those priests who are molesting kids to different places so they could molest more kids.
Of his mom's faith, Savile said, she was an old fashioned religioso.
She went to mass because she had a guilty conscience.
Now, that's interesting to me because he'll emphasize this a lot.
And guilty over what?
Now, we don't know.
He never says.
This is one of a number of very vague, never directly stated bits of Jimmy lore that could be seen as supporting the idea.
Some people have suggested that he was probably molested as a child.
There's not evidence of this.
He never talked about it.
I've never heard anyone like.
Come up with any like clear factual allegations based on a firsthand narrative that he was molested.
However, he has a deeply weird relationship with his mom and he goes on to molest hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, potentially thousands of kids.
So people naturally wonder was Jimmy a victim himself?
Now, I don't have a satisfying answer on this.
This is going to be one of those things where I just have to shrug and say, like, I don't know.
But he is like, he never.
Has a long term relationship with an adult woman in his entire life.
He never has a real girlfriend.
He never gets married.
I don't think he's ever close to having a long term relationship with a woman other than his mom, who he will like go on dates with and hang out with as a young man.
Like she is like a major part of his social life while he is like famous in the early years of fame to an extent that a lot of people have wondered, did something go on there?
And I will tell you, people wonder that.
I don't have any evidence.
I'm not aware of any evidence.
It's just kind of a thing people wonder because his relationship with his mom is so.
If she romanticized him in some way, like that's kind of damaging enough.
Yeah, it may not have involved actual molestation.
Sorry, I cut you off.
Yeah, no.
There's no priest.
Molestation, maybe not that we know of.
Okay, like obviously, there are priests who were around the area he grew up in who molested kids because that's true everywhere there were Catholic churches.
But I haven't, there's he never alleges that, and I don't have any evidence of it, right?
Okay, so we can ponder this.
And obviously, it is not uncommon for people who wind up being child molesters to have been molested or to have had like very early traumatic sexual experiences.
Experiences, but that doesn't have to happen for someone to be a child molester.
Sometimes people are just child molesters because they suck, right?
War Profiteering At 1400:04:53
Anyway, his childhood is interrupted by World War II, the big dub dub dose, although not in a way that was particularly traumatizing to him.
A lot of British kids in this era have really trauma because they're bombed, right?
Kids in London and stuff are getting bombed and hiding in shelters.
And he gets a bit of that, but he's in a really good area to avoid like the worst of that.
He recalls when he was 11 or so and the war started that he and a bunch of local kids were taken out of the city to this rural camp where they did minor manual labor in order to keep them away from bombs.
Basically, it's a long term summer camp where you're working on projects and stuff, you're helping to build things out in the woods, and they're just trying to keep you away from where the Germans are targeting.
Now, just based on when things happened, we know Jimmy was 13 in 1939, so he can't have been 11 when the war started because that just doesn't work.
One of the difficulties here is.
Jimmy gives ages for where, when, how old he is when a bunch of different stuff happens that absolutely cannot be true.
And I don't know why he'd lie about it.
This may have just been honestly him forgetting because once you get to a certain age, it's hard to be like, was I 10 when that happened?
Was I 12?
Like, I can't tell for myself on some things that happened to me.
Check your damn memoir though.
Come on.
Yeah.
But it is a little, you do have to like kind of go back and be like, no, he couldn't have been 11.
He was 13.
We know when he was fucking born.
Right.
Um, He wouldn't have been worried about getting bombed by the Germans in 1937.
That would have been crazy.
And they hadn't started bombing the UK in 1939, but I can believe that, you know, maybe that, like that era, they were getting worried about it and stuff.
So, anyway, whatever.
Whatever age he is when he gets to this fucking summer camp, he's only there for a few months before his parents borrow a car to visit him.
I think he's there for like six months.
And then they come to visit him.
And his mom sees that his camp, where he's camping, is directly underneath like a massive gasoline tank.
And she's like, well, fuck, he could get blown up here.
I'm not going to let him just, I'll take him home, right?
I feel like the odds aren't any worse that he gets blown up in Leeds than sitting underneath this gas tank.
So his mom takes him back home.
And this is the moment that Jimmy, you can tell Jimmy says this, thinks this is the moment that his life really begins.
Because once he gets back home, all the men are away at war at this point.
This probably would have been like 40, 41, right?
All of the men are away at war.
And a bunch of the older teenage boys who aren't old enough to have been like drafted yet, Are working, right?
They're taking over jobs that the grown men are no longer able to do, as are a lot of the women.
And there's shortages of everything.
So, first off, he is kind of one of the only quote unquote men because he's 13 or 14.
Now, that's in this era, a child starting to become recognized as a child.
But if you think back to it, if you go back a generation or two, a 14 year old is basically a man in Western society.
That's when you start working full time.
That's when people, you are old enough to like run a job and be living your life.
And the concept of a childhood doesn't sort of descend evenly upon society.
It is starting to at this period of time.
But it's also not very, it's not weird that he's going to be treated.
By a lot of adults, as a grown man, as a 14 year old, or as close to a grown man, because all of the bigger grown men are gone, right?
And it's just like.
Including his dad, or is his dad still around?
No, his dad is still around.
His father's like old enough that he's not going to get drafted, but he's like working all the time and shit.
Right.
So, because there's shortages of everything, a vibrant black market opens up, and Jimmy rushes straight to the middle of it.
You know, he was, because of sort of his upbringing, I think he was primed to.
Be willing to get into a business like that.
And because everyone else is kind of gone, he's able to start making money by, as he puts it, we were all in the racket business then, which is likely true.
So he's hustling one way or the other.
He's finding things that people need, he's selling them for high prices, he's like probably nicking stuff to resell.
You know, this is kind of the birth of him like starting to become and live as an independent person.
And he gets into it basically as a war profiteer, you know, as a 14 year old war profiteer, which is interesting.
You know who else is a war profiteer?
Cordy.
Products and services?
Very possibly.
We have no way of knowing.
I would say there's like a solid 40% chance that whoever is advertising this podcast right now is a war profiteer.
And hey, somebody's got to make money off of wars.
Making Money From Wars00:03:32
Okay.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Vodem.
My next guest, you know from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, It's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Yeah.
Listen to ThinkStat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, Oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Groben.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night.
Each morning, say you love me.
You know.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Unsettling Times For Kids00:15:09
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop.
Even if you did a lot of redistribution, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We're back!
So, Jimmy is making spare money hustling until one day he decides to go by one of the big local ballrooms, the Mecca Locarno Ballroom, which is like a dance hall, right?
And he sees that they need work because, again, all the men are gone.
He turns himself into a gopher for the adults in Leeds' vibrant entertainment industry.
The city had recently been nicknamed Britain's City of Sin by one Sunday paper, and working at the Mecca is what gave Jimmy his real education.
One that, and this is from his autobiography, qualified me for every A level that ever existed in hell.
He is not really hiding the fact that he's a scumbag.
Jimmy continues Not yet five feet in height, as thin as a drumstick, with big eyes, ears, and nose, I was everyone's mascot, pet, runner, holder of mysterious parcels and secrets.
Because I didn't understand the first thing about anything, I was the confidant of murderers, whores, black marketeers, crooks of every trade, and often of the innocent victims they preyed on.
I also played the drums.
And he's, you know, dressing that up to make a better story, but this is probably pretty accurate as to like what he's doing.
He is hanging out with a very bad crowd who are making their living.
Like, there's a lot of prostitution that gets run through this ballroom.
There's a lot of like sketchy stuff happening here.
And because he's this kid, everyone's kind of fine with him being in the room.
Now, he is also doing like a formal job there.
The Mecca was short on members for the bands because of the war.
So, as Jimmy tells it, he became the relief band for the whole establishment, getting paid 10 shillings a week to fulfill a 50 pound a week job and scrounging for cigarettes under the seats to make extra coin.
This was a very different time.
That's like a good way of making extra money is let's find some like half smoked cigs to sell to people.
That tells you how bad the war years were that there's a vibrant industry and cigarettes people didn't finish.
Not even just for him.
Yeah, to sell.
Oh my God, gross.
Yeah, to sell.
He would finish school at four and then rush to the Mecca to perform for their afternoon shows.
Then he'd have a couple hours break, and then he'd do a second half hour spot in the evenings.
The relief band was just him and a girl who played piano.
And even in the 30s and 40s, this was not a legal arrangement.
Quote Being hopelessly underage and therefore highly illegal, there were times when I was persona non grata on stage.
Don't come in tomorrow, the manager would hiss.
The directors are coming.
When the visiting boss asked, Where's the second band? the suave reply never failed.
There's a big air raid going on in Hull or Doncaster or Halifax, and the relief band is made up of firemen.
There were always lots of fires.
So he is illegally doing this, and it's being justified as, oh, no, the band's not here right now because they're putting out fires from the bombs.
Don't notice that it's like a 14 year old kid.
They're totally adults.
Yeah.
They're totally adults.
And it's a whole band.
Now, that is a fun old timey tale of child labor.
And we love a good one.
It is honestly, as child labor stories go, I don't know if they have an issue with that.
I don't think it hurts a 14 year old kid for them to play the drums for an hour or two a night.
Right.
That's not really that bad as things go.
But you can see what's happening here, right?
From almost the beginning of his life, Jim is drawn towards entertainment.
And from his first gig, he gets used to the idea.
That your age doesn't matter, even if there are laws against it, and that he's kind of special.
He's not subject to the rules.
And that's bad for a kid to learn, right?
That's going to have consequences.
Right.
Now, again, the adults around him don't find this too strange because of the time that this is happening in, right?
And Savile also credits the way he's treated to the fact that he remained small and sickly.
I was like a chair or a table.
People used to talk in front of me because I didn't exist.
Anybody who had done anything wrong, I knew who had done it, but nobody ever asked me.
And one of Jimmy's great strengths here is knowing when to keep his mouth shut around crimes, a skill he would only master further as an adult, right?
Knowing how to cover up.
When he's aware that something illegal is going on, this is again a very, very early thing that he learns how to do.
Now, he claims that his first date is at age 12, based again, because he's also saying that this is happening while he's working at the dance hall.
That can't be accurate based on when he was born and when all of this happened, right?
But he claims that he goes on his first date when he's 12 with a 20 year old.
And even if he's 14, a 14 year old and the 20 year old is pretty messed up, right?
With a 20 year old who worked at the box office.
He takes her out to a movie and the two like made out to some extent afterwards.
If this story is true, and again, he's the only source on this, and he's telling this story because he thinks it makes him look Cool, then Jimmy was molested as a child, right?
But also, he clearly, if this happened at all, he clearly didn't view it that way and wrote proudly in his autobiography that he learned based on this fooling around in the dark The 90% you can't see is just as important as the 10% you can.
These days, the percentage is reversed, but the principle is the same, right?
So, this is his first lesson about girls.
Oh my God, you can totally see how it started.
This is crazy.
Yeah, it's crazy how much open he is about this, right?
Totally.
So, Young Jim finds himself drawn to entertaining people, right?
Particularly to performing on stage and to women, basically from the time that he's a preteen up to the time that he's like in his early adolescence.
The other thing he develops early on is a fascination with death, specifically corpses.
In his autobiography, immediately after describing his first date, he discusses a time of great excitement for me when one of the Mecca's lady patrons was discovered in several carrier bags in a ditch.
This woman had been chopped to pieces and murdered and chopped to pieces, right?
Oh my God.
He talks about this grisly murder in a way I've never heard anyone write about a murder.
He writes that quote, This was a whole new scene for me.
I could never work out why it was necessary to cut her into bits.
All right, bro.
Now that's an unhinged way to describe.
That's fucking wild.
That's one of the most fucked up things I've ever heard.
What do you mean?
What do you mean, Kate?
Oh, it gets way worse.
Jimmy Savile's relationship to dead bodies does not get healthier after this point.
But Jesus, he's what, like 12, 13?
You said he's made, he's like 14, probably, something like that.
It's a little hard to tell again.
Yeah, dude, young, yeah, that's not some sicko.
What's even weirder is this next bit again, he's talking about a woman being cut up after getting murdered.
It was all part of a strange adult world that I never tried to understand.
And even though I had a good idea who'd done it, no one ever asked me.
Besides, I was far too excited about leaving school the following month.
He didn't see this body cut up, did it?
He did.
Yeah, he did.
And he's fascinated by it.
He really witnessed it.
He witnessed them finding the corpse.
Yes.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
Oh, my God.
Or at least that's how he describes it.
It's a little unclear, but I think so.
And this must have happened when he was 14 because he says he left school the following month.
And that 14 is when he graduated, right?
Again, you are kind of in some ways, childhood is starting to be more kind of formalized, understood, but there are ways in which you're kind of an adult at 14.
In this era, right?
And he's going to be treated like one in some ways.
So, after the Dunkirk evacuations, everyone in his town had to put up soldiers for a few days because there was no Quartering Act in the UK, right?
Which Savile describes as totally bizarre.
And both of his parents become like major activists in terms of like supporting the war effort.
His mom and dad help organize this big fundraiser in Leeds where they like gather a bunch of money from the local community to help.
Pay for the military to build bombers.
And there's a, you know, they eventually raise enough to build 250 bombers.
And this is like a huge story in the local papers.
His parents are in the newspaper and being praised for raising money for this charitable cause.
And that's going to stick with him, too, right?
This is a big deal to Jimmy.
His two older brothers were both overseas serving by this point, and one of them actually got trapped during the siege of Malta.
Families all over town were receiving telegrams notifying them of their dead sons and husbands with some regularity.
Jimmy watched all of this happen, but wrote later that, I wondered why people wept during the war when their relatives had been killed.
I didn't even know what killed was.
I was much more inquiring than I was affected.
And that can't be true, right?
Because, like, you're not a tiny kid at this point, bro.
You were born in 1926.
You're like 14 or 15 when this is going on.
You know what death is.
Also, you just saw that lady chopped up.
You totally know.
It's weird to be like, I didn't understand why they were sad that their son was killed.
You know what death is.
You're 14.
You're not like a four year old.
And he was writing about like being a six year old, and then I didn't understand why that.
Well, yeah, that's not weird, but this is weird.
That's a weird thing for you to say.
And he does this a lot.
He writes and talks about the war years often and about his cognition of what's happening as if he was a small boy then.
And he's not.
He's a late teen, like young adult, while the war is going on.
So that part's really weird to me.
I don't know what to say about it other than he does that, and it's kind of strange that he does that to me.
In March of 1941, he and his mom have to run for cover during an air raid.
A cop near them was killed by the bomb.
And after the raid, Jimmy claims that he picked up a black glove with a hand still inside it.
In Davy's book, In Plain Sight, he writes, It is a morbid detail and one that Savile savored.
He's going to tell this story a lot with a degree of relish.
Like he's excited by this.
And you get the feeling that he's excited at the time.
Again, this is all going to be important much later on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's not well.
That's not a healthy reaction.
From age 15 to 16, he just keeps working at the Mecca and taking on odd jobs, mainly to provide his mom with money for food, both of which earn him praise, right?
The fact that he's making money and the fact that he's like an entertainer, he gets a lot of praise early on from this.
He also starts training with the Army Air Corps because he's expecting, he's going to be like 18 when the war ends.
He's expecting to be called up.
To the RAF in another year or two, when he's like 16 or 17.
Like, his expectation is that he's going to serve.
And many people would have no doubt been better off if he'd gotten sent to the front and died to some Messerschmitt.
But Jimmy had the dubious luck instead to become a Bevan boy.
So, in the early years of the war, British Minister of Labor Ernst Bevan decreed that one in 10 men between the ages of 18 and 25 would be conscripted to work in the coal mines rather than to fight at the front.
And It says 18 to 25, younger boys got conscripted all the time, as happened in the military, or got one way or the other got in.
And Jimmy is not 18, I don't think, when he gets called in to be a Bevan boy, although it's a little hard for me to say what age he is.
But he does this, this happens to him.
And this is a foundational part of the Jimmy Savile saga.
Although I can't actually tell you that this 100% happened, but we'll get to that.
Here's a representative sample of how this is usually described from a CNN article.
He was one of the surviving Bevan boys who received an award from the then British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2008 for helping to keep the mines operational during the conflict.
Savile suffered serious spinal injuries in a mine explosion and left the colliery, right?
And so that's the standard version of the story that he does his duty to his country as a mining boy when he's a teenager.
And he eventually, after a couple of years, gets horribly injured and, you know, has to leave.
And this is a big part because he can honestly say, when he's like a big entertainer, I was a coal miner, right?
Because a lot of Jimmy's.
A lot of Jimmy's appeal as an entertainer later will be that he's an authentic voice from the North.
He's a real man of the people, a common man.
He worked as a coal miner as a boy, right?
Now, for his part, Jimmy simultaneously claimed to have enjoyed the work in the mines and to have been haunted by it.
Quote, the noise, the dark and dust and the torn fingers created an impression of hell that I will carry to the grave.
But he also writes that this is the period of time in his life where he learns, quote, the power of sheer oddness because he's the weird kid and he's notably weird.
Like other people are kind of weirded out by young Jimmy.
And so he gets a job most of the time that he's a Bevan boy, he gets a job where he's basically.
Alone in an isolated chunk of the mine, that periodically coal trucks will come through and sometimes they get derailed.
And so he has to like put them back on the tracks if they get derailed.
And so every day he just goes there and he's sitting alone for like 12 hours or whatever in a coal mine.
Like that's his job.
And this gives him a lot of time to read.
This is kind of when he claims he got his education basically, because every day he'll come down and he'll turn on his light and he'll read books all the time while he's sitting alone in the coal mine.
He spends, he claims, three and a half years doing pretty much this.
He rarely socialized with his coworkers, and they seem to have been repelled by him.
In fact, Jimmy recalled one specific moment where this became clear to him Instinctively regarded as strange by my mates, there came a day when they drew apart from me, and I started to draw apart from the normal world.
It all started as a joke on my part.
And this is interesting.
The way he describes that is like, this is when I drew apart from the normal world, is really compelling to me.
So let's talk about this joke that he plays that he thinks severs him from normal society.
Saving His Public Image00:07:07
So one day he shows up late for work, still dressed in his best suit that he'd been wearing the night before.
I think he'd been out at the club or something like that, and he had no time to change.
So he goes down wearing a suit, which perplexes his peers, right?
Because you're going to ruin whatever you're wearing if you take it into the coal mine.
And now, because he doesn't want to destroy his best suit, once he gets into his position down there, because he's spending the whole day alone, he just strips naked and he wraps the suit in newspaper and he works in the nude all day.
Then at the end of his shift, He likes to clean his face and his hands off and he puts the suit back on.
And so it appears as he walks out that he's leaving the mine wearing a clean suit, looking like he had when he'd gone down the start of the day.
Quote In the history of coal mining, no one had spent eight hours underground and emerged clean, not a smudge on the collar or cuffs.
Witchcraft it may not be, but unnatural it certainly was.
And I was branded from that moment.
Right?
So, what's so weird, dude?
That's really odd, Jimmy.
Oh, shit.
So, Dan Davies, the author of In Plain Sight, asked him about this decades, like 60 something years later.
And when he asked Jimmy about this moment, like why he did this, Savile responded, I wasn't sure what it did, but it did develop my out of the box thinking.
I didn't do it for any reason.
I just realized that going back clean would freak people out.
And it did.
I realized that being a bit odd meant there could be a payday.
That's going to be super important.
That's so strange.
I thought he was just trying to save his suit.
It's also weird.
That, like, his body is described in, but then hell is coal mining when he's reading a book.
It's like, what?
Well, some of that I think is just because he wants to really judge up how difficult, and even though he seems to have had basically the best job you could have down there, he really wants to like play up because it's good for his later reputation.
But I don't think he's playing this bit up where he's talking about this, why he did this, that he just feels a compulsion to freak people out and get a reaction.
I mean, look, as an entertainer, I get that.
I was that kind of kid in some ways, right?
Sometimes you did things just to see how people react or just because you wanted to get everyone laughing.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, Jackass made a career of it.
Right.
Yeah.
And it's interesting that he's his goal is not to make everyone laugh.
He wanted to freak people out.
Like, you could see how a different person could have made this a funny bit and like brought everyone in.
And like, this is something that could make your pals laugh and could like have an impact on them.
He wants to scare them, kind of.
He wants to make them to be upset with him and to feel like because then they won't pay attention to him.
If they think he's really weird, they'll give him a wide berth and he'll get to continue doing his own thing alone.
That's something Jimmy is going to take from this experience, and it's going to be with him his whole life.
So the war ended, and the Bevan boys started deserting the mines because they didn't want to work in a mine anymore.
It sucks.
Davies, his biographer, suspects that Savile was a repeat work skipper even before the war ended.
And basically, that he was never working as much as he should have.
He was kind of skipping out a lot of the time, even from the jump.
Now, this is important because every version of the Jimmy Savile story includes him being horribly maimed in a mining accident, which is why he stops doing the work, you know?
However, I can't say that this really happened or when it would have happened.
He gives different dates for when this mining accident happened every time he talks about it.
He claims to be a different age when this happens every time he talks about it.
And he gives kind of differing accounts about how it happened.
His initial claims about how bad this injury was and when it happened simply can't have been true because the age he claims to have been when he was, and he says this is serious enough that he's basically unable to move right for months.
This can't have happened because the age that he does that, we know that he was participating in like a bike race through France.
That like there was a post war, like a big bike marathon basically, and we know he's in it.
So it can't have happened then.
It's really unclear to me what actually went down here.
I found a CNN article that describes him as having suffered a serious spinal injury.
And Jimmy did keep a surgical support jacket that he said he was made to wear as he was recuperating from the injury.
Hurt to some extent, but again, the timelines he gives us just doesn't work with the things that we know that he was doing, like participating in the first tour of Britain's cycle race in 1951.
If he's injured when he claims he was, and it was as bad as he claims he was, it can't have happened the way he said it did because of the other things we know that he was doing.
So, I don't know, was he actually hurt in a mining accident?
Was it a minor injury?
Or did he just stop going to work one day and later lied about having been badly injured in order to like.
Because that's a better story than I just kind of abandoned mining.
He said in 2008 that he'd been hurt after working for seven years as a Bevan boy, and that's impossible.
We know that's impossible because in 1948, he was in a movie.
He's like an extra in a film, and that movie still exists.
So you can see that he's physically healthy.
He's visibly very fit in the movie.
Like we know he wasn't in like traction from a spinal injury then.
During an interview in the 1980s, Jimmy gave yet another different story and claimed that a chest cold got him out of the pits in 1948.
I think that's a lot likelier, right?
Just that, like, oh, I just kind of had the flu and stopped coming into work and started doing other shit.
That's a lot more believable to me.
There are some people who suspect Jimmy Lyatt entirely about being a Bevan boy.
I think that's unlikely, but he definitely didn't do the job as long as he claimed.
We know this because by the late 40s, after the war is over, he becomes an athlete.
He gets into really good shape, he's cycling all the time.
And he's eventually going to be like a professional athlete.
He's also on the side selling scrap with somebody.
He's got like a scrap business.
He's probably working with his dad right before his dad passes on.
And he does some odd bits of agricultural labor.
There's this like post war government scheme where they're paying kids to like work on farms to help get the country back up and running after the war.
Per Davies' book, In Plain Sight It was on one such camp that he discovered his talent for hypnotism, surprising him and those watching by persuading an unsuspecting female victim out of her clothes.
A sign of the unpermissive times was that the room emptied in a second, he wrote.
That's kind of the first story Jimmy gives us of him doing something really sexually questionable.
That, like, both he's studying hypnotism to get ladies to take their clothes off, and that everyone else in the room is really uncomfortable with what he's doing, right?
And he's like, ah, it's a sign of the times.
We were more repressed back then.
No, Jimmy, that's just weird.
That's just, like, really uncomfortable.
Hypnotism In Plain Sight00:03:20
Fucking weird, dude.
You know what else makes people uncomfortable?
Products of services.
Sometimes.
Sometimes.
What's up everyone?
I'm Ego Vodum.
My next guest, you know from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Ferrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come look for up-and-coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you.
which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah.
It would not be.
Right.
It wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to ThanksDad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two never mess with her friends either.
We always say that trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield.
And in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends, Trust Me Babe, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop.
Even if you did a lot of redistribution, you know.
We have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Prehistory Of DJing00:11:19
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast.
Called Playing Along is Back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Groben.
You, he related to me.
The phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me, you know.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
So, by the late 1940s, Jimmy's dad is ill and dying, and that makes Jimmy increasingly the breadwinner and emotional support for his mother.
And he begins to slip noticeably into the role of caring for her beyond all of her other children.
It was his mom that tipped him off about one of the most significant moments in his life.
Some neighborhood kid had wired a gramophone up to a radio, allowing you to basically get kind of a proto DJ set going.
This is like the birth, the early birth of like the turntable systems that like.
DJs use now is like a gramophone we hooked up to a radio to make it louder.
So Jimmy falls in love with this.
He buys this thing and he starts, he likes to hold an event and sell tickets to it.
He has his mom make refreshments.
He likes to rinse out a room at a social club owned by the Catholic Church.
And he's like doing one of the first DJ sets anyone would have ever done, right?
Where he's like putting on records and like picking what songs are going to come on at what time.
This is like very prehistory of DJing, DJing.
Only about 12 people show up, but Jim was electrified to see people dancing to music that he picked for them.
Quote I felt this amazing power is the wrong word, control is the wrong word, effect could be nearer.
What I was doing was causing 12 people to do something.
I thought I can make them dance quick, I can make them dance slow, or I can make them stop.
That one person, me, was doing something to all these people.
And that's really the thing that triggered me off and sustained me for the rest of my days.
That's really important.
His ego is entirely too inflated for being a DJ.
Are you kidding me?
Yeah.
But it's interesting.
You talked, I've had a lot of friends who are DJs.
You talk to most people who are into this, and they, if you ask what appeals to you, it's like the music.
They love music.
They like, there's something about the art.
Jimmy is always very clear.
He doesn't care about the art, he is not at all interested in this as a creative endeavor.
He likes being a DJ because you get to make people do stuff.
You are controlling the emotions and mood, and to an extent, the movements of a group of people.
The control is what appeals to him about being a DJ.
That's very upsetting.
That's so strange.
Yeah.
It's like a hypnotist kind of continued.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Exactly.
As Davies notes, and I think this is obvious from that quote, Jimmy, like the art of what he's doing, is kind of lost on him.
He's purely in this for power and control.
So he starts hosting more of these record dances, renting whatever venues he could find, and occasionally running out halfway through a set when his equipment broke because none of this stuff works very well at the time.
Now, this is also the first time when he starts to write about taking birds home from shows with him.
He almost exclusively, in his autobiography and in his personal writings, refers to girls and women as birds.
Right?
That's the term he uses.
And he uses it constantly.
Why?
It is common at the time.
It was very common at the time.
Very common.
Okay.
He keeps doing it through the 70s and 80s, 90s, which is weird.
But at the time, again, that's part of the story is when this starts, it's not so weird.
He's a teen, young adult at the time.
When he's 17, 18, the fact that he's taking 16, 17, sometimes 15 year old girls like home from the club at night isn't the weirdest thing in the world, right?
Like it's not considered Too strange by any of the people because he's right in that age bracket, more or less, right?
He is a teenager too at the start of this.
And so that's it's not seen as super odd.
And part of what's interesting to me is that Jimmy never kind of gets out of that mind state, right?
Of like the one that he has when he's like an 18 year old, right?
And it's important you know that he goes down this road very early.
Now, we don't actually know when this starts to happen, when he starts DJing and, you know, fucking taking girls home from these shows that he's doing, because by realistic calculation, it should have been around 19.
48, 49, or 50, maybe even 51.
But Jimmy would sometimes say these shows took place in 43 or 44.
So I can't take any of the dates here too seriously.
It's just impossible for me to know.
But by his late teens to early 20s, Jimmy is playing shows as a DJ.
He's not making a lot of money at this, though, but like he gets obviously he's interested in it because of the benefits that it brings him.
That said, because it's not making money for him, he decides to try his hand at being a pro cyclist.
He'd always liked cycling, he'd been into it as a kid.
And This is when cycling started to take off as a competitive sport in the post war period.
And he gets really into that.
And he was actually pretty good at cycling for a while.
He competed reasonably well.
He never wins any major races, but he finishes second in a big one in 1950.
I just, like, I'm sorry.
I have to say, it's like, okay, I was like 17.
I worked at a restaurant, I carried the food to the tables, but like, that's not what I was into.
And so I, it's like, it's like if I was just like, And I became a professional basketball player.
Like, what?
Yeah.
Like, what?
I mean, it's not, it's a part of what he's doing here is in this post war period, there's a bunch of open places, right?
Cycling has just started becoming a competitive sport.
So, as just some dude, you can kind of slide in.
And if you're okay at cycling, maybe make a life of it.
And it's going to be the same in the music industry, the same as a DJ.
Like, he is looking for places, he's looking for things that where there might be money and where it's not, it's a new thing.
So, like, It's not really been ironed out how this business is supposed to work.
It hasn't ossified yet.
So it's easy for him to get in.
And it's easy for him to.
So many stories like this where a guy was like, Yeah.
And then I just decided to become a professional cyclist.
And then I walked into a room and I got my first job.
I had zero experience.
And now I'm a bajillionaire.
Yeah.
And I have all the experience.
Yeah.
It's still the post war experience for a lot of assholes in a nutshell.
It's crazy.
Now, Jimmy's never super committed.
To the competitive side of racing.
I think he likes it because there's a lot of girls, right?
In fact, he loses one race because he and his buddy, as they're cycling past, see some girls having lunch by like, you know, in a park or something, and they decide to stop and flirt with them.
And so everyone else passes them.
He regularly flexed the power of his oddness here, too.
He starts doing that in his cycling days.
He would do shit like he would show up for races wearing a full tuxedo and he would hire someone to like run up where everyone else is stretching pre race.
He's got his tux on.
And he hires someone to run up with like a tray and a mirror so he can like freshen up and get like make himself look nice while everyone is like prepping for the race.
He's doing this as a bit and he's doing this because it makes him stand out.
One of his buddies later said of him, he was a good writer, but he was never a great writer.
He was a real character, however.
Some of the other writers thought he was a bloody fool, and he was a buffoon at times.
In fact, his buffoonery is gonna be what takes him further than the cycling, because he's never good enough to really make a living as a professional cyclist.
But he does become famous.
Even though he's never one of the guys winning races, he's one of the most famous cyclists of his day because of his bizarre behavior.
He gets his first nickname, Oscar the Duke Seville.
He registers as Oscar Seville for reasons, or Oscar Savile for reasons that I don't know.
But he gets his nickname, the Duke, because he finishes the race while smoking a cigar, imitating Winston Churchill.
As Jimmy later said, I was forever with the gimmicks before gimmicks had ever been invented.
And Sophie's going to show you a shirt from not too much later than this period of time.
There's Jimmy with a cigar.
He's always got his hair like that.
This is a young British man with a cigar in his mouth and long shock white straight hair.
Clearly, bleached white hair.
It's really strange.
No one else looked like Jimmy Savile at any real point in his life.
Again, I hate doing the wow, that guy looks like a pedophile thing, but that guy looks, you wouldn't trust that guy with your kids.
There's something dangerous about that.
It's a very off putting looking person.
One thing's for sure is our colleagues, James Stout, former cyclist, also British.
This is like opposite day James Stout.
He's evil, evil James.
He's evil James.
And one thing I know about James is that James fucking hates this guy.
We've never spoken about him.
But I mean, you can't.
You really ought to hate this guy.
Well, yeah.
He apparently got started with the evil.
He hasn't even done anything all that evil yet.
He's just done some really weird and upsetting things.
His bangs in that photo.
Deeply bad star.
Yeah.
Like fucked up bangs.
I don't know how to describe it to you other than fucked up.
Man, look at that.
So Jimmy's proud appeal vastly exceeds his actual skill on a bike, and race promoters notice this.
And after a match in which he showed up hungover and collapsed mid race, he's offered a job.
They're like, look, Jimmy, clearly cycling isn't going to work out for you, but everyone loves you.
You're like one of the maybe the most popular cyclists we have.
How about trying your hand at being a race commentator?
Do you want to be the guy who likes, like, Talks about what's happening, basically, right?
And as Jimmy said, it turned out I was a natural ad lib broadcaster.
And this is going to be the big break that leads to everything else that we're going to talk about in these episodes.
But that is the end of part one, Courtney Kosak.
How are you feeling?
Whew, what an exciting episode.
Yeah, we've just kind of got the Jaws music going.
You know, something really, you know, this is going to a terrible place.
I do recognize him based on that photo that you showed.
He is a very, and if you did you see the sequel to 28 Years Later, The Bone Temple?
Cycling And The Job Offer00:04:02
No.
Oh, man, there's a reason.
So, all of the bad guys in that movie are dressed like and aping Jimmy Savile, and there's a reason for it.
Because that movie, if you haven't seen it, I love it.
The whole film is an extended critique of Thatcherism.
And there's a very good reason why the psychotic, like murderous villains are dressed like Jimmy Savile.
But we'll talk about all that later.
Courtney, you want to plug anything before we roll out here?
Well, I want to plug Sophie's facial expressions during this episode.
Excellent.
They were so good.
Such a good compliment to yours.
And also, guys, buy my fucking book.
You'll like it.
It's called Girl Gone Wild.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
What else are you doing?
Nothing.
Fire a book.
Wow.
I don't know.
Should we continue?
Should we record part two or should we just take a break and just like, I'll read Girl Gone Wild?
I don't know.
I'm going to take a break.
I'll read the entirety of Courtney's book and then we'll come back in like four minutes.
How's that sound?
Perfect.
Great.
Great.
All right, everybody.
We'll be back Thursday with some stuff that's really going to upset you.
Good night.
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