#savileweek: the icon of unpopular populism

OK, you asked for #savileweek and here it is. I’m determined to write him out of my head anyway. So, I read In Plain Sight: The Life and Lies of Jimmy Savile, Dan Davies’ critical biography of Jimmy Savile. Before going any further that’s not our Dan, but rather a journalist who felt he was creepy as a lad in the 1970s and, as a teenager, started pulling together what he termed a dossier.

Here’s a case study drawn from the book. Not long after Gordon Brown became prime minister, the surviving Bevin Boys were invited to No.10 Downing Street as an act of national recognition.

In case you don’t know, during 1944 the UK basically ran out of labour. It was no accident that the pinch was felt down the mines and on the land, the two manual jobs that were physically the hardest and that offered the least future prospects. The economy still ran on rails back then. Coal was king. So the personnel chief of the war economy, Ernest Bevin, decided to order a chunk of the conscription class of 1944 out of the army and into mining. That wasn’t even the weirdest thing happening at the time – for example, the railways were trying to recruit young men out of the RAF pilot training pipeline to be engine drivers. The high-level view is that fixing radars or even looking after Bren carriers with one hand and the other on your rifle had a future, but going down the pit or staying on the farm didn’t. (It’s telling Savile found two random guys in two Leeds suburbs who’d independently worked out how to build a pair of decks and an amplifier, as early as 1944 in one version. Skills and empowerment were being driven through society.) The social status of labour was being fundamentally transformed, but it wasn’t transformed enough yet that the miners would be a labour aristocracy like they were in the postwar era.

When the Bevin Boys came to No.10, Jimmy Savile also showed up. Savile claimed all his life to have been one of them, but per Davies, their association has never accepted that he was. In fact, their secretary at the time alleged to Davies that Savile was a walt, a civilian version of those guys who show up at Armistice Day parades with other people’s medals hanging wrong. This is plausible; Savile, among everything else, was a prize bullshitter, and his story changed a lot.

Davies found at least one witness who places him working underground at his first pit, but beyond that it all goes hazy. He certainly seems to have been in a pit accident, but how bad his injuries really were is questionable – he was in the habit of using two sticks at some of his DJ gigs but he was also a professional cyclist at the same time. At one point he seems to have had another job. Davies speculates that he was using two identities. He may have been malingering, or perhaps the sticks were part of his act, or perhaps he was trying to dodge conscription into the army for real, or maybe he felt the need for an identity card to show the cops, and the extra rations would have been handy. The first gigs move about, too, between 1947 at the latest, when he officially got out from underground, and 1944 at the earliest, before it was ever a possibility, but when he might well have been worried about going to the war. In essence, he was a classic 40s spiv.

Not surprisingly, the Bevin Boys didn’t invite Savile to Downing Street and were not best pleased when he showed up. So who invited him? Well, a nameless Downing Street press officer, who told the secretary that he did it for the sake of the publicity. The press officer is not named, but I think I know which close PR adviser to Gordon Brown with a taste for a scrap and a massive tin ear for basically everything fits the timing and description.

We can pick a couple of important themes out of this. The first one is that, as through Savile’s career from the mid-60s onwards, powerful people saw him as being popular with the public. The second is that the public most involved didn’t ask for him – instead, the powerful imposed him, and his presence in the media they ultimately controlled convinced them further that his popularity was inherent in him rather than being something they had created. The third is that the powerful asked him for something very specific, authenticity. The irony of asking a man as fake as Savile for authenticity rather strengthens the point.

Brown’s not very anonymous PR man was putting on an event that would communicate both the Brown government’s continuity with both Labour history and labour history, and its continuity with the patriotic memory of the Second World War. It is roughly true that northern working-class culture is a shorthand for the authentic in the British media. Savile’s Yorkshireness and working-class status were the only things about him he didn’t need to fake. Politicians constantly wanted to press that button, because he didn’t require anything in return but acceptance. In that sense, he was useful indeed in the political class’s adaptation to a post-1944 society.

Savile launched his career into this society, in the context of the media that already existed pre-war. Having decided to be famous, while shivering in his mum’s attic in the hellish winter of 1947 – who wouldn’t? – he had a crack at professional cycling, at the movies, the dancehall, and wrestling. Each one fit in the social context.

Cycling? Yeah. Here’s one of Keighley’s most prominent buildings. It’s cut in the stone roses on that thing.

But almost as soon as he had mastered this environment, another wave of disruption came roaring towards him. TV, football, and rock’n’roll were going to replace the movies, the wheelmen, and the ballroom. He had to deal with it somehow, and the role he hit on was crucial. Already too old for the new culture, he became a middleman between it and the older one. New cultures always need to co-opt part of the older because the older has the money. Money was critical; Davies makes the interesting point that Savile’s pop music columns always talked about cash, rather than record sales. Of course, he became a DJ from being a manager rather than being a musician.

The obvious comparison is Colonel Parker, another spiv who linked the shock of the new with the old money and stuck to much of it in the process. Mecca, Rank, the movies, and the northern club circuit, all of them had to adapt to the future and here was yer man to help out with the process.

That was his escape from time – already when he first appeared on Top of the Pops, people were picking him as a very unconvincing representative of the teenage world, a phrase he used as late as the 1980s. The musicians, especially, spotted it quick. But that was only the beginning; having made his escape he secured it with his transition towards a general purpose TV personality and an increasingly political role. TV both expanded him and insulated him; on prerecorded TV, as it always was, they can’t jeer, or if they do it gets edited out. It was also the moment when his public was no longer old enough to be out in Manchester of a Friday night, but rather planted in front of the telly.

Around about this time, he also swung over from Granada in Manchester to the BBC in London, and began his involvement with Leeds General Hospital. Now this is politically interesting. I didn’t know, before reading Davies, that Savile’s volunteering began as part of the “I’m Backing Britain” campaign, launched by a group of people in Surrey who volunteered to work unpaid extra hours to fight that bloody ‘Arold Wilson, as my other granddad called him. The setting that enabled the great bulk of his offending behaviour was one literally created by the post-60s swing to the union-bashing hard right, when the transformation of society that began in the crisis of 1944 began to hit new resistance.

This would require the sustained projection of a new sort of public; rather than offering policies that were popular, politicians would define the popular to suit. Jimmy Savile was the founding icon of this unpopular populism. He was also, I think, the first or one of the first genuinely postmodern celebrities, something I’m going to tackle in another post.