Behind the Bastards - Part One: Jimmy Saville: Britain's Unending Nightmare

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

Robert explores the life and times of Jimmy Savile, the face of the BBC for decades, an ally of Margaret Thatcher, and a pedophile rapist on an incomprehensible scale.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

CoolZone Media. 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 is nominated in the Experimental and Innovation Podcasts category. It could happen here is in the News and Politics Podcasts category. and James Stout's 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... I'm trawled with this book I'm reading. Oh, is that a copy of Girl Gone Wild by Courtney Kosack? 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 a 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. Good, good. What do you know

about Jimmy Saville? Oh, okay, vaguely, I thought you were about to say Joe Francis. No, no, no, no, no. I was not saying anything about Joe Francis, but we're talking about Jimmy Saville, 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. Do you know anything about this guy?

Is he raunch? The first thing that came to mind was like the stories about, you know, Robert Plant's or Jimmy Page. But did he have any connection with those bands or totally separate? He was connected to every band that was big in the 60s and the 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 Saville is probably the number one request I get from British listeners. is like you need to do Jimmy Saville. 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, when I first, because I didn't know much about Jimmy Saffle, 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 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 Saffle was a massive sex pest. I mean, we'll pull up some photos of him later. And I hate to be like, oh, that guy looks like a pedophile. But Jimmy Sable is the most, that guy looks like a pedophile, pedophile in the history of fucking pedophiles. Oh, I can't wait to see. Yeah. 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 a 17-year-olds or, 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 camouflage is this. And at the start of the pop industry, there's a lot of people, including probably, 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. We're, 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, like, 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 unique kind of predator, right? And that's the story of Jimmy Saffel. Margaret Thatcher is also heavily involved. Oh my God. Oh, yeah. 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, it's like in his 40s and on that like things start to get really, that he get, that he kind of evolves as a predator in a unique way. Because a lot of what's interesting to me about this case is that Saville'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. I'm getting ahead of myself. We should have. Yeah.

All right. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves.

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James Wilson, Vincent Saville, was born on Halloween night, October 31st, and 1926. fucking Halloween. Like just. Oh my perfect. 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, William Zeresa. That's how place name should sound.

I don't know what the fuck you guys have been doing over there. But it's nonsense. St. Louis, bitches. Yeah. Oh, no, he's in the burly area of Leeds and the West Riding of Yorkshire to fuck you guys. Come on with your J.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. No. Yeah. Jimmy writes this of his own. own birth. Some babies are born strong, some weak, being the youngest of seven, it would appear that

my father's last effort was lacking in the juices of strength. I witnesses have it that I was born sound asleep. He's a sickly kid, right? And his family members, people who knew the family around that time, confirmed that he was, you know, ill as a child and suffered from regular health problems. He exaggerates these as part of his like personal mythos and narrative. For his part, Saffel claims that he nearly died when he was two years old and was so sick that a priest was brought in to administer last rights while his mother prayed feverishly to a then unconfirmed saint, Margaret Sinclair. And like, things were so bad that the doctor just like 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, you know, tiny mouth to see if he's breathing. And in his book, and in numerous interviews over the years, Saville 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 Saville myth. And in his own autobiography, he follows it with this very strange passage. Hardened by my urinary success of catching my grandmother, Farron 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, you know, he's a children's entertainer to a major extent, right? But 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 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. And 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, 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 not a lie and the other one.

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. 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, 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. 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, oh, 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 in 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 fond 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 Saville that while Saville 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 like lie about this, 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 is like, no, we were obsessed with him because he nearly died. Now, Jimmy'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, he's, Jimmy grows up connected to at least a low level organized crime. You know, this guy is running like numbers rackets and stuff. And his dad is kind of his gopher. But his dad's also not a big wig. 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. His dad's just kind of. For you, Robert. Windsor like House of like royalty? Yeah. But no, he's not royal. It's just also a name.

Oh, okay. I was like, I was like, British, Windsor. The Queens, Corgi's. 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, like, 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 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, like the family 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, 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. It's like he doesn't, 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. No, 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 get him a spoonful of malt. A spoonful of malt helps the medicine go down. Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

It's a very like 20s, 30s thing. 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 Saville 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, 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 can molest more kids. Of his mom's faith, Saville 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, was, did something go on there? And I could, 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 weird. She romanticized him. In some way, like, that's kind of damaging enough. But there's no. Yeah, it may not have involved actual molestation. Sorry, I cut you off.

Yeah, no. There's no priest molestation at any point? 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. But that doesn't have to happen for someone to be a child molester. Sometimes people are just child molesters because they suck, right? 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. 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 know, 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 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, yeah.

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? 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 leads 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 have, 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. a grown man because all of the bigger grown men are gone, right? 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. 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, 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? 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. Okay. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different

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It's like the old Polish saying, not my monkeys, not my circus. Yep. It was a good one. It is an actual Polish saying. Yeah. It is an actual Polish saying. Better version of Play Stupid Games, win stupid prizes. Yes.

Which, by the way, wasn't Taylor Swift who said that for the first time. I actually, I thought it was. I got that wrong. Listen to the Nick, Dick, and Paul show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know the famous author, Rold Doll. He thought up Willie Wonka and the BFG. But did you know he was a lot? a spy. Neither did I. You can hear all about his wildlife story in the podcast, The Secret

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Right. Just finished five years. I'm going to have cookies and milk at my mom. Yeah. On the Seno Show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption. On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon, Danny Trail, talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances.

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So, uh, Jimmy is making spare money hustling. Um, until one day. 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, quote, 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 scumback. 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, horrors, 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 bans 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 sigs to sell to people. That tells you how bad the war years were. But there's a good, there's a vibrant industry in cigarettes people didn't finish. Not even just for him. Yeah, to sell. Oh my God, gross.

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-grada 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 a hole 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 like, 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... It is, honestly, as child labor stories go, I don't know, 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 Saville 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's 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 the 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, quote, 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?

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, how 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 one of the most. fucking wild. That's one of the most fucked up things I've ever heard. What do you mean? What do you mean, kid?

It gets way worse. Jimmy Saville's relationship to dead bodies does not get healthier after this point. But Jesus. He's what? Like 12? 13, you said? He's like 14 probably. Maybe 14.

Something like that. It's a little hard to tell again. Yeah. Dude. Young. Yeah. It's fucking nuts. That's some fucking sicko shit.

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, like, 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?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which Saville 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, they raise enough to build 250 bombers. And this is, like, a huge story. 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, quote, I wondered why people wept during the war when their relative had been killed. I didn't even know what killed was. I was much more inquiring than I was affected. And that's 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 like, 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. If he was writing about, like, being a six-year-old and 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, 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 got 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 ten 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 not, or got in 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 Saville 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 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. Saville 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 appeal as an entertainer later will be that he's a, 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 Jim. me. 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 he's,

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. Quote, 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 severes him from normal society. 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're. 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, like, cleans 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 at 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, which craft it may not be, but unnatural it certainly was,

and I was branded from that moment, right? What's so weird, dude? That's really odd, Jimmy. Aw, shit. So Dan Davies, the author of In Plain Sight, asked him about this decades, like 60-something years later. And when he asks Jimmy about this moment, like why he did. did this. Saville 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 the body is described in, but then hell is calm. 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 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 Saville 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 Saffel 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 like bike marathon basically and we know he's in it so it can't have happened then it's really it's 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 so he probably got hurt to some extent but again the timelines he give 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? Did it 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 lied 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 Davy's book in plain sight, quote, 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. It's like really uncomfortable.

That's fucking weird, dude. Mm-hmm. You know what else makes people uncomfortable? Products and services? Sometimes. Sometimes. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them.

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Now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I went and sat on the little ottoman in front of him. I said, hi, Dad. And just when I said that, my mom comes out of the kitchen. And she says, I have some cookies and milk. This is a badass convict. Right. Just finished five years.

I'm going to have cookies and milk at mom. Yeah. On the senior show podcast, each episode invites you into a raw, unfiltered conversations about recovery, resilience, and redemption. On a recent episode, I sit down with actor, cultural icon, Danny Trail, talk about addiction, transformation, and the power of second chances. the entire season two is now available to bench featuring powerful conversations with the guests like Tiffany Addish, Johnny Knoxville, and more.

I'm an alcoholic. And without this trouble, I'm going to die. Open your free I-Heart radio app. Search the Cito Show. And listen now. 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-d-j 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 like holds an event and sells tickets to it. He has his mom make refreshments. He like rinsed 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. 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? 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 dance. 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 is 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, yeah, exactly, exactly. As Davy's 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. 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 this isn't, 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. Why? He uses it constantly. Why? Well, it is common at the time. It's very common at the time. Very common. 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.

two at the start of this. And so 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 to 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 1948, 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. 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 perfectional 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 it's 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.

Jay. 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 get in. There's 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. And now I'm a bajillionaire. Yeah, that's really the post-war experience for a lot of assholes in a nutshell. That'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 tucks 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 going to 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, like, 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 Saville, 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 in this period of time. There's Jimmy with a cigar. He's always got his hair like that. It's, he's, this is a young British man with a cigar in his mouth and like long, shock white straight hair.

Like, clearly like bleached white hair. Yeah. It's really strange. No one else looked like Jimmy Saville, like at any real point in his life. And he does, like, 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. I guess that's a guess that there's something dangerous about that I'm 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 evil evil James yes evil James and like and one thing I know about James is James James fucking hates this guy we've never spoken about it but James hates this guy oh yeah yeah you barely 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. Sorry. Yeah. Like fucked up bangs. I don't know how to describe it to you other than fucked up.

Man looks bad. So Jimmy's crowd 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 cyclist we have.

How about trying your hand at being a race commentator? Do you want to be the guy who like, 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? 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 did you see the sequel to 28 years later, the Bone Temple? No. Oh, man. There's a reason. So all of the bad guys in that movie are dressed like and aping Jimmy's, uh,

Saville, 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 Saville. 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.

What else are you doing? Nothing. Fire a book. Wow. Mm-hmm. I don't know. Should we continue? Should we record part two?

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. Great. Great. Great. All right, everybody. We'll be back Thursday with some stuff that's really going to upset you. Good night. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe. to our YouTube channel,

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