Celebrity Big Brother winner Jim Davidson worked with Jimmy Savile for years – but reflecting on their time at the BBC together, he had a chilling realisation. Jim admitted that he used to “run away” from Savile while on set; in an interview with Heretics podcast host Andrew Gold, the chilling realisation came that he didn’t run because Savile was threatening, but because he was “boring”.
Jim was asked on the show: “Were you at the BBC when Savile was roaming about? What was he like?” and explained: “We used to run off. We used to hear him, ‘Now then, now then’ and you’d go, ‘F*** me, it’s Savile’. You didn’t think, ‘Oh, he’s going to grab my bum or s*** my granddaughter’, you just… he was boring.”
On the podcast last year, Jim also explained what happened when he was accused of visiting sex offender Gary Glitter in prison. He explained: “I was involved with another charity, Care After Combat. The idea was we’d help veterans and soldiers who were in danger of entering the criminal justice system.
“If you do the crime, you do the time. We used to go and see them in prison, find out how they were all doing, and get them a mentor to pal them up. When they come out, the mentor stays with them for three years.
“So I went to HMP The Verne, which is a sex offenders clinic. Now this is different – you don’t give these guys mentors. These were veterans that were on the sex offenders [registry].
“So we’d say to about 30 guys, ‘We don’t quite know what to do. Give us your story – you’re going to come out of here one day…’ It was that kind of thing, to work out how to stop reoffending.
“[There’s a] knock at the door, there’s a Paul Gadd outside wants to come in. I go and look and there he is, Gary Glitter!
“He took his bobble hat off to a bald head, as if it makes any difference, and said, ‘Jim! It’s me, Gary!’ I said, ‘Oh, hello’. He said, ‘Can I come in?’ And I said, ‘No, this is for veterans!’
“He did my TV show loads of times. I didn’t go out with him, he wasn’t a pal. So that was it, that was me banning Gary Glitter.”
