Jimmy Savile - A British Horror Story
NETFLIXTRIGGER WARNING: PLEASE BE ADVISED THIS REVIEW DISCUSSES TOPICS OF SEXUAL ABUSE, SEXUAL ASSAULT, AND PAEDOPHILIA
It is difficult to talk of and about – or even utter notorious paedophile and TV presenter Jimmy Savile’s name. Many still do out of shock and disbelief of a man idolised by a generation of children, by politicians – namely a certain prime minister – and celebrities alike. They are disturbed by the brand he represented; the flagship shows he presented all the while carrying out such vehement and disgusting crimes. It is his position of power, the trust many had for him at the helm of the ship, that keeps Savile in the public eye over a decade after his death. Documentary after documentary, from the infamous Louis Theroux pieces to this, a two-part Netflix original, Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story. But this is no story as the title would imply. Savile and his crimes are all too real, and all too easy to gloss over in a limited series documentary. Fifty years of horror, but documentarian Rowan Deacon boils it down to the core essentials.
Doing that is no small feat. Deacon scours through hours of footage and comes out with some actively chilling and ominous snippets, all carried out with cuts back to interviews with people that knew Savile, associated with him, worked with him. There is no escaping the chilling feeling Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story presents, and one of the crucial parts of that is how enigma-like it makes Savile and how unknowable he truly was. But the off-colour remarks and the lines that have an overlying fear to them now are applied to this documentary without the context of the time in some instances. The offhand remarks and the humour of a talented degenerate now have a new layer, a postmodern one that adds the “we should have known” angle to everything and anything. It is the over-analysis inevitable of those who beat themselves up for not knowing sooner or better.
Deacon does at least keep away from the unanswerable and philosophical questions. Was the charity work a smokescreen for nefarious deeds? Was it all solely evil? Nobody can ever know the answers to those questions, and Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story accepts that. The distractions, the feeding of the tabloids and the disturbingly sinister and awkwardly cheery interviews with Selina Scott are harrowing. It is hard to know what is and isn’t real. All the quotes from Savile are disturbing now that people know of his actions. How many of them are genuinely striking, though? Savile knew he was untouchable, but does that make everything he said, everything he did, a clue? Savile was a product of the reality-television-loving public who idolise those that do little more than exist in the bubble of presenting.
The charitable acts, the good deeds, public life were the smokescreen for utterly abhorrent behaviour. Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story gets to grips with that, the “public property” that Britain created. Naturally, this being a Netflix documentary, it is dramatised and incomparable to straight-shooting documentaries, but the dedication from Deacon is notable because it cuts through the tabloid-like dreck of ghoulish documentaries released immediately after Savile’s death. Even eleven years on and documentaries of his life and his many crimes cannot get to grips with just how evil the man was. Mark Lawson called it “depravity,” and that’s exactly right. But this is the most thorough depiction of that depravity, and it’s a must-watch for those intent on learning more of Savile and how he got away with the crimes in the first place.