British light-entertainment legend Jimmy Savile's exposure as a prolific child abuser was a shock to the nation–at least the part of it that wasn't in complicitous denial about it. Now we know he did the same to the dead, and boasted of wearing "very huge rings that he said were made from the glass eyes" taken from them. A new book, In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile, by a man who researched Savile in the decade before his death, reports that he covered his tracks by moving into "the innermost circles of the establishment."
"This interview that was meant to last an hour in his house lasted, I don't know, God, it was about seven hours, something like that. It just went on and on and on." He interviewed him again for another profile in 2006. And another profile again in 2008. Shortly after which he – bizarrely – ended up going on the QE2's farewell Mediterranean cruise with him and began researching his biography in earnest. "I saw myself going up the river of his life and hopefully finding out everything on the way and then having a climactic final confrontation with him. I was going to call it Apocalypse Now Then. The implicit awareness was that it was going to be dark, because even in that first meeting there was a real, dark, underlying subtle menace to him."
I really wish British reporters would stop saying things like "how did we fail to detect the monster in our midst?" when it is abundantly clear how many of them had done exactly that.
