The new Netflix documentary Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story which looks at the “evil within” the TV presenter and DJ has aired, and viewers are left wondering how anyone in the UK could have missed it.
Savile whose career spanned decades was able to commit horrific sexual offences throughout his career whilst keeping a positive image of himself in the media, and Netflix’s international audience is amazing that Brits didn’t spot anything.
One Netflix user wrote: “Watching this netflix thing abt jimmy savile and hey brits I deeply need to understand how you didn’t know this guy was a freak.” It has since been liked over 52k times with others seemingly agreeing with him.
One user agreed saying: “The biggest revelation of this Jimmy Savile thing on Netflix is that Brits have poor eyesight. They looked at this for years and then said ‘Wait, you mean THIS GUY is a pervert?!'”
It’s a valid question to ask when you look at archive footage, it’s hard to believe that no one ever clicked about what he was doing.
The director of the Netflix documentary, Rowan Deacon analysed over 700 hours of archive footage and believes he used the fact of ‘hiding in plain sight’ to hide his dark secrets.
She said: “I think in the 1960s and 1970s what’s most shocking is that his what we now describe as lascivious, creepy, assaulting behaviour on women, which is happening in front of the camera on broadcast footage, what’s shocking about that is not that he’s doing it, because we now know what we know, it’s that nobody blinks an eye, it’s completely normal.
“So I think that the social conditions at the time normalised that kind of behaviour. I don’t mean the things that we found out that he was also doing, but the sort of public lasciviousness and creepiness (that) was not judged as anything problematic.”
Deacon believes Savile’s tactics in the 1990s were to “double-bluff the audience” by “suggesting that he’s up to no go”.
“So it’s quite confusing and people end up thinking, ‘Well, he’s sort of saying it so it can’t be true.’
“And I think that kind of psychological game that goes on, it’s quite complex, that we can now look back at in the archive and we also asked our interviewees who were in the archives to look back at it themselves, which was kind of an interesting experience, really helps us to understand how this happened in a way that’s illuminating.”
Watch the trailer for the Netflix documentary here:
In October 2012, the Metropolitan Police Department initiated an investigation, and in January 2013, they announced that 450 persons had come forward. He is thought to have preyed on roughly 500 children as young as two years old.
Steve Coogan is due to star in the film BBC Drama The Reckoning, which is based on the events.
Read More: Steve Coogan Has Defended His Decision To Play Jimmy Savile In Upcoming BBC Drama
