How's About That, Then? - Jimmy Savile:A British Horror Story.

"I'm feared in every girls' school in this country" - Jimmy Savile

"You squeeze them and make them go 'ouch'" - Jimmy Savile

"We tend to leave very quickly when we've stayed overnight" - Jimmy Savile

You can't say the clues weren't there right from the start. Savile, as we all know by now, was a predatory paedophile who was 'hiding in plain sight'. When he referred to girls and women as "it", when he joked about getting "fifteen years in nick" if he risked including certain anecdotes in his book, and when he, regularly, resorted to his catchphrase "my case comes up next Thursday", as well as countless other comments across a half century career of abuse and rape, interviewers mostly laughed either at or with him.

We see many of them in Netflix's Jimmy Savile:A British Horror Story. Michael Parkinson, Frank Bough, Anne Diamond, Melvyn Bragg, Richard Whiteley, and Russell Harty. Sometimes they cringe at Savile's comments and behaviour but mostly they laugh. Very very rarely is it questioned and when it is either Savile turns nasty or the establishment closes ranks around him.

Because Jimmy Savile, despite appearing to be some huge cultural outlier, was very much an establishment figure. We see kind words dispensed towards him from the likes of Lulu and Frank Muir but even more so from Prince Charles and Diana. Charles even going so far as to regularly solicit advice from Savile, suggesting his choice in friends was just as bad as his brother's. Who, as an aside, is seen at the time of the Lockerbie plane crash making a very crass and insensitive remark.

More than anyone though, it was Margaret Thatcher who admired and endorsed Savile. She was utterly determined he should receive a knighthood and, in the last year of her premiership, he did. At the time me and my friend Adam regularly joked about him being a paedophile. As did many others - Gerry Sadowitz's routine was both hilarious and, in retrospect, incredibly accurate.

We joked about it. We knew, as did almost everyone else, the rumours. People had heard clips of John Lydon saying he'd like to kill Savile for what he's done (in an interview that, depressingly, was never aired precisely because of those words). With another friend, Cheryl, we made up a story that the chair he sat in while presenting Jim'll Fix It was hollow, that the legs we saw were false legs, and that, in reality, he was actually stood up masturbating while talking to children. That's why he made that weird "ayayaya" noise - he was ejaculating - and why he always lit up a post-wank cigar.

We all thought Jimmy Savile had all the makings of a paedophile but none of us had any proof. That's what they mean by 'hiding in plain sight' and Savile was nothing if not visible. He was unavoidable during my youth. Raising money for charity by running marathon races, driving a gold Rolls-Royce, forever gurning and chomping on cigars, wrestling, dressing eccentrically, winning awards for DJing, and, later, appearing on Celebrity Big Brother with Michael Barrymore and George Galloway.

Three more ghastly individuals in the same room would be hard to find. Savile presented both the first (1964) and the last ever (2006) Top of the Pops, he introduced The Rolling Stones, larked around with The Beatles, and posed for photographs with Elvis Presley. He even met the Pope. Jim'll Fix It, a show I'd sit and watch each week with my family, topped the TV ratings with over twenty million viewers per show.

For younger readers who've never seen Jim'll Fix It (for some reason it's not repeated very often) the premise of the show was that you wrote to Jimmy Savile and he fixed it for your dreams to come true. No matter how extravagant. No matter how mundane.

He fixed it for kids to meet Captain Kirk from Star Trek, to fly like Peter Pan, to drive motorbikes through hoops of fire, to dance with Kylie Minogue, to drive James Bond's car, and to become an Indian princess and wear a sari (!). He even fixed it for a duck that couldn't fly to go on an aeroplane.

Jimmy Savile, despite his eccentricities, was seen as a man of the people - so he was allowed to be near the people. Be they adults or children, alive or dead. He worked two days a week as a porter at Leeds General Infirmary, he worked as an ambulance man (one former colleague recalls him cheerfully volunteering to retrieve a decapitated head), and he regularly visited Duncroft approved school near Staines where he'd take some of the girls out for a spin in his Rolls.

Drinks sometimes too. He even wrote the foreword in a book warning children about 'stranger danger'. Hiding in plain sight - again. Even when revelations about Savile's personal life came to light they were the sort of revelations that were useful to him, the sort of revelations that helped cover up his far more serious crimes.

The Sun said that, in the early days of his career, he had had people beaten up. That he was pretty much a gangster. This suited him. It acted as a distraction while at the same time causing people to be wary of upsetting him.

When it came to his personal life, he boasted about a series of 'conquests' but nobody ever saw any of these girls. Some suspected he was gay and either closeted or repressed. Others suspected he was a nonce, with a penchant for 'little girls'. Not long after his death in October 2011, we all found out who'd been right and that is what the second of the two episodes, a noticeably much less easy watch than the first, is all about.

They say you should never speak ill of the dead but I think it's fair to say in the case of Jimmy Savile, never punished or made accountable for his crimes in his lifetime, we can make an exception. Each of the talking heads do. Ian Hislop, Andrew Neil, Mark Lawson, Selina Scott, and Lynn Barber are all rolled out to share their thoughts and memories of the monster but so too are the likes of Jim'll Fix It producer Roger Ordish and Savile's biographer Alison Bellamy.

There are psychotherapists and the man who directed Savile's funeral, almost a state event, as well as, more importantly, some of the people who finally exposed him like the investigative journalist Meirion Jones. Most importantly of all, some of Savile's victims, silenced or ignored for so many years, were given plenty of air time.

It is their testimony that is most harrowing. They told how this man who raised millions of pounds for a spinal unit at Stoke Mandeville, and seemingly even saw the good in those incarcerated at Broadmoor, manipulated them (as he manipulated everyone), groomed them, abused them, and raped them. How he created a climate of fear, and guilt, in his huge network of victims.

Some of his victims have since taken their own lives. No doubt many more still have not come forward. One who did spoke of putting a Tampax up her bum before meeting him to make it more difficult for him to anally rape her. Some victims were as young as eleven. There are stories of Savile molesting brain damaged little girls, and severely crippled young boys, in the back of ambulances.

The mind boggles at the scale of the abuse but fifty years is a long time for an abuser to be at large and nobody was stopping him. He certainly wasn't stopping himself. Savile, people who knew him report, never showed any emotion - except for when his mum, who he called the Duchess, died. He spent five days alone with her corpse which is odd for anyone but downright creepy when you consider Savile has long been suspected of necrophilia.

The dead can't talk so we'll never be certain about that. "I don't allow myself the luxury of personal feelings", Savile once said. He grew up in an era of, to quote his mother in the film, "spare the rod and spoil the child" and, in a film that takes in his run ins with Louis Theroux and Ricky Gervais as well as digging up scenes where he met with David Icke, Wincey Willis, and Craig Charles and appeared as a guest on Michael Aspel's This Is Your Life, while passing through the era of popbitch and Friends Reunited, includes one terrifying piece of television where Savile chats to Gary Glitter.

A summit meeting of scumbags. A Catholic, Savile was desperate to go to heaven and it seems that the charity work, as Sadowitz had said decades before, was intended to offset his crimes. He even spoke of imagining St Paul weighing up his credits and debts at the Pearly Gates.

But some debts can never be repaid and Savile's debts to those whose innocence he stole, to those he raped, to those who killed themselves because they could not live with the shame and damage he had caused them are those kind of debts.

The damage was ,and for many still is, too severe. Anyway, Savile's idea of heaven would surely be a hell for anyone else. On Earth, he created a heaven for himself and a hell for his victims. The worst thing of all was that it was a preventable hell.

But the British establishment, British society, the government, royalty, the BBC, the church, the police, the public including me and my friends and our stupid jokes, chose not to prevent it. How's about that, then?