Savile - The Beast: The Inside Story of the Greatest Scandal in TV History. John McShane
the televised New Musical Express awards, but it was TOTP that was the real breakthrough. If other programmes were later to consolidate Savile’s position in the light entertainment world, it was TOTP which projected him into stardom.
One newspaper preview of the show proclaimed:
Teenagers get a new pop music show tonight – the BBC’s Top of the Pops (6.35). It is the Corporation’s answer to ITV’s Ready, Steady, Go! screened on Friday evenings.
The BBC series will come from the Manchester studios, and a team of four disc jockeys have been booked as weekly hosts. First to face the camera will be Jimmy Savile, followed by Alan Freeman, David Jacobs and Pete Murray.
For the first time, the BBC are letting the performers mime their recordings – as they have done on ITV. ‘We want viewers to hear the original discs’, explains producer Johnnie Stewart.
‘All the discs will be from the current hit parade and our audience will hear the exact sound that won its popularity. Some of the artists will be booked at the very last moment, for our aim is to be as topical as the “Top Twenty” itself.’
For tonight’s show, four acts are already taped on film. These include The Beatles.
‘It’s Number One – It’s Top of the Pops’ was the announcement at the start of every show, a programme that was on screen for nearly half a century and, during its glory years, helped shape the face of British popular music.
A review the next day in the Daily Mirror noted:
A new BBC beat show, Top of the Pops, was born – or, rather, prefabricated last night. Disc-jockey Jimmy Savile was in charge wearing a shining blond hairstyle.
He is the first of four jockeys to carry the show throughout the year, into the hearts of teenagers. Well, it couldn’t be their minds.
The songs were the best in the current hit parade, mimed from records to a bunch of serious-looking youngsters. I agree with the BBC’s policy that the record itself should be heard, and not an on-the-spot ‘live’ version.
All artistes can’t appear in the studio at the drop of a Beatle wig, but those who can’t are going to suffer. There is no doubt that the ones who did turn up made the biggest impact.
That first transmission was on New Year’s Day 1964 from BBC-owned premises: Studio A, a converted Wesleyan Church on Dickenson Road in the Rusholme district of Manchester. The show was to be on the nation’s screens, although from different venues, for a staggering 42 years. In the 1970s 15 million people a week watched it and – in a pre-pop video age – it made household names of the acts who appeared regularly performing to the hits of the day if the band or singer concerned was not available. Many of them became better known than the artists TOTP was allegedly showcasing; the dance troupes Legs and Co and Pan’s People, for example, but above all the DJs. None more so than the man who became synonymous with the programme; Jimmy Savile.
He and Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman presented the first show early in the evening of Wednesday 1 January, which featured The Rolling Stones with ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, Dusty Springfield’s ‘I Only Want to be With You’, ‘Glad All Over’ by the Dave Clark Five and several other classics from the period – The Hollies’ ‘Stay’, The Swinging Blue Jeans’ ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’ – and then finished with the hit parade top number of the week (a format used throughout the show’s long history) which that week was The Beatles’ classic ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’.
There was a ‘disc girl’ presenter too, theoretically there to help play the records, and a quartet of DJs on a ‘rota’: Savile, Freeman, Pete Murray and David Jacobs.
All of them had their distinctive styles. Aussie Freeman had learnt his trade Down Under and then at Radio Luxembourg. He presented Pick of the Pops on BBC radio which told listeners of the latest movements in the Top Twenty and his quick-fire delivery and catchphrases such as ‘Greetings, pop pickers’, ‘Greetings, music lovers’, ‘Alright? Stay bright!’ and ‘Not ’arf!’ were later to be parodied affectionately by the comedy duo of Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse in their ‘Smashey and Nicey’ sketches. Despite the jokes about his ebullient manner, he was universally praised for his professionalism and delivery and in years to come became widely regarded as being one of the most innovative of DJs. When he was presented with a Sony Award in 2000, six years before his death, he was described as ‘a man who has served, and is held in the highest affection by, quite literally every sector of our industry.’
Murray, another Luxembourg presenter, was an urbane, public school-educated former actor who’d presented one of the earliest pop shows, the skiffle-orientated Six Five Special, while Jacobs had been an announcer on the BBC, played many parts in the radio adventure series Journey Into Space and become nationally known for hosting Juke Box Jury on television.
All four were born in the mid-1920s, so were approaching their fortieth birthdays when the show was first aired – something inconceivable for any popular music programme nowadays – but it was Savile who stood out. It wasn’t that in any way he was more professional than his co-hosts, simply that whereas they wore their ages well and dressed and groomed themselves accordingly, Savile, in his 38th year, appeared to have come straight from a school pantomime costume fitting.
He made sure he attracted all the attention he could when he presented the programme. Once he wore a Roman legionnaire’s outfit, another time a suit adorned with real bananas. His hats had lights on them, he wore a kaftan before anyone else in the music business and his hair was longer than many of the acts, male or female, that he introduced. In slight contradiction to his madcap appearance, his presentation of the artists was, verbally, quite straightforward, deliberately devoid of gimmicks or jokes.
For years he appeared on the show, smiling, clowning, using his catchphrases ad infinitum, in front of massive audiences. What could be more harmless; a sanitised presentation of the world of pop music for youngsters to eagerly watch and for their sometimes bewildered parents to turn a blind eye to. The studios were crammed with young people vying to be on camera around their idols and at every link they could be seen crowding around the presenters, creating an impression of innocent semi-mayhem. The truth was far from innocent. Throughout his years on the programme Savile used it as one of the bases for his lust.
In the same way that the dance halls of the North had been his hunting ground, so the world of television provided him with fresh fields to conquer. There had been no one to stop him in those dark provincial evenings where he ruled with a mixture of charisma and threat and who was going to stop him now in the heady world of the BBC and the hit parade? It was all too easy.
We will be examining in detail later his behaviour on and, especially, off-screen during those Top of the Pops years, up to – incredible as it might seem – the last TOTP show ever broadcast. In 1964 he’d said ‘Welcome to the very first Top of the Pops’ and in July 2006, wearing a shiny gold track suit and taking centre stage with presenters from over the years lined up either side of him he announced, ‘And welcome to the very last Top of the Pops’.
The BBC noted on its news website on July 26, 2006:
Recording has ended for the final edition of Top of the Pops at BBC Television Centre in London. Just fewer than 200 members of the public were in the audience for the programme, co-hosted by veteran disc jockey Sir Jimmy Savile, its very first presenter. Janice Long also returned to record links for the show’s swansong, alongside Tony Blackburn and Mike Read. But no live bands took part in the programme, which will instead feature celebrity tributes and archive footage.
The programme will be shown on Sunday, 30 July. Classic performances from the Spice Girls, Wham, Madonna, Beyoncé Knowles and Robbie Williams will feature in the show alongside the Rolling Stones – the very first band to appear on Top of the Pops. As is customary, it will conclude with this week’s number one single.
Speaking on BBC Breakfast, Sir Jimmy, 79, said it was ‘terrific’ to be hosting