Jimmy Savile Dodges Question When Asked About 'Playboy Life'

When you hear the name Jimmy Savile now, you immediately think of a wicked sex offender who perpetrated heinous crimes throughout his time on Earth.

But prior to his death in 2011, the DJ and TV presenter was much-loved; some even regarded him as a national treasure.

Despite spending his life in the spotlight, Savile's 'love life' remained something of a mystery, in large part due to his ability to manipulate and deceive.

This skillset is plain to see during an interview on Is This Your Life? back in 1995.

As interviewer Andrew Neil attempts to delve into whether Savile lives a 'playboy life', the paedophile used a range of techniques to dodge the subject - whipping out a banana, presumably in a bid to amuse the audience.

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"I mean, you know, a gentleman doesn't ever speak of ladies," he replied.

"Where've you come from? I don't know what your circles are, but my circles, ladies... you don't grass on 'em."

Asked why he's shied away from close relationships with women, he joked: "I'm happy to have a few close relationships tonight, if anybody's not spoken for.

"What you doing after the show ladies? A few close relationships, I'm all for it."

Clearly determined not to let Savile completely laugh off the subject, Neil probes further, with Savile dismissing his lack of a public love life as an unavoidable consequence of his lifestyle.

"I've never been in the same town more than about 48 hours at any one time," he said.

"It's just the lifestyle I've got, it's not my fault."

Neil then attempted get a straightforward answer about his love life, but Savile cut him off and skirted around the subject with another performative response.

"I fall in love every day of my life," he interjected.

"Every day of my life I fall in love. Two, three, four times a day I could get married immediately - except the lights change and you have to drive off because they're going the other way.

"Or the train pulls out the station and you're going, 'I want to marry you'."

And when Neil tried to raise the subject of sex, Savile once again reverted to type, playing to the crowd and feigning prudishness.

"You mentioned the 'S word'?!" he replied.

Watch how he dodged Neil's questions here:

Savile died in October 2011 aged 84, having never been brought to justice.

His crimes are back under the spotlight following the release of a new Netflix documentary examining how he managed to 'hide in plain sight' for decades.

Having analysed 700 hours of archive footage, Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story director Rowan Deacon concluded that Savile adapted his approach to 'hiding in plain sight' across the decades.

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 feels Savile's tactics changed by the 1990s, as by then she thinks he was seen as a 'creepy and strange figure', so he himself became the 'source of the rumours'.

"He's the one saying the creepy things and suggesting that he's up to no good, and I think he does a kind of double bluff with the audience," she said.

"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."