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Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story is a Limited Series split into two parts, and opening with clips of Jim’ll Fix It, the show where that man would somehow arrange the wish of your dreams, this series showing us the boy who flew around like Peter Pan, and another one meeting William Shatner on the set of the Starship Enterprise, and so on.
Of course, the one that stands out for me at the time was the school trip to Blackpool Pleasure Beach and some kids eating their lunch on the Revolution rollercoaster, with the food and drink correctly adhering to the laws of gravity.
Savile was idolised on TV for decades, including many Top of the Pops episodes as well as both the first episode AND the finale, but he was an evil individual who was hiding in plain sight.
I loved watching his programmes on TV when I was a kid, and as he ran charity marathons for Stoke Mandeville Hospital, at school, we once even made posters celebrating this!
He came across like an amusing man who was very cheerful, although you see from his very own comments that he says his weird hair is like a “smokescreen”, and that he’s a very “tricky” individual. Plus, when he’s on Melvyn Bragg’s book talk show, Read All About It, discussing his new tome – Love Is An Uphill Thing – and Frank Muir asks him to tell more anecdotes in his next book, Savile replies, “I’d probably end up doing 15 years in the nick if I did that”… and there’s scores of situations like this.
He even wrote a book about “Stranger Danger“, and advised the Royal Family on how to act publically in relation to tragedies such as the Lockerbie plane disaster in 1989.
In the end, as we now know, it turned out those high up knew what he was like, but no-one ever came forward.
So far, I’ve seen just the first of two episodes – entitled, Making A Monster – where we see the rise of Savile, and his climb to fame, and the power it brought him. It’s one revelation after another, although all each one does is just cement what we already know about him from when a lot of them came out after he died. So, it’s worth a look, but you don’t need to watch it all.
I will check out the second episode, however.
In addition, the first episode also features comments from Tina Davey (BBC Secretary from 1971 to 1975), reporter Martin Young, who ran with Savile for a week, as he ran for charity, investigative journalist Meirion Jones, Celebrity interviewer Lynn Barber, film critic Mark Lawson, Selina Scott – who presented BBC’s Breakfast Time at the time when he was on, and trying to chat her up, and Steven Phillips, a boy who wanted to take his teacher out for a meal on Jim’ll Fix It.
As an aside, it’s weird that this documentary is in a 2.39:1 widescreen aspect ratio, when most of the footage is 4:3, so a lot of it simply falls off the screen.
Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story is not available to pre-order on Blu-ray or DVD, but is on Netflix now.
Detailed specs:
Cert: 
Running time: 75 minutes (episode 1) ; 92 minutes (episode 2)
Release date: April 6th 2022
Studio: Netflix
Format: 2.39:1
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.