Mark: So welcome back to 30 Minute Crime. My name's Mark Williams Thomas and of course, Jeremy Vine.

Jeremy: Hello Mark. Well today I want to discuss with you the case of Jimmy Savile. And we need to get to this case because this is in a way is the one I think you know best as an investigative journalist. And it's the most awful case that one of the worst in British criminal history and Savile may be the worst paedophile that has ever... lived on these islands and partly of course facilitated by his status in our society. But there's a key year here, well two years, 2011 is the year he died, aged 85, 86. 2012 is when ITV exposure came out, which you fronted, you investigated, you helped put together, which told the story. And I think all of us, that was the moment the curtain was lifted, wasn't it?

Mark: Yeah, mean, a moment in time, really, I think certain things define society and define elements of our life. And I think when I look back on those moments, that was a pivotal moment in society. It was described as a tidal change. think Tim Loughton at the time spoke in Parliament and said, you know, no programme has ever made such a massive impact. You know, it changed. It changed so much and it changed so much for the better. It wasn't without real difficulty. mean, getting that program broadcast was a momentous struggle. I mean, the things that I had to go through to get it there. But let's pay tribute to, I was a facilitator. I created the program. I did all the investigation behind the back of it. But it was down to five women who put their confidence in me to tell their story. And it was their story to tell their story. that then open it up for everybody else. And I think it's a lesson for us all is that it just takes one person. It takes one person to have the confidence to come forward and for society to protect the authorities to do their job. And thereafter, you know, a change can happen because there's no doubt a change. mean, I can't think of a scenario where... so much has changed since then, but in the early days afterwards, I it led to the resignation of the BBC director general.

Jeremy: Yeah, and a complete rethink of how we deal with celebrity and what celebrity is and it mustn't be allowed to facilitate people. The stuff we found out was unbelievable that he had keys to... you know, was it Broadmoor? He was able to walk around and Stoke Mandeville Hospital and after your investigation I followed it really closely and read a book called In Plain Sight by Dan Davis. Now Dan Davis was, you'll know, was a gentleman who essentially was quite interested in Jimmy Savile as a celebrity growing up with him and got Jimmy's permission to be his biographer and so spent a lot of time with him. Didn't at that stage know or understand what was happening. But then when he died it all came out he was in an amazing position to add to your story and It was an incredible book but it was so upsetting because it goes through all of Savile's life the offending from the very start from the moment he's in his Swanky car in Leeds and as a you know an underage girl in there with him and a police officer pokes his head and says what's going on here and he says nothing to nothing to see here officer makes a joke of it right till the in the 60s where he had to He was doing an event for the local council, a DJ, you know, kind of radio thing. And they said, is there anything you need that we can give you? Because it's a charity thing. He said, you know, I'm not going to do an impression of him, tempting as it is. He said, I'll just have like a tent full of young beauties, young girls to go next to my tent. And they, you know, they had a council meeting to decide which girls should be in the tent. It's unbelievable.

Mark: Mm.

Jeremy: And then it goes through all those years. And I saw him only once after he left the BBC, he was in reception. I joined in 87. And he'd gone by then, even from his Radio One show, but the shadow he leaves, and not just the B, not just the NHS, but I think for all of us, he's given, it's now such a mistrust, I think, about adult males who befriend children. It's now, or even charity work being somehow suspicious, and a lot of stuff is tainted that shouldn't have been.

Mark: Mm. Yeah, think it's what it told for me, you know, I've dealt with quite a lot of high profile jobs when I was in the place, but what it told me is the power an individual can can have over other people. And the media industry is very good at elevating people's power. And with that comes protection and, you know, an isolation. And I think he was he was an incredibly powerful man. I Dan Davis, lovely guy. I met Dan quite early on in our investigation and we shared a lot of things in terms of what what he'd found from Savile. And some of what he talked about was was helpful, but he did give a quite an insight into kind of built this picture of what a prickly, difficult character Savile was. But I think as we started to investigate, I mean, let me tell you very simply for the people that perhaps don't know the story. I was coming back from Interpol. I'd been over there working for BBC Newsnight doing a report about child exploitation. And on the way back, the producer, Marion Jones, from BBC Newsnight said to me, have you ever heard anything about Savile as being an offender? And I said, no. I said, I wouldn't want him anywhere near my kids, but he's a bit of a weirdo. But no, I haven't. And he said, well, he's an abuser. And I know that because my aunt was in charge of the children's home where he used to frequent. And I went, well, that's very interesting. And he said, well, there's a lot of chat about it online from people who've been in the children's home. And I said, well, what are you going to do? He said, well, we can't do anything whilst he's alive. But when he dies, we'd like to try and do a program. We've got one witness. We've got no victims. We've got one witness. And we're looking to kind of do something with them. Anyway, fast forward a number of months. It wasn't that long after that. He dies. And kind of the next day I get a phone call from Murray and say, listen, we're going to make this program. Would you help us? And I said, yeah, yeah, what do you want? He said, well, we've got someone to front it, so we don't need a presenter. But would you give us an interview in regards to the case? And I said, yeah, you know, I've interviewed lots of people and been aware of high profile allegations in the past when I'm in the police. I said, yeah, I'll give you an interview. And that's kind of where we were. And then they wanted to try and establish what police force interviewed him, whether it was Surrey or Sussex. Anyway, and I established which one it was. It was my ex-force. And the reason I said, I said, don't haven't heard about it. The reason I didn't know about it is I'd left the police at that stage. Otherwise I would have known about it. It would have come across my desk. And that was kind of the pivotal moment because it went back to BBC and the editor of Newsnight said, well, because the police have done an investigation, it's clearly not a failing for the police to investigate. Therefore there's no issue for us. I remember saying to both Marion and to the editor, So you're missing the point here. The point is, is that he's a child sex offender. It's secondary what the police investigation is. Anyway, they dropped it. And I said to Murray, listen, I think there's more to it, but there's a lot of work to do. Would you be happy for me to pick it up and obviously, you know, work with you as much as I can, but I'm conscious that you are employed by the BBC News night. And he said, listen, Mark, there's only one person that can probably take the kid on and that's you. And that 10 months of probably one of the hardest investigations I've ever done.

Jeremy: Yeah, and it was like just, as I said at the start, curtain being lifted because as soon as the very first story came out in your documentary, which was about someone poking their head around the door of his dressing room and he was sitting there with a girl on his lap and his tongue in her ear, you just thought, my goodness, it all makes sense. Of course, he was actually almost pretending to be a weirdo and a creep and he was one. In this long book by Dan Davis, the only hero in the whole thing is a guy in the 80s. He was on a cruise ship and he was predating on this 15-year-old. And in the end, her parents just got sick of him. It's so disgusting. They went to the captain and said, this guy won't leave our 15-year-old alone. She keeps trying to kiss her. And the captain went into Jimmy Savile's cabin and said, right, the next port, you're off. And he's the only hero in the whole thing because he totally saw, you know, it doesn't matter how famous this guy is, he's a danger. I just, it's so sickening that he didn't get done in his lifetime. And I interviewed, and this will sound like a very strange connection here, but in about 2014, I did an interview with Hillary Clinton. She was publicizing a book. It was before she decided to run against Trump or she hadn't talked about it. And... She had a, she came to us an hour early. So she was sitting around on her own. No one was with her. And this whole thing was going on with Savile. And she said, my God, what's this story? Is this just Jimmy Salga? And I said, you know, isn't it the case? Our societies always seem to be almost in lockstep on these cultural changes. And I'm trying to think what the American equivalent is of Savile. And she, she came up with a guy called Sandusky, who's not very famous, but he was an abusive coach. I, you know, and she said, Oh, we haven't had one. Of course they've had one now. they've had Epstein

Mark: And Weinstein, and Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein, know, he was the start of it, yeah.

Jeremy: is when and Harvey Weinstein so why see yeah that's true that's true of course that was the articles written by it was Woody Allen's son wasn't it Dylan who started writing them but the thing about Epstein that's so uncannily similar is the way they can really I'm trying to avoid using the word sniff out, they work. Their radar is focused on girls who won't be listened to. Because they know they're vulnerable. And this story of dear Virginia Dufray, who of course is dead now, but is finally now believed after her death, was in her book that she wrote, Nobody's Girl. She says how she was in the, I think it was Mar-a-Lago actually, where she was picked up by Ghislaine, who was cruising around. And she says, I didn't realize I had just met an apex predator. And that's the phrase for Savile as well. That they basically spend their whole life hunting. That's what they do.

Mark: When offenders do that, offenders target their prey and use it in a simplistic term. That's exactly what they do because they're incredible manipulators. They're control. They know that actually the first time they offend is the time they're going to likely be caught because the victim will talk about it. Thereafter, there's a mind imbalance change. So what Savile was very good at is orchestrating and manipulating the position, manipulating those around him. but also orchestrating so that there was children there. I all his programs were involved, involved children. He created this. When I did an article for the Radio Times, I said, you know, these were vehicles for him. He was creating vehicles for his offending behaviour. One of the things that was really important when we set out to do this investigation, as I said, and there's just three of us on the team. I said, first of all, we keep this off computers. Everything's on paper. I was very concerned that there'd be a leak. And then the second thing is, as I said, we have to find victims, survivors from elsewhere other than the children's home, because it will be very easy for those people in the, people watching, people who are observing this and giving a view to say, well, yeah, but they've damaged children. So we had to take it outside. So we focused on Larry's outside of the children's home, as well as the children's home. And that is what gave us the strength of the allegations against them. And we got, got seven, seven complainants. And we said to ITV, who were very much on board, Peter Finch and the director of TV at the time, who was brilliant, very supportive of this whole thing. And he said, look, this is a time bomb, but it's so politically sensitive. I don't think there is a, at that time he was dead, but he was so, so powerful. Completely kind of misread by the BBC in terms of how big a issue this was going to be. mean, at the time I asked the director general for an interview. I said, listen, give me an interview. And I gave him kind of an hour, because I said, listen, isn't it on your watch? You know, just tell me what you're going to do about it now. Tell me you're going to do it. Launch an investigation and you're very sorry that these things have happened. But you refuse to give me an interview and you just kind of shut it down and go, you know, there's nothing there. And that was the biggest failing. mean, when you look back at it from a crisis management point of view, and I do quite a lot of crisis management for organisations, BBC handled it absolutely appallingly, which is why it then cascaded to the degree that it is. I mean, as a direct result of Operation Utrea. And I'll give you a few little nuggets in a minute about it. There was 30 separate inquiries that came about and obviously the main one Dame Janet Smith's review.

Jeremy: Well yeah and I'll be very interested to hear about that because obviously it created this spider's web that began to extend beyond Jimmy Savile but Savile was dead and died apparently in his bed in Scarborough or maybe his penthouse in Leeds but with his fingers on his chest crossed like that that's the position he was found in so he was lucky to the very end. I yeah I sort of I really really really wish that someone had gone for him early he used a lot of legal threats against people. He was constantly threatening. And the thing that I think is with Epstein, with Savile, is that they choose people who not only are they vulnerable, but they're isolated from each other. And the thing I think that got Savile caught, as well as your investigation, is you mentioned a forum. Digital media for all its problems, social media, has allowed and did allow his victims to connect. And in that moment, you get a little bit of strength thinking, wait, it wasn't just me. Because he made everyone think it was just them. That's the thing that the cruelty of it is that none of them realized they were in a crowd of maybe 100 victims of him.

Mark: And that was one of the major failures of the Crown Prosecution Service, because when the case was put to the Crown Prosecution Service to tell them that there were three separate allegations in respect of him, the Crown Prosecution Service said, you cannot tell each other, you cannot tell the victims that there are other people. Now that was a massive criticism of the CPS at the end, and they were wrong, because actually what we needed to do is to give confidence, not tell them exactly what the nature of other allegations are, but say to them, look, you're not alone. There are other people who are making allegations as well. And that gives people confidence. Nobody, nobody wants to be the only person. You we have to give confidence. And one of the things that we were really careful about, and this is, you when I brought, when I did the investigation, I did it as a police investigation. One of the things that Operation U-Tree said to me afterwards is that, you know, the quality and level of your investigation was, we've never seen that before, because actually that was at such a level that it went to... you checked out every single tiny little aspect of it, which in the end, makes our job very easy. mean, Operation U-Tree, which created out of Savile. Then kind of the spider's web opened in terms of the inquiries that came out of that. So we had Operation U-Tree, had Operation U-Tree and others, Operation Hydron, Operation Fairbank, Firmbridge, Operation Midland.

Jeremy: No.

Mark: You know, Operation Jaguar, Serial Smith, you know, all of these little things that have come out of it and the names that now have come forward, of course, massively significant. I mean, let's just talk about how it's moved to other places. Savile was failed to be caught at the time. But what about Serial Smith? Serial Smith was offending against children and yet the police never prosecuted him. And the power that some of these people have. just meant that the authorities were too scared. I mean, the interview with Savile at Stoke Mandeville by police officers, shocking. I first of all, they interview him for two sexual allegations and don't tell the location where he's interviewing, i.e. Stoke Mandeville. We're going to interview him for suspicion of two sexual offences.

Jeremy: Yeah, yeah.

Mark: And he ran the interview. He totally ran the interview and he finished the interview up going, basically, I'm very litigious and I will take you on. And he did that. And I don't believe people would have been able to powerful people, i.e. people within the BBC or other establishments, could have stopped him. But

Jeremy: well the yeah

Mark: the victims were never going to be able to take him on because he was just too powerful. And

Jeremy: no I was I was gonna it's it's not a defense of the was gonna it's it's not a defense of the BBC I mean it's somewhat historic with them but and obviously I worked there so so I would tend to be understanding of how they got caught but I think what I would say is again and again in life we see this rule uh, evidenced and it is this that good people can't see bad people and so someone like Shipman can operate inside the NHS and kill 250 people because the NHS can't even conceive that someone's gone into the health service to kill people and so there was a bit of that going on with the BBC but but also of course he fooled everyone because the thing that was amazing about his time in Leeds is he used to have this breakfast club which you'll know all about where Leeds police officers were invited around to his flat every month or two

Mark: Yeah.

Jeremy: for breakfast, they probably love doing. And then he would say, I've got another one. And he'd hand them a letter from somebody saying, you raped me in 1975. and he said, there's another stalker, can you deal with it? And they said, oh yes, of course we will. And I mean, whoever those police officers are, I'm assuming they're retired now, they should hang their heads in shame because you're being allowed into the actual pedophiles lair and you can't work out where the criminal is. again, it's the same defense, isn't it? It's that you can't conceive of anyone that evil.

Mark: Yeah. People commit, so this concept of stranger danger, which is a concept that you and I were taught at school, is not the reality. The reality is, is a person who gets closest to children to abuse children is a person that presents themselves in a manner to which they can gain access. No young child is going to go and...

Jeremy: Yeah, and you know the amazing, just to interrupt you for a second, you know the amazing thing is, he wrote a book called Stranger Danger. This is

Mark: Yeah, now he did!

Jeremy: Savile wrote a book called Stranger Danger,

Mark: And he was he was the epitome. actually, if you look at as offenders, he was the epitome, not only of someone that created this this persona, this persona of a charismatic individual. And actually, people lots of people go, he's weird. But actually, he's weird. There's nothing wrong with him. Whereas he also had this persona, of course, where he created such famousness about him. And he became untouchable. There's no doubt.

Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah.

Mark: he became untouchable. He was, I I remember going through my second programme, so we did exposure and then did exposure two. And

Jeremy: I saw them both,

Mark: I remember speaking to his PA, yeah, speak to his PA and going through the book that she had of him, which had his contacts with the Pope, his contacts with the royal family. I mean, he was specifically asked to counsel and Diana specifically asked to counsel them during their divorce or their separation problem. The problem is, that someone had never been in a relationship. mean, the closest relationship he had was with his mum and I'm not sure what was going on there, but that's the only relationship he has. How does it that now the King of England is in a position to go, do you know what? He'd be quite a good person to counsel us. What?

Jeremy: Yeah, I know. again, it comes back. These evil people fool the good people. know, the hell was Charles doing? then, you know, Thatcher loved him as well, you know, and we forget when he died. Remember the way his

Mark: They do. They do. Yeah

Jeremy: coffin was carried. Remember the fact that he was buried on that. They called it Savile's Walk and

Mark: Bye.

Jeremy: they gave him this very elaborate tomb and it had all these beautiful engravings, which, by the way, they smashed up almost the day of your program. I mean, it was literally within a day of your program they smashed up his tomb and took it away. I suppose in the words of the Who, the band, we won't get fooled again but the next one will look different and I think what you can't do in the digital world now is create that kind of victim backstory without it coming back at you. I really think that that's what's changed now. The victims grow up and they come back.

Mark: I There has been a shift change. been a massive change. mean, so we have Savile and then obviously after Savile we have Max Clifford, we have Rolf Harris, we have Stuart Hall. So there's a cascading effect. The night after Savile's program goes out, the night of Savile's program, I get an email from someone saying, do you work for him? with a title Max Clifford. I went back and said no, why? And they said because he offended against us but no one's prepared to take him on. And I said I'll take anybody on. And so we subsequently got Max Clifford prosecuted, was part of the Ralph Harris investigation. Ralph Harris got away with a lot of crimes. Australia should have taken him back and prosecuted him. Yeah, I mean he committed a load of offences in Australia and New Zealand.

Jeremy: Tiddy, tiddy.

Mark: actually the Australian should have taken him back, but they said, you know what, he's in jail in the UK, he can languish there. But there are other people. I I tried, desperately tried to get Mohammed Al Fayed prosecuted. So I had, yeah, so I had three victims in relation to Mohammed Al Fayed and

Jeremy: Really?

Mark: I did an article on one of them and I went to the police and said, listen, I've got these three victims, please, can you go back to Crown Prosecution Service? And... you know, prosecute him. he said, they said, well, if you give us and share us all the evidence. So did. Anyway, they went to the Crown Prosecution Service. But in the meantime, I then started to do my own investigations and I established that he had, I'll be very careful in this because I don't want to identify the person, but he had sexually abused a very high profile person who is actually now went on and became a high profile correspondent. But he sexually abused them on board a boat.

Jeremy: I always wondered why they didn't, yeah. But also we should say, for the sake, yeah, go on, sorry.

Mark: and that subsequently led to him not gaining his UK citizenship. It was that seriously taken.

Jeremy: for the sake of balance,

Mark: Yeah, so as a result, gone.

Jeremy: we should say that Utre went off in in directions it should not have gone off in and that was Lord Bramall and Leon Britton and Cliff Richard who were all falsely accused and so on. And of course, what happened there? And you know what, Mark, this is probably a topic for another show. Another podcast is is the arrival, as always happens in a situation people have the best of intentions. You will get a bad actor arrive. And the bad actor in this case was a man called Carl Beach, who was an Olympic level hoaxer. And he led so many people up the garden path. and that's a story for another day, but it meant that when you say Utre, I don't think of it as a success. I think of it as just a very ragged operation.

Mark: Yeah, mean, the problem with any police operation is the pendulum very rarely sits in the middle. And what you end up with is you end up with a knee-jerk reaction, whether that be the police, whether that be the media outlets. I mean, we have McAlpine. We had the BBC Newsnight do a story in relation to McAlpine, and it was completely wrong. I remember the afternoon of that taking place. I was up filming, and I got a phone call, and they said, look, we're going to do this thing tonight on McAlpine. Have you ever heard about it? I went... Are you sure? Are you sure you've got the evidence right? And they went, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're sure. Obviously it subsequently went out and they were completely wrong. But this is the problem. Yeah, and you end up with a situation where it becomes a complete nightmare because they're following a path which is non-evidence based. There's no clear clarity in relation to where they're focused. And my position always is, is

Jeremy: Yeah, there's another one. Yeah, another one.

Mark: Single victims, be really, really careful with. You need to get into a position where you've got

Jeremy: Yeah.

Mark: supporting evidence. And I do think Carl Beach is, we're to have to do a programme on Carl Beach because Carl Beach was flagged as a concern. So I saw Carl Beach, I saw an interview that Carl Beach gave on a programme about Savile and I watched it and I went, he's lying. He's absolutely lying. That stuff is not true that he's saying. Also, when I was in the police service, I had a piece of intelligence given to me. I've got these tapes still. So I've got six audio tapes. I gave them to the police. I got six audio tapes, which tell me, which basically give a story

Jeremy: I know about this. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah.

Mark: about how a former

Jeremy: Yeah.

Mark: home secretary had been involved in the murder of a child. All right. So I got that as a tape. I got that as a tape from an individual.

Jeremy: No.

Mark: And so we looked at it at the time and there's no evidence to support it. This is looked at within the police service. They were also telling us there was a location where bodies, a whole load of children were buried. None of this was true. So I then, when this came up about Carl Beach, I spoke to the senior police officers and I said, listen, we need to have a meeting. So I met with the senior officers from Utrea and obviously the branch out from that into Midland. And I said, Be really careful. I don't believe this guy's telling you the truth. Listen to these audios. He's telling you exactly slightly different change elements that what's on these, which I investigated over 15 plus years ago, but they still pursued that angle. They still pursued the angle that actually as part of Operation Midland, three children had been killed. I went to the press conference and I said, so who are the three children?

Jeremy: Yeah.

Mark: And they said, well, we don't know who they are. Well, hang on a so how do know children have been killed when you don't know who the three children are? Appalling, absolutely appalling. The problem is, is you go full circle because we're in a position with Savile that victims, survivors weren't believed. And then you get to position where the police take a phony and they take his evidence as being correct. And it's like, hang on a minute, so you've now completely swung the pendulum on the other way and you've ended up believing guys telling the truth.

Jeremy: And it's, you know, you can say the same with, you know, Newsnight didn't do one story, so they did another one that wasn't right. And with the police, they didn't catch Savile, so they think we're to catch everyone else. And then they end up, you know, creating, I we haven't mentioned Harvey Proctor, who's another innocent person whose life fell apart. But let's go back to Savile here, because, you know, it's really difficult to, when we put this together and, you know, there's now all kinds of programs. There's one on Netflix, I think, called A Very British Horror Story that shows the whole thing and anyone watching that from any other country would say you can tell that guy is a creep weirdo probably a criminal probably a danger to everyone around him you can tell looking at him but we were all someone said he groomed a nation and I'm thinking well I'm the guy was born in 1965 so there's a lot of Jimmy Savile in my childhood there was a lot of Jim will fix it there was a lot of him doing adverts for British Rail or whatever they were at the time I didn't I didn't smell a rat I feel you know is personal life didn't really add up so whenever he was asked do you have any girlfriends he always said no brain damage or something and then it turned out he had lots of girlfriends but he never wanted to talk about them and he talked about young girls and maidens and I suppose that was really weird he never wanted to get married or have kids he was completely on his own but at the same time he seemed to have a lot of female company and he always talked about how much he liked girls and you know all of it now looks so obvious and I'm like the police I'm kicking myself how didn't we see it? Are we too fair minded? Is it that?

Mark: But society has changed. Society has changed. So the way we have greater understanding of how offenders operate, go back 20 years and we didn't understand grooming. We didn't understand how offenders

Jeremy: Yep.

Mark: manipulate society, manipulate individuals. know, within the words have been used, in plain sight, groomed a nation. You those are very true. But actually, human beings, are inherently trusting. We trust people. We want to because if we don't trust people, we have a society where we go, do you know, we don't trust anybody and it falls apart. So we inherently trust people. And what that means is those are very clever, those manipulators. It enables them to latch onto that and go, actually, do you know what? And what ends up happening

Jeremy: Yeah.

Mark: with offenders? If you're an offender and somebody dislikes you because they're onto you or they've got a concern about you, cut them out. You don't have them as part of your setup. So you focus on those other people who you can manipulate. And money, wealth, status creates awful amounts of manipulation. And of course,

Jeremy: Mmm.

Mark: he had that in an abundance and people, as a result of that, trusted him. Society has changed in our understanding. The way we use social media and the way that the internet works is massively different now. So I think we as a society, we have to be groomed in a different

Jeremy: No.

Mark: way than we were back then. There will be other offenders in due course. There's no doubt about that. It's part of, you my investigation there were a number of people who still haven't been prosecuted or arrested. But we won't have somebody the same as Savile because what we do know about offenders is offenders change as well because they know that they'll get caught because the way we as a society operate, the way the police operate, so they have to change their offending behaviour and that's exactly what they do.

Jeremy: I was at a jumble sale and I found an old Top of the Pops annual and it was from the, I think it was from the 70s, you know, there was, I don't know if there was any Savile in it, but I was looking through it and it was in the days when people would probably write, you know, things that were less tactful than they would right now. So one of the bands had said it was really, the really odd thing about Top of the Pops is that we went on and we'd done a hit record and we took ages to write this record and we were touring and we could play our guitars. And the DJs seemed to think that they were as talented as us. I thought it was such an interesting thing to say because what of course we miss now because because because stars, music stars and so on are so elevated is that back in the day Saville was as big as the Beatles. He was almost he had that level of celebrity where we just got broadcasting music, music stations, Radio One, 1967. He was one of the first people on it. We just got, you know, this amazing on Russia, British music, the Stones and the Beers and the DJs were carried along with it and were part of it. And once you realize that, you realize, my God, they were like superhuman, they could do anything. Because we only had three TV stations back then. We had only one or two pop stations, depending on where you lived. It's not like it is now. So there were only about a dozen famous people and he was one of them. And that gave him such power. It's tragic. I also feel, don't, you mentioned some of the victims of Savalmark. I don't feel I know their names. I've seen them on TV, I've seen them speaking. I feel they've, it's not that they've been lost in this, but there were so many victims. We've never really got a compelling story of the essence of what Savile did. The only one I can think of that comes through is a girl who went to Stoke Mandeville and she was 12 and he was working as a porter and she was there for some sort of, have her tonsils out or something, you know, and he raped her and then just left her in a corridor. and she had no way of explaining to her parents what had happened and she carried it with her for years and years. I bet you probably know who this woman is. And then she began writing to his secretary years, decades later to say, you tell Jimmy what he did to me? And she didn't get anywhere until your program. So that's why I wanted to talk to you about it.

Mark: Yeah. I think it's very powerful and I think this is over 500 victims, 72 solely at the BBC. This was a I think it's very powerful and I think this is over 500 victims, 72 solely at the BBC. This was a momentous time and I'm incredibly proud that I had the opportunity to lead it and to make a change. And I think what I would say when people say to me, know, why do you go after the most powerful? I went over the most powerful because if you can get them, everybody is touchable. I think I would say confidently is that, do you know what? I want to send a very clear message and always say this, if you have offended, I want you to sleep very, very lightly. I want you to worry that the next knock on the door will be the police. My heart goes out to all of those people, those survivors in relation to Stavol and those other offenders. And, you know, it's a very, very difficult time. That leads us into what we've got coming up next week, which is a, do you know what? It's a complete flip the other side. We've now got a position where perhaps Somebody is in jail and they shouldn't be.

Jeremy: Right, and here I'm so conflicted by this thing, I'm gonna need you to help me with it because we're talking Lucy Letby next week. At first she was the most evil person ever born. She's gone to jail. She's now got a very powerful group of very clever people who have believed they found the evidence that she should not have been put inside. Every time I think, well, she's definitely a wrongful conviction. Somebody comes and says something to me that makes me think she should be in jail. So we can't come to a guilty, innocent answer, but we can help ourselves understand, you can help us understand what it is that is worrying people about the Lucy Letbe conviction.

Mark: Brilliant, as ever, Jeremy, brilliant, and I look forward to seeing you next week. And thank you so much. Please keep telling your friends, come and join the community and let's get really involved. 30 Minute Crime.

Jeremy: See you next week.