The four, hour-long episodes depict the career and sexual offences of Jimmy Savile, who was one of the best-known radio and television personalities in Britain during his lifetime, and whose crimes emerged after his death. [9] Four real life survivors of Savile's abuse speak at the beginning and end of some of the episodes. [10] Each episode has scenes taking place in the last years of Savile's life, primarily where writer Dan Davies, who is researching Savile for his book, interviews him in various locations. Smoked out … A giant Bolivar cigar was a condition for an interview Photograph: Graham Whitby-Boot/Allstar/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar Extract He went on to describe: "For someone that every kid from that era felt as if they knew, Savile came across to me as remote, cold and unapproachable." Writer Dan Davies interviews media personality Jimmy Savile to recount the story of his life. In the early 1960s, Savile is living in Salford with his friend Ray Teret. As a DJ, Savile runs sell-out dances for young people in the dance halls of Leeds and Manchester, and volunteers at Leeds General Infirmary – but is also able to exploit these positions by sexually abusing people, ranging from young women to children. He is invited to host a new BBC series, Top of the Pops, while victims of his abuse watch in horror.

Davies, Dan (9 October 2023). " 'Why was I so obsessed with him?': my seven years in search of Jimmy Savile's secrets". The Guardian . Retrieved 19 October 2023. It is likely they refused to speak to the film-makers, but the ease with which such potentially key witnesses can hide behind their PR teams and public pensions means that culpabilities in the case are likely to remain hidden.Of all the many places I interviewed Jimmy Savile, The Athenaeum Club in London was perhaps the most revealing. It was 2008 and I was researching a magazine story about the extraordinary influence he had and the connections he’d made and cultivated over the course of his 80-plus years. In God'll Fix It, a slim volume of his thoughts on religious affairs, he stated how he believed that life consisted of credits and debits.

It was March 2004, our very first meeting. Jimmy Savile had thrown me off balance. The rules of engagement had been established: he was on home turf and he was in charge.That first interview, which was scheduled to last an hour, went on for the entire afternoon and into the early evening. It set the template for the series of lengthy meetings that followed, staged in the same flat in Leeds or in the seafront apartment he had bought for his beloved mother in Scarborough. In time, these summits began to stretch over days and nights. It is an incredible read; preposterous, unbelievable, utterly damning about the institutions that were taken in and duped by Savile: the NHS, the BBC, the royal family, the government, the civil service, the entire nation. And a cast of characters that spans everyone from Elvis Presley to the Beatles, from the Rolling Stones to the Queen to the pope. It could never have been fiction. Everything about the Savile story strains credibility. The man who dressed like a paedophile was a paedophile. Though this is only one part of it – just as paedophilia was only one of his many crimes. It was the kaleidoscopic aspect of Savile's life that gave Davies the idea to write the book in the first place. He didn't just want to write about Savile but had the idea that the history of the nation's popular culture could be told through him. Cooke, Rachel (9 October 2023). "The BBC's Jimmy Savile drama is entirely gratuitous". New Statesman . Retrieved 10 October 2023.

That was in 2004. "And that's when I first had the idea for the book. This interview that was meant to last an hour in his house lasted, I don't know, God, it was about seven hours, something like that. It just went on and on and on." He interviewed him again for another profile in 2006. And another profile again in 2008. Shortly after which he – bizarrely – ended up going on the QE2's farewell Mediterranean cruise with him and began researching his biography in earnest. "I saw myself going up the river of his life and hopefully finding out everything on the way and then having a climactic final confrontation with him. I was going to call it Apocalypse Now Then. The implicit awareness was that it was going to be dark, because even in that first meeting there was a real, dark, underlying subtle menace to him."When I learned of his death, I felt a mixture of anger, sadness and frustration. I attended his three-day funeral, which began at Leeds Cathedral and ended with his gold coffin being lowered into a grave dug at a slope," he added. "It was later marked with a giant gravestone bearing the epitaph 'It was good while it lasted'. Less than a year later, the gravestone, like his legacy, was reduced to rubble. At first, he was fiercely resistant to the idea, claiming that he had written his own autobiography only because he’d got wind that a journalist was planning an unauthorised life story. Controlling the narrative was paramount. Over time, though, he started to come around to the idea, as long as he could, in his words, “correct everything” that I’d got wrong. In pursuing these themes over the following years, Clare was unfailingly courteous and supportive with his guests, listening for the most part, rather than interrogating.