Now Then, Now Then...

Jimmy Savile - superannuated former DJ, marathon runner, wrestler, mother-obsessed weirdo and the subject of more urban myths and rumours than just about any other celebrity I can think of. For some reason I was told yet another bizarre rumour about him the other day. This time it was that the bleach-blonde haired octogenarian's longevity was down to his draining the bodily fluids from patients at Stoke Mandeville hospital (where he still works as a volunteer), and injecting them into himself. Clearly nonsense, as he obviously doesn't vampirise helpless hospital patients any more than he dresses up in his dead mother's clothes, or that he dug up said mother and mummified her. Obviously. Just like he isn't a necrophiliac peadophile. Of course, the real question is just why he attracts such stories? After all, he seems to have worked tirelessly for various charities, raising huge amounts of money over the years, had a hugely popular kids TV show in the 1970s and gives freely of his own time as a volunteer. However, there's no doubt that he's just, well, creepy. It's nothing you can quite quantify, but there's just something about him which seems weird.

What probably contributes to the urban myths surrounding Savile is the fact that he, himself, has a tendency to talk absolute bollocks about himself, making all kinds of incredible claims about his involvement in the Middle East peace process, his role in trying to prevent the break-up of Prince Andrew's marriage to Sarah Ferguson and being a confidant of Mrs Thatcher. Most ludicrous of all, he claims to have invented the disco. Apparently, back in the 1940s he used to charge money to let off-duty servicemen dance to records he played on a portable gramophone in church halls. At least, that was his story when he and five naked sailors were pulled from the rubble of a bombed out Salford church in 1941. It must have been a magnificent sight seeing all those soldiers, sailors and airmen 'getting jiggy' to the big beat of the Tommy Dorsey Band or George Formby. He also claimed that he invented 'mixing' when he used two turntables. Presumably that was when he came up with his innovative club remix of Glenn Miller's 'In The Mood' featuring Kay Kyser's 'Three Little Fishes'. So preposterous are such claims, is it any wonder that people would rather believe that the shell-suited, gold chain wearing Top of the Pops presenter is actually a cross-dressing, vampiric sex offender?