4 replies to this topic

[foodie52]

I remember him well..especially his hair.

[yvonne johnson]

He gave me the creeps.

[Wilfrid]

"So now then, guys and gals, 'ows about a little obituary?"

He managed - and he's not the only celebrity to do this - to combine supreme creepiness (and a mysterious private life) with lasting appeal to a very broad audience. (Benny Hill springs to mind, but really there are many.)

A ridiculous but not entirely negligible figure. He consistently claimed, with some plausibility, to have invented the discotheque in the late 50s/early 60s. Of course, people had been holding domestic parties based around playing records for decades (and even charging admission to pay the rent).

Savile started booking local halls and rooms above pubs to play records and promoting the events. He was, at least, in the vanguard. He was also the first presenter of Top of the Pops, the British equivalent of Dick Clark's bandstand.

If anything, he's the British equivalent of Dick Clark, devoting the last decades of his mammoth career to increasingly charity-style television work. But my goodness he looked a lot stranger than Dick Clark.



He looked like a professional wrestler. He was one in his youth.

[Wilfrid]

That, while absurd, he was by no means a nobody, has filtered through.

NYT

I like "puckish". More Caliban with a cigar, I'd have said.

What fun:

He also yodeled — often.

Wrong. He did it often enough, but it was a mock Tarzan call, not a yodel; unless we say, as we might, that Tarzan yodeled.

A broken mould.

[Wilfrid]

Bin Laden a Jimmy Savile fan?