Netflix Viewers Have One Question For Brits After Watching Jimmy Savile Documentary

A new Netflix documentary about Jimmy Savile has left viewers with one burning question for Brits. Watch the trailer here:

Jimmy Savile: A British Horror Story explores how the British DJ and TV presenter managed to continually carry out horrific sex offences, all while remaining in the public eye.

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

Now the paedophile's heinous crimes are being exposed to an international audience on the streaming platform, and viewers – quite reasonably – do not understand how Brits couldn't see that something wasn't right about the posthumously-disgraced national treasure.

In a tweet that has been liked more than 32,000 times, one viewer 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."

Another added: "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?!'"

A third wrote: "The new Jimmy Savile documentary on #Netflix is actually unbelievable. Every single thing he said was practically an admission of guilt, and everyone just laughed."

The question of how he got away with it is, of course, a valid one, and many colleagues, journalists and fans have spent a decade trying to come to terms with how they didn't cotton on to his criminality.

Rowan Deacon, the director of the two-part documentary, analysed more than 700 hours of archive footage of the predator and concluded that he 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."

Featured Image Credit: Alamy

Topics: Crime, Netflix, TV and Film, Jimmy Savile

Jake Massey

Jake Massey is a journalist at LADbible. He graduated from Newcastle University, where he learnt a bit about media and a lot about living without heating. After spending a few years in Australia and New Zealand, Jake secured a role at an obscure radio station in Norwich, inadvertently becoming a real-life Alan Partridge in the process. From there, Jake became a reporter at the Eastern Daily Press. Jake enjoys playing football, listening to music and writing about himself in the third person.

@jakesmassey