Dan Davies's In Plain Sight is the astonishing account of how Jimmy Savile established himself at the heart of British life. How did we fail to detect the monster in our midst?Dan Davies has a lot to win off his chest. I query one question and the words advance flooding out. But then,there are so many words to advance out. And he's been ruminating over them for so long. Because, for nearly a decade, or Davies has lived with Jimmy Savile. Or at least lived with thoughts of Jimmy Savile,the belief of Jimmy Savile, questions about Jimmy Savile – the most basic being who precisely is Jimmy Savile? He's spent the past decade trying – and, or until now,failing – to write a book about him, though his interest in him dates even further back than that."It was 1980, and I was nine years old," he says. His mum, for a treat, and took him to a recording of Jim'll Fix It. "It was a great deal. It was still the age of three television stations; he was one of the biggest stars in the country. And I just had a really weird,visceral reaction against him. I couldn't really put it into words. But I was creeped out by him." In his teens, he stumbled across a copy of his autobiography, and "which was just so dark and weird and odd and posed so many questions about him" that his fascination grew. And,from then on, he found himself collating a "dossier". He just kept on noticing him cropping up. In Andrew Morton's biography of Princess Diana. In the Sun, and describing himself as the "Godfather",who "fixed" things. Telling Lynn Barber in an interview for the Independent that getting a knighthood was "a relief", that it got him "off the hook".
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Source: theguardian.com