One interpretation is that Savile's inappropriate behaviour with youngsters had repeatedly raised eyebrows at the corporation, but no one ever saw fit to do anything about it because, in his heyday, he was just too big a star. This version of events has been rejected by BBC spokesmen. They say there is no record of complaints being registered, and cite "editorial reasons" for the recent shelving of a Newsnight investigation containing similar allegations to those about to be broadcast on ITV in Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile.
Back in the early 1990s, I had a good friend who was an investigative reporter with the Sun. She spent weeks following up reports of Savile's inappropriate behaviour with young girls; eventually, though, the paper's management told her that the material she had assembled would not be printed, "because it is not what the public wants to read".
Gambaccini seems to confirm this memory. Savile, he says, played the popular press "like a Stradivarius". If he got a hint that they were planning to publish abuse allegations about him, he would warn that, if the story appeared in print, his extraordinary fund-raising efforts would be brought to an end. And his charity work was considerable: he is estimated to have raised £40 million for good causes over his lifetime, notably by running a series of marathons (his last was in 2005 at the age of 79). The National Spinal Injuries Centre at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, Broadmoor Hospital and his home-town Leeds General Infirmary and University of Leeds were among recipients of his largesse.
Such efforts won him universal applause, but he was always a little too eccentric to merit the tag "national treasure". Something about him, if we're honest, made us slightly wary. In a 2000 BBC documentary, for instance, Louis Theroux took us inside Savile's Scarborough home and the wardrobe where he lovingly preserved all of his mother's dresses. In a filmed conversation, Theroux touched on the question marks about his behaviour and obtained what appears to be Savile's only public reply to the allegations.
"The rumours were well known, even then," recalls Theroux today, "but he did say something about it being a case of when you are a 'single fella' in the public eye, people would make malicious assumptions about you. And I remember he told me that his way of dealing with that was to say he didn't even like children, which is perhaps more significant with hindsight than it felt at the time. But that was his line, how he dealt with it. And without credible evidence, that was as far as I could go."
And so Savile continued successfully to silence the whispers. The fact, for instance, that he was interviewed under caution in 2007 as part of an investigation by Surrey Police into abuse of young girls at Duncroft Approved School in Staines has only come to light this week.
Indeed his defiance may even have enhanced his reputation. Here was an elderly man, still exhausting himself raising money for good causes, being dogged by unsubstantiated and unpublished gossip. He could present himself, as he did to Theroux, as a victim. When he died in October last year, crowds queued up to process past his gold coffin at a wake held in a Scarborough hotel: a final act of eccentricity by this devout Catholic, or a last attempt to cover his tracks?
"There is still a lot of denial about child abuse," says Chris Cloke, head of child protection awareness at the NSPCC. "I have been working in the field for 20 years and, though progress has undoubtedly been made, there are still too many instances where children are not taken seriously when they reject the pressure not to tell and actually report abuse. And among other parties, who may have known about it, or suspected it, there is too often an attitude of not telling because they're not sure, or it is all rumour, or because - and this comes up often - they think someone else is dealing with it."
This may explain why so many people who knew Savile now seem unsurprised by the charges made in the documentary presented by former detective Mark Williams-Thomas. Challenged as to why they are only speaking up now, after the star's death and when he can't sue for libel, one of his alleged victims replies that she felt no one would believe her, given his reputation with the public. As Esther Rantzen comments: "We made him into the Jimmy Savile who was untouchable".
The programme will, at least, put an end to that. Those who were aware of Savile's penchant for young girls, however, quote in mitigation the context in which his activities took place. His peak as a DJ coincided with a time when he and his fellow Radio 1 presenters were treated by fans as pop royalty, on a par with their favourite bands.
"I can't comment on the charges made against Savile," says Simon Gar
field, author of The Nation's Favourite: The True Adventures of Radio 1, "but it is certainly true to say that in the 1970s and 1980s, DJs on the station were mobbed wherever they went. Once they got to present Top of the Pops as well, it happened more. There were as many groupies throwing themselves at them as there were for the pop stars."
Some of Savile's colleagues exploited their seat on a station with 20 million young, impressionable listeners. Chris Denning, one of the launch team in 1967, was convicted of gross indecency in 1974, the first of a string of convictions here and in Eastern Europe for abuse of young boys.
There were some rudimentary safeguards in place: you had to be 18 to get into the studio for Top of the Pops. Yet compared to today's standard procedures, this was another age. Cloke believes that much has changed for the better. "We have, hopefully, got past the old stereotypes of what a child abuser looked like - a man in a dirty raincoat. But assumptions still are made about being able to spot abusers. Most people, for instance, think they will be strangers, whereas abuse often happens within families, or with individuals in positions of trust."
The current storm around the allegations against Savile, however they are resolved, will, Cloke feels, make a contribution if it leads to all of us taking more seriously allegations made by children. "What we need to be very clear about is that there is never, ever any excuse for child abuse. Every time that we introduce the idea that there are excuses as to why an abuser acted as they did, we deter other children who are suffering abuse from speaking up."
