I spent seven years talking to Jimmy Savile – it was all a game for him, a twisted thrill

As Steve Coogan portrays the serial sex offender in ‘The Reckoning’, Dan Davies – whose book the BBC drama was partly based upon – reveals how the man he came to know uncomfortably well wore his ‘oddness’ as a badge of honour that allowed him to hide in plain sight as an abuser of ‘things, bodies and people’

Steve Coogan portrays Jimmy Savile in ‘The Reckoning’ (BBC/ITV/Matt Squire)

Of all the many places I interviewed Jimmy Savile, The Athenaeum Club in London was perhaps the most revealing. It was 2008 and I was researching a magazine story about the extraordinary influence he had and the connections he’d made and cultivated over the course of his 80-plus years.

The article for Esquire was the latest in a series of pieces that attempted to reveal what lay beyond the jewellery, the helmet of white hair and the billowing clouds of cigar smoke. During that time I stayed with him at his flats in Leeds and Scarborough. The former, a penthouse apartment overlooking Roundhay Park, was decorated with mementos from his many different careers: mining, cycling, pop music, wrestling, radio, television and beyond. The latter, which he’d bought for his mother, Agnes, who he called “The Duchess”, was where he went to feel close to her.

It was Savile’s choice to meet at the grand Pall Mall home of the private members club once frequented by the likes of Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin and Winston Churchill. It was a fitting venue to emphasise how successfully and deeply he had penetrated the British establishment.