Original subtitles

How's the make up look?

Don't get me looking too flash.

Ha-ha! Love it, love it, love it.

I never thought I'd hold one week's disc jockey wages in me hand.

Jimmy Savile was the biggest star on British television.

My first impression was,

"Oh, my gosh, I'm standing here in front of Rolf Harris."

Stuart Hall was a hero to a lot of people.

He was a British icon.

He was loved by thousands and thousands of people in this country.

He was a smart, shrewd operator.

He knew how to play that character.

Jimmy had a very high tabloid profile,

but behind that was a very, very evil, sinister guy.

What he did to me was despicable.

Stu Hall said,

"I wondered when we were going to get to you."

He was a front person for an anti-child abuse video called

Kids Can Say No!

Well, I wanted to find out what makes yes feelings and no feelings

when you're touching or being touched.

It's very clear now that he was grooming me.

One of the things that she could remember was the pungent smell

of tobacco and alcohol when he got into the bed.

Do you have anything to say to your victims, Mr Harris?

I have no comment to make.

I'm innocent.

These were the self-made stars. Rich, famous.

They could do what they wanted, and they did.

It was the biggest shock when I picked up the papers and read

the rest of the story.

Britain in the 1960s and '70s was full of energy and change,

exploding with music, fashion, new fads and entertainment.

But behind the mop tops and promises of free love,

Britain was also still a country run largely by and for men...

Most people like to look at pretty girls.

In this case, well trained, pretty girls.

Away we go. Faster. The bunny must always be correct,

and ready to smile however tired she is.

..and the light entertainment business was no different.

Popular shows like The Golden Shot,

fronted by the charismatic Bob Monkhouse,

reflected society's attitudes at the time.

Philip, are you married? Yes. How long? Ten weeks.

Ten weeks! Yes. So you've been enjoying the power cut?

AUDIENCE LAUGHS

You could say that. What do you do for a living?

Well, I work for a firm that, um, do controls for conveyors.

For conveyor belts? Yes. And your bride?

She's a little belter too, I hope. Yes, she's lovely.

But change looked like it was on its way.

I think the '60s was when it began to happen, and had the excitement

of the new, and some amazing talent.

This was a cultural revolution of the highest order,

and television had to reflect that.

Stand by, everybody.

Television was fast becoming the most popular form

of entertainment in the country.

By the end of the decade, nearly all of British homes owned a TV.

The big shows of the day were pulling in massive audiences.

A successful Saturday night programme would regularly

have over 30 million people watching.

It was only a matter of what time you switched the telly on,

and sat down to watch it in the sitting room,

and everybody went. Grandma, grandpa, the kids,

the grandchildren, whatever.

Everybody watched,

and it was part of your daily routine,

part of your life.

Every day of the week. Switch on.

Half a minute to transmission.

As TV's popularity grew, its mainly male stars became national icons,

the cult of the television celebrity was born.

Celebrities at the time were godlike figures.

There's no doubt about that. There were so few of them.

But you're talking about the early days of TV.

It was magic.

If you were a talent,

whether you were a performer or a presenter,

you had to be on television,

and once you were on television, and if you were good and the public

liked you, you had enormous power.

It was very male-dominated, though.

If you had a superstar at the front, it would be a male personality

and the woman would always take second position,

and I guess that was an indictment of the time.

This combination of showbiz power and masculinity would dominate

the television landscape.

The most popular entertainers felt untouchable.

Celebrity status was something that enabled them.

Those celebrities were able to trade on that status.

They were given that status by their employers, the BBC,

or whoever it was, because those institutions use those celebrities.

Those celebrities liked being used, because it enabled them to not

just continue to climb the ladder, but also to do what they wanted.

Some of those men did behave that way, because they felt

they were invincible because of who they were.

And so people tended not to say anything at the time

if they had bad experiences, and those men hid behind that.

They were safe, because they were protected by their...

..reputation and their personality.

They hide in plain sight.

Television viewers became starstruck fans in awe of

these powerful celebrities.

In 1964, a legendary TV show was born.

The worlds of music and television collided

to create what would become an icon.

Yes, it's number one - it's Top Of The Pops!

Bill Cotton, who was the head of light entertainment at the BBC,

decided that television needed to reflect

the explosion of popular music,

and he invented this thing called Top Of The Pops.

Yes, it's number one - it's Top Of The Pops!

Every Thursday evening, pop stars at the top of the charts were

centre stage in the nation's living rooms.

At its peak, Top Of The Pops was watched by almost

20 million people.

The programme would go on to become the world's longest running music

show, remaining a firm fixture in the lives of the nation's

teenagers for over 40 years.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Top Of The Pops!

There was very little in the way of pop music on television,

so that was really the only thing we had, and we pored over it.

You know, we never did miss it.

Key to the show's success was the decision

to use Radio 1 DJs as presenters.

The man chosen to front the first episode would go

on to become its biggest star - Jimmy Savile.

And a welcome to this week's top DJ - Jimmy Savile.

Very good, very good, very good, very good.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, welcome indeed, to Top Of The Pops,

and how are you this evening?

Hope you're all feeling very, very fit and well, and if...

Jimmy Savile was someone who emerged from

the Mecca ballrooms from what was then a new scene.

Young people, teenagers coming down to dance halls,

enjoying the new music that was coming through.

The BBC was trying to recruit a new, young audience,

and the shortcut to that was to employ Jimmy Savile.

Savile seemed the perfect fit for the show,

but at the time, few stopped to think whether behind the scenes

his star power led to something darker and more dangerous.

You had a particularly toxic mix where you had the glamour

of television, the glamour of the pop industry,

and young people who wanted to be around that.

The programme revolutionised popular music, and the big stars

were idolised by their fans, none more so than Gary Glitter.

In 1973, a youthful Glitter appeared

on the Top Of The Pops Christmas special.

# D'you wanna be in my gang?

# I'm the leader, I'm the leader, I'm the leader of the gang I am! #

Oh, he was a British icon.

He was loved by thousands and thousands of people

in this country.

He had this persona - larger than life.

The platform shoes, the ridiculous hair,

the shiny costumes.

He literally seemed to love himself.

The audience were part of his show. They were the gang.

I mean, you know, "D'you wanna be in my gang?"

and the audience would go, "Yeah, we do", you know?

And he was the leader.

It was manic.

It was just absolutely manic.

Thousands of screaming fans.

Yeah, he was as big as what Elvis was in this country.

But like Savile,

Gary Glitter had two faces - the public and private.

Beneath the celebrity facade lay something altogether more sinister.

I think a lot of people hide behind different characters.

He was someone who was so famous and so popular

and selling so many records every week, on Top Of The Pops,

that how could he?

No-one would ever suspect Gary Glitter of being a paedophile,

and yet that is what he was.

Television was changing

and entertainers had a superstar power like never before.

One eccentric Australian performer was becoming a star

and also had hit singles on Top Of The Pops -

Rolf Harris.

I remember watching Rolf Harris in black and white TV

when I was growing up with his wobble board

and watching him paint.

# Rising up from Bennelong Point. #

I was a big fan of his. He was a very original talent.

The painting, the didgeridoo and...

You know, he was a breath of fresh air

because he hadn't come up through the British musical scene

and become an entertainer -

he had a few strings to his bow.

Well, it's the thrill of my life, really, to this moment.

It's a tremendous thrill.

The problem was being an Australian and being the first one in here

doing a light entertainment concert...

..was what to do, actually, the programme.

Don't put any powder on me, will you?

And don't get me looking too flesh.

As Harris became famous and his career developed,

rumours about his behaviour began to emerge.

He arrived in this country from Australia with lots of ambition

and no short measure of talent

but he used that fame, the celebrity,

and the love of the British public -

he took that and he abused it.

And then you've got Stuart Hall.

During the 1960s, Stuart Hall was making a reputation for himself

as a popular and charismatic newsreader

in the north west of England.

Oh, back now to Stuart.

Well, thank you very much.

I thought you were never going to stop.

WHISTLE BLOWS

And just a few years later, he would become a household name

as the presenter of popular family primetime game show It's A Knockout.

Here, fronting the show in his own trademark style.

SCREAMING

Oh, ooh! Oh!

She's on, she's got three.

Stuart Hall was a hero to a lot of people.

I mean, I grew up in the '70s and I used to watch It's A Knockout.

So, he was well-known, well-established,

regarded as a fun figure.

Although it was accepted that he was a womaniser at the time,

that was part of the culture -

swinging '60s, moving into the '70s.

He was friends with football managers,

with other celebrities

in this rarefied atmosphere of celebrity status

and that gave him the cover that he was later to exploit.

Stuart Hall, Rolf Harris, Gary Glitter and Jimmy Savile -

four superstars symbolising British entertainment in the '60s and '70s,

protected by a shield of fame and celebrity

where no-one questioned them.

They became powerful in a way that people did not want to interfere

with what they did, and they took advantage of that.

They knew what they were doing.

These were the self-made stars, rich, famous,

they could do what they wanted and I think they did

and society allowed them to.

The Britain we thought we knew had changed.

By the 1970s, the successful TV shows were fronted by men

held in high esteem no matter how they behaved.

I guess in the era that all these men emerged as superstars,

all you saw and all you understood was what you saw on television

or, if you were lucky, you got a ticket to his live show

or on stage,

so they grew more as celebrities in our minds,

and it was all very glowing.

That allowed them to get away with what they got away with for so long.

The big light entertainment stars could carry a show

and a series every year

and, of course, that made them part of the family, they were...

..they were part of the furniture.

You felt like they were your friends,

especially the general entertainment stars like Rolf Harris.

They were on your screens,

they were in lots of different programmes,

so they did feel very familiar

and their particular persona was very strong in your mind.

At the dawn of the 1970s, Rolf Harris was flying high.

After a number of successful singles,

he'd secured his first number one hit with Two Little Boys.

Rolf Harris was already a star,

Two Little Boys made him a superstar.

It really did project him into that superstardom,

not just in the UK and, of course, in Australia,

but in the US as well.

And Harris was about to become a household name

with his own TV programme on BBC One.

There's no question that Rolf was a star entertainer

and an original talent.

There was...there was nobody doing what Rolf could do.

It was very original and very brilliant and huge...

..hugely successful.

But behind the success lay another side to Harris.

A part of him he kept hidden for years.

I really, really, really liked Rolf.

It was the biggest shock when I picked up the papers

and read the rest of the story.

There were two masks that he wore -

the public entertainer face

and this sinister man with a sexual interest in young girls.

And he was quite obviously using the fame

and the kind of shock value that it would have,

that he would be around people and they would be in awe of him -

he was using that to abuse young girls.

He was a smart, shrewd operator

and he knew how to play that character.

As his popularity grew, Harris was frequently invited to appear

on other primetime TV shows.

My name is Karen Gardner.

In 1978, Rolf Harris assaulted me three times

at an event called Star Games in Cambridge.

Team number three in the 1978 Star Games final is

The Theatre Team...

Star Games pitted teams of celebrities against each other

in a series of sporting challenges.

Local schoolchildren were enrolled to help during the filming.

We were just taken off to a tent, briefed and told what we were doing,

and I was pointed at Rolf Harris

and told that I was going to be there to help carry his bags

and look after him and make sure he had everything he needed.

I was toiling round this hot field,

and Jesus Green in Cambridge is quite a big field,

and I was carrying this big kit bag and following Rolf Harris

and essentially, under cover of praising me,

he assaulted me.

It was the most extraordinary thing.

We were surrounded by people and yet they didn't see what he did.

It was in plain sight,

but no-one saw.

Despite being surrounded by crowds of people,

Rolf Harris allegedly indecently assaulted Karen.

Everything in my veins turned to concrete

and I saw it in his eyes,

it was like triumph,

and I absolutely knew that he'd done it on purpose

and that he had enjoyed doing it to me in front of all those people.

And then he did it again.

I thought, "I really don't want to be here now

and I don't know what to do,"

and I felt sick and everything slows down.

And within about 30 minutes of that, something else happened.

At the third time, he said...

I hate even saying it...

He said, "You're irresistible."

Even now, it makes me feel sick.

He did much worse things to other women,

I've always been clear about that, much worse things,

but I don't have any doubt if he'd had the opportunity,

he would have done worse things to me.

Karen kept the alleged assault private,

before giving evidence at Harris's trial.

At the same time, Jimmy Savile's star was also on the rise.

Top Of The Pops was attracting massive viewing figures

and had become must-watch TV.

Jimmy had a very high tabloid profile, you know?

He was a great publicity seeker with the cigar and the Rolls-Royce

and the ridiculous hair,

and that gave him a certain amount of influence.

But Savile was now using this influence to hide his criminal acts.

Savile was not a spotless character,

but it was known while he was alive that he was not whiter than white -

he'd come to the attention of the police way back in the 1960s.

There is a Met police file from 1964,

and he is listed in connection with a brothel in London

and, unfortunately, the trail goes dead.

Savile had worked hard to make himself untouchable.

Even in the early '60s, he knew which buttons to press.

He was universally feared,

and we know now that various journalists tried to do something

and their editors were terrified of the legal consequences

and that helped him get away with it.

Despite the growing rumours surrounding Savile

and a conspiracy of silence,

his career went from strength to strength.

Off the back of being a top Radio 1 DJ

and then Top Of The Pops,

he was suddenly given access to a whole new audience

in the mid '70s.

He was rebranded as a TV star

to appeal to a younger generation of kids -

seven, eight, nine, ten-year-olds.

It seems remarkable now, knowing all that we know about him,

but the BBC set him up in a vehicle

which made him the Santa Claus figure,

the kindly uncle figure, surrounded by kids.

And good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

Welcome indeed to Jim'll Fix It.

Jim'll Fix It began on the 31st of May 1975.

Young viewers would write into the show

and ask Savile to "fix it" for their wildest dreams

to come true.

"Dear Jim, please, can you fix it for me

"to drive a 125 high speed train?

"I'm six."

At its peak, the programme received almost 5,000 letters from viewers

every single day.

They had a huge audience, 20 million audience sometimes.

Unbelievable numbers of people watched it.

It was an audience participation show, essentially,

and it worked extremely well.

20-odd weeks a year, Jim'll Fix It, six o'clock Sunday night, job done.

It became THE Saturday night big show that everyone watched,

particularly people with young families,

young children,

and it said Jimmy Savile is the person you can trust.

As Jim'll Fix It took the ratings by storm,

by 1975, Gary Glitter had chalked up three number one hits.

He appealed to teenage girls who bought his records

and followed his every move.

When I first met him, I thought he was absolutely hilarious.

He was, like, completely over the top,

great personality, you know, great showman.

In the early '70s, his records were selling in millions

in this country.

I mean, he was in the charts all the time.

How's the make-up look? Perfect.

Yeah?

Oh, dear.

I keep forgetting a line of that song.

As Glitter's fame grew, so did his army of fans,

but the fame masked a familiar pattern of behaviour.

Throughout the 1970s, he would abuse his position of power,

culminating in an attack on a young girl in 1975.

She came into contact with him not through his celebrity

but through a friendship.

And it was as a result of that that she came to be staying

as a guest at his home where he then lived,

and one night, following some sort of party in his house,

he came upstairs to the bedroom where she was staying

and he got into her bed.

She was eight at the time.

He tried to rape her.

One of the things that she could remember was the pungent smell

of tobacco and alcohol when he got into the bed.

At that time, 1975 in the UK,

Gary Glitter was a wealthy, successful person

selling millions of records,

he was on Top Of The Pops.

This would have been a great excitement for the child

to be staying at a pop star's house.

And the end result was he attempted to rape a schoolgirl.

By the end of the 1970s,

Britain was undergoing a period of massive upheaval.

Her Majesty the Queen has asked me to form a new administration.

Strikes crippled the country and inflation skyrocketed.

So how much money are you earning? Nothing at all.

Television offered families an escape.

The age of the light entertainment superstar formats had truly arrived.

It's A Knockout, with its wacky games

and its affable uncle host,

was top of the ratings.

Not quite centre court, but its smash and volley for glory.

Stuart Hall was one of the big celebrities of the day.

There he was on television every week.

I was 25

and I was part of the Winchcombe It's A Knockout team

against Newbury and Cirencester.

The show was unlike anything else on TV.

Its mix of slapstick action and outlandish characters

entertained 19 million viewers a week.

You had three towns competing against each other

in all sorts of fete-style games

where you threw balls into baskets,

ran around in silly costumes

and, of course, it was a lot about the slapstick that occurred

and the fun that people had.

Stuart Hall was the star of the show,

and his iconic engaging style quickly made him a household name.

During filming, Mary Nortcliffe was invited to meet him.

So we stood there in a line

and Stuart Hall got to me, and he said,

"I wondered when we were going to get to you,"

and, do you know, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck

and I can still feel it now.

And then he went on, and that was done.

And then about 20 minutes later, he came back

and said, "Would you like to come and have lunch with me?"

You see, if it had happened now

and I'd told my friends,

they'd have said you should report him.

They would say that now.

What happened then?

They teased me and we laughed about it

because that was the culture.

That's the difference.

Stuart Hall's past was littered with allegations

of inappropriate behaviour.

A later report, published in the wake of his conviction,

claimed that "he loved women

"and that they gravitated towards him

"as a result of his showbiz persona."

Stuart Hall was a very valuable commodity,

and people made enormous allowances for his behaviour.

Police would eventually discover that Hall's abuse of young women

started in the late '60s.

In the years that followed,

his offending would reach new levels.

This is a man who abused one girl in the bath at a party,

an adult party, but she'd been sick

because some of the kids had got hold of some martini.

He supposedly was helping to bathe her,

but he abused her in the bath.

It just beggars belief.

Elsewhere in the BBC,

Top Of The Pops was still riding high,

cementing Jimmy Savile as a major star in the eyes of the nation.

Jimmy Savile was, certainly in the 1970s,

the UK's number one celebrity.

If you had a television set or the radio,

you could not but know who Jimmy Savile was.

Whether he was the voice over for British Rail's adverts,

The Age Of The Train...

So why not do what I do? Take the train!

..or whatever it was tuning into Top Of The Pops, there he was.

He was omnipresent.

As his status and power intensified,

Savile became more and more brazen in his actions,

even the presence of TV cameras failed to stop him.

I was a hairdresser at the time,

I got some tickets for Top Of The Pops.

I think I was about 17 - 16, 17.

There's a lot of cameras about, lots of cameras,

and you had to just mind all the wires and everything,

and they'd tell you where you go and stand.

Then the lights seemed to go down.

We saw Jimmy Savile and that come out with some men

with, like, these head things on,

and, all of a sudden, the man had come over and he said,

"Would you like to go and sit on the platform

"next to Jimmy Savile?"

I jumped at the chance.

I was excited like anything and I wanted to go -

I was going to be there and I was going to be on telly.

The Top Of The Pops cameras filmed Sylvia

standing next to Jimmy Savile,

surrounded by other young women.

Then, all of a sudden, he started putting his hand underneath me.

I tried to move but I couldn't go anywhere

because there was too many people around us

and the camera was right there.

But he wouldn't move his hand and I was getting embarrassed

because I just...

But you know when you're stuck, you can't move anywhere

because there was too many people around me and he just wouldn't stop.

I knew it was wrong

but what can you do when you're stuck?

When we was allowed to get down, I went and told the cameraman

and I said, "You know, it's disgusting,"

I said, "He put his hand up,"

and he went, "Oh, that's just Jimmy Savile.

"Just go away, just go away." I went, "No..."

He just told me to go away and told me to mind out the way -

he basically, virtually, pushed me away

cos he just went, "Oh, that's just Jimmy Savile"

and I nearly went flying and he goes, "Mind the wires."

More interested in the wires than he was of anything else.

And he just basically told me to get lost.

"That was Jimmy Savile," he said.

The investigation into Savile's offending following his death

uncovered 19 cases of sexual abuse

carried out during recordings of Top Of The Pops.

A former floor manager described the show as

"an extraordinary mixture of sleaze and innocence."

A later report found that the young audience were in "moral danger".

Away from the music charts,

family-friendly viewing continued to build.

It's A Knockout was, by now, such a successful format

that an international version was commissioned.

It propelled Stuart Hall to a new level of stardom

which brought new opportunities.

My name is Vanessa Walker.

I am 66 years old now.

I was assaulted by Stuart Hall when I was 26.

I want to do this interview because I'm terminally ill

and I'll never, ever have a voice again...

..to be able to express what I think about what he did to me

and what he did to others.

Vanessa travelled to Yugoslavia to watch the filming

of Stuart Hall's international It's A Knockout.

She stayed at a hotel with the cast and crew

and one morning was sunbathing on the terrace.

And that's when Stuart Hall appeared.

He started chatting.

He very quickly started to be too familiar

in my space,

overtly complimentary about how I looked.

He then started to insist that he applied suntan lotion

to my back,

and I absolutely refused and said no.

That's when he significantly sexually assaulted me.

I leapt off the end of the sunbed.

I was extremely angry.

He then became very remorseful and very apologetic.

So I go and he then followed me

and he followed me as far as my room.

And I got my key out to open the door

and I said, "Go away, just go away,"

and he wouldn't go away

and he tried to force his way in with his foot.

I slammed the door very hard on his foot.

He yelped, stood back.

I was able to shut the door.

He blasphemed outside of the door.

Eventually he went

and I recall sitting on the edge of the bed

just simply trembling with fear and anxiety

about what he might have done

and what might have happened.

At the time, the public suspected no wrongdoing

from these four family-friendly superstars.

1970s showbiz culture protected them.

Were they now so powerful they could do just what they wanted?

# My body, nobody's body but mine

# You run your own body

# Let me run mine... #

In 1985, Rolf Harris used his celebrity status

to front a charitable video about child abuse called Kids Can Say No.

It's that sort of touching I want to talk about today

because it helps you to understand the sort of touching

that doesn't make you feel too good.

It's enough to know that when anybody is giving you a no feeling,

you tell them to stop.

Although none of the children in the video were harmed by Harris,

he had already abused teenage girls.

He probably enjoyed hiding right in plain sight.

He is that predator,

he is that person that has been sexually violating

these young girls -

he was preaching to himself.

I mean, it was almost a confession.

Some people don't act right with kids and they need help.

Alongside Harris, Stuart Hall was also hiding in plain sight.

Having joined the BBC in 1959.

Hall was a popular and powerful figure.

Although it would take decades to surface,

Hall abused at least 21 victims whilst working for the BBC.

There was a real sense of self-importance,

a real sense of arrogance, a real sense of untouchability,

and that's, of course, part of the grooming process

because the victim thinks that this person IS important,

this person IS powerful.

He milked it for all it was worth.

It was later revealed that some members of staff were aware

of certain aspects of Hall's behaviour

but no formal complaints were made.

We didn't know until Dame Janet Smith's inquiry

into the BBC how much power he had.

It does beggar a belief that nobody knew what he was doing

until these cases were brought.

Using his celebrity power,

Hall was able to keep his sexual assaults hidden from the public...

..as did Gary Glitter, whose crimes included

the statutory rape of a 12-year-old girl, under modern law,

and the attempted rape of an eight-year-old.

But in the early 1990s,

television bestowed him with one of its greatest honours.

Your fans cut across all age groups and include Patricia Neal

and the late Roald Dahl.

You were introduced to them by their daughter and she is here.

Tessa Dahl! Tess!

Tessa, Tessa, Tessa!

APPLAUSE

This Is Your Life was an iconic British TV programme.

For famous people, it was the pinnacle.

Tessa, daughter of famous children's author Roald Dahl,

was one of Glitter's guests on the show.

Gary actually came to live in my house

when he was between jobs...

Between jobs, yeah, when I was absolutely broke!

She goes on to tell the story about her sister, Lucy,

who made quite a lucrative business

out of taking train loads of schoolgirls in school uniforms

to visit Gary Glitter at their house

and charging them £5 to gaze at Glitter.

She used to pack the train full of her adolescent school friends

in school uniforms and they'd skive school

and she'd bring them up to the house

and charge them £5 a head to come and gaze at Glitter.

LAUGHTER

And the house actually turned into a sort of

Gary Glitter fan club outpost, which you quite liked.

No-one would have noticed it watching at the time on TV,

but he flicks his finger to his lips for a nanosecond.

Close friends the Dahls were unaware of any criminal activity.

Glitter hid his secret life from all those around him...

..as did Rolf Harris.

After he allegedly sexually assaulted

make-up artist Suzi Dent in a dressing room,

Harris's behaviour was said to have continued on set.

Each time I had to blot the sweat off his face,

he would touch me.

And each time he was putting his hand up the leg of my shorts,

he was feeling, trying to find my knickers.

I was really powerless.

There was nothing sly about it.

We were standing in the middle of the room.

He knew that he was the star,

he took full advantage of his position

and had a great time with me whilst he was doing it.

And if I triggered him to walk off set,

who knows what would have happened?

I know that my career would have been over, for sure.

Suzi decided not to report Harris's actions until filming had finished.

But the management took no action.

What I saw when I looked into his eyes

was a man who used his power and his fame

to do whatever he wanted to.

And that's a little bit scary.

From a coal miner to a disc jockey,

he became one of the country's most popular celebrities.

Now the man known for his tireless work with the handicapped,

including £10 million raised in marathons,

is to become Sir James Savile.

In 1990, Jimmy Savile received

the ultimate establishment accolade and endorsement.

I will have to wear much cleaner tracksuits now

and probably press them.

Normally, I press my tracksuits by sleeping in them.

It seemed he could do no wrong.

But a later inquiry revealed

during 23 years at Stoke Mandeville Hospital,

Savile abused at least 60 people,

including patients, visitors and volunteers.

The youngest was eight years old.

Victims generally are reluctant to come forward.

They blame themselves

for not having the physical ability to fend the offender off.

Also, fear of what might happen if I do complain.

They need that reassurance, they need that knowledge

that they are going to be looked after,

that they're going to be believed.

Savile continue to exploit his positions of trust,

his attacks becoming even more distressing.

One of his victims at Stoke Mandeville was Pauline,

who was paralysed from the waist down.

We feel they might like a nice holiday.

Pauline didn't tell anyone about her abuse for 26 years.

Jimmy Savile kept the authorities at bay for over 50 years.

He was never arrested for his crimes during his lifetime.

But the police were about to catch up with Gary Glitter.

His notoriety,

so far as his sexual interest in children is concerned,

first became public knowledge in 1997,

when he took a laptop of his into PC World in Bristol for repair,

and the technician who looked at it

discovered images of

a very grave and serious kind.

Over 4,000 images of child sexual abuse

were stored on Glitter's hard drive.

Unaware of the technician's discovery,

the singer went back to collect the laptop a week later.

The police were alerted as to what had been found,

and when he arrived back at the store to pick up his laptop,

they were waiting for him.

Glitter - real name Paul Gadd -

was sentenced to four months in prison

for possessing indecent images of children.

He was released after two.

I deeply...regret

doing what I was sent to prison for.

I've served my time.

Gary Glitter's reputation was in tatters,

but he was still trying to pull the wool over the public's eyes.

More offences from the past were yet to come to light.

I want to put it all behind me.

And live my life.

After leaving prison in January 2000

for possessing over 4,000 images indecent images of children,

Gary Glitter fled the UK.

His whereabouts were largely unknown

until he was arrested in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, in 2005,

accused of raping two girls under the age of 12.

He flees the UK, he moves to the Far East,

the new life for him,

and, unfortunately, it was a life

that continued the abuse of young children sexually.

In Vietnam, the punishment for the crimes

was death by firing squad.

The rape charges were dropped,

but Glitter still faced charges of serious sexual misconduct.

He paid off the victim's families.

The rape charges, which would have carried a death penalty,

they vanished.

The judge described him as abnormal and sick

and said he needed help.

A translator told him his sentence.

You are sentenced to three years' imprisonment.

Glitter was sentenced to three years in a Vietnamese prison

for committing obscene acts against two young girls.

Are you sorry for what you've done?

I haven't done anything. I'm innocent.

Three courts have found you guilty, is it time you got help?

Time I got help? For what? I didn't do anything!

Three courts have found you guilty of being a paedophile.

BLEEP!

Although the extent of his crimes in the '70s and '80s was still unknown,

Glitter was ruined.

His reputation is in complete tatters,

and Gary Glitter's name is synonymous with crime,

and shameful crime.

As Britain entered a new millennium,

Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris and Stuart Hall

were hiding decades of abuse,

yet were still revered and in demand.

Harris had become the star of award-winning show Animal Hospital,

a series that ran for ten years on BBC One

before moving to Channel 5.

G'day and welcome back to Animal Hospital.

To his colleagues, Harris appeared whiter than white.

My only memory of Rolf was that he was an absolute gentleman.

He was really sweet.

He was lovely, charming.

I am bothered that I didn't see anything different,

anything unusual - anything that would have given me a clue to...

"You're not a nice character,"

you know, "Your motives are different."

He was a colleague, he was a popular character,

but he clearly had a very different side to him.

He really was hiding in plain sight.

One, two, three, hup!

In 2005, Rolf Harris was given the honour

of painting the Queen for her 80th birthday.

Harris did the portrait of the Queen,

and one critic said, "He's clearly a really nice bloke,"

and I blush to say that,

cos that TV critic was me, I wrote those words,

and in a few years' time he was exposed.

When he painted the Queen, he said he was an insomniac,

and we thought he was worried about the painting of the Queen.

Maybe he was worried about some other stuff.

Really worried.

And in 2012, Stuart Hall was awarded the OBE at Buckingham Palace

for services to broadcasting and charity.

Anybody, in any walk of life, the greatest accolade

is somebody to say, "Well done, thank you very much."

We don't hear it a lot,

so I'm grateful.

Listen to the clocks, even the clocks are saying well done!

Ha-ha, love it, love it, love it!

A lot of current broadcasters would perhaps say

that they were encouraged to go into broadcasting

by watching what he was able to achieve.

He'd been given an OBE by Her Majesty the Queen.

That meant that he had some power.

Nobody, seemingly, suspected him of involvement in any criminality.

To the public, Stuart Hall, Rolf Harris and Jimmy Savile

were still celebrated icons,

but rumours of their behaviour were finally circulating.

I kept finding stories or rumours,

but when you questioned them, it never really went anywhere.

Kept an eye out to see if there was anything on Savile.

Rolf Harris had a reputation for being a groper.

There were hints that something was up.

Questions were being asked.

How much longer would these national treasures

be able to keep up the pretence?

A friend suggested we go out to a jazz bar

and just have a night off.

I went out with them,

and one of them turned around to me and said,

"There's something I have to tell you about Rolf Harris."

About Rolf Harris and his daughter's friend.

I'd never heard a suggestion that he had abused an underage girl.

And the actual details of that story are horrible,

absolutely horrible.

Although in the twilight of their careers,

Rolf Harris, Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall

was still esteemed and respected

for their years of service to the entertainment industry.

They were absolutely embedded into the establishment now,

not just of television, but of the nation.

They were the untouchables.

For decades, these men, along with Gary Glitter,

were serious sexual criminals,

paedophiles hiding in plain sight.

Who am I looking at first?

The celebrity status gave them easy access

to carry out whatever their nefarious plots were.

What ghastly things they got up to.

They wanted to be able to assault women,

even if they didn't articulate it.

Certainly, it would have been one of the rewards of what they were doing.

These four men were once regarded as national treasures,

but the house of cards was about to come tumbling down.

On October 29th 2011,

Jimmy Savile was found dead at his home, aged 84.

The iconic presenter had died in his sleep.

When Savile died, there was this odd reaction,

because he was lauded as someone who'd done great works,

achieved a great deal.

He was lauded as some kind of national celebrity.

SAVILE GIBBERS

Jimmy Savile had been welcomed into the homes of millions.

His primetime Saturday night show Jim'll Fix It

made the dreams of children all over Britain

come true for almost 20 years.

"Dear Jim, please can you fix it for me

"to drive a 125 high-speed train?

"I am six."

It was almost like a member of the Royal Family

or Mother Teresa had died,

a personification of goodness

and an essentially innocent man had passed.

Savile's death prompted an outpouring of national grief.

All the major TV channels across the UK covered the events.

Good evening. He was a giant of British entertainment

through the '70s and '80s

and an extraordinary charity fundraiser...

Known by his trademark zany appearance and love of big cigars,

he made his name first on TV's Top Of The Pops...

Jimmy Savile was laid in state inside a gold coffin

at the Queens Hotel in Leeds,

where over 4,000 people came to pay their respects.

Class, class.

Sheer class, that's what Jimmy had.

He was a one-off,

and I don't think they make them like that any more.

On the day of his funeral at Leeds Cathedral,

much of his hometown came to a standstill.

A warm welcome to all of you as we gather to pray for the soul,

pay tribute and make our final farewells

to Sir Jimmy Savile.

It was a public occasion,

his passing and his funeral,

yet there were many, of course, who knew very different.

I was glad, I was glad he was dead.

All I thought about was, "He can't hurt anybody else any more."

He deserved to go.

But some had been looking behind the legend.

BBC journalist Meirion Jones

had been investigating rumours surrounding Savile for years,

but no-one would talk.

He was always in the back of my mind.

I asked around at the BBC, there were plenty of stories,

but I could never get to a victim or a witness or anything like that.

Then Meirion came across a little-known blog

that included graphic details of abuse

suffered at the hands of a person named JS.

The author of the blog described how she and her friends

were sexually abused by JS

in a Rolls-Royce and at Television Centre.

I read a self-penned autobiography on the web,

and that was the point at which I really thought,

"We're in a position where we could do something here."

All I had to believe that the JS she was talking about was Jimmy Savile.

Meirion and the team at BBC's Newsnight

tracked down the witness,

who confirmed that JS was indeed Jimmy Savile.

In addition, she claimed

that she saw Gary Glitter having sex with a young schoolgirl

in Jimmy Savile's dressing room.

When the girls went out in the Rolls-Royce with Jimmy Savile,

he demanded sexual favours from them.

When they went to Television Centre,

others became involved, specifically Gary Glitter.

The whole account made everything look very much darker.

Glitter later denied the allegations.

The woman's testimony formed the basis

of a Newsnight programme set to reveal the truth about Savile.

We had a very strong interview.

We had messages from others who'd been abused.

We thought, by the time that we were ready to transmit,

that he must have abused at least 100 young people.

At that point, we found out

that there had been a police investigation into him.

That was the point at which our editor said,

"Prepare for transmission."

The libel laws, which had protected Savile for all those years,

were now put to one side.

Savile was dead - he couldn't sue.

All we needed to do was broadcast the truth.

Jimmy Savile's death prompted an outcry of national mourning.

But at the BBC, investigative journalist Meirion Jones

had uncovered the truth about Savile's decades of sexual crimes.

However, his team's documentary,

set to reveal the iconic presenter's true nature,

didn't make it to air.

The schedules were announced for the BBC,

and they were wall-to-wall Jimmy Savile tributes,

and that obviously couldn't happen

and our investigation go out and say that he was a paedophile.

The tributes went ahead,

and the expose was pulled.

For 60 years, Jimmy Savile has been part of our lives -

a great British eccentric...

Frustrated that his investigation into Savile was dropped by the BBC,

Meirion's research was given to a current-affairs team at ITV.

We wanted the story out there.

It was also really important to stop celebrities

being able to hide behind that sort of cloak of power

because they were celebrities.

In October 2012, The Other Side Of Jimmy Savile aired on ITV.

He stands accused of being a sexual predator

charged with at times preying on the very teenagers

he invited to appear on his BBC TV shows.

The programme contained graphic accounts of Savile's abuse

and his secret life, hidden from the public.

Suddenly, everything started coming out of the woodwork.

His knighthood went, his grave was destroyed.

He, within a very quick time,

went from national hero to national villain.

Following the broadcast,

the Metropolitan Police launched Operation Yewtree.

They knew that it would receive publicity

and that it was likely to generate calls,

but there was no real concept of how big that was going to be.

In essence, what it did

was take the lid off of the nation's sort of pain, if you like,

because what you ended up with

was hundreds and hundreds of people coming forward.

Very quickly, serious allegations

against some of Britain's most famous entertainers

were made to the police.

The volume was quite shocking,

and having grown up, you know, in the '70s, '80s,

hearing some of the names was quite surprising,

because they were people that I'd seen as entertainers as a child.

They seemed to just have come from absolutely nowhere.

As soon as the revelations about Savile came out,

you know, it took me back,

and, of course, I believed all of that immediately,

cos it all rang true.

And all of that abuse in plain sight,

appearing to get away with it time and time again,

all of that seemed very, very real to me.

Following the broadcast of ITV's Savile documentary,

BBC Director-General George Entwistle

announced two inquiries into the BBC.

These will be forensic

but also soul-searching examinations.

Our audience's trust in us is paramount.

We will do everything in our power to maintain that trust.

They were allowed to do exactly what they wanted

for far too long.

Such a breach of trust,

I can see why societies come down very, very hard on it now.

It's why these national treasures aren't national treasures any more.

Operation Yewtree uncovered 214 offences

committed by Savile across the country between 1955 and 2009.

However, the police were inundated with accusations

relating to other celebrities who were still alive.

Savile and his exposure represented a sea change.

Savile enabled other investigations to be conducted

and other so-called "celebrities" to be brought to book.

Two names emerged early on in Yewtree -

Gary Glitter and Rolf Harris.

Already disgraced, Glitter - real name Paul Gadd -

had returned to the UK in 2008

following his prison sentence in Vietnam

for molesting two young girls.

One of the names that kept cropping up was Paul Gadd,

AKA Gary Glitter.

Proving historical sexual abuse is extremely difficult,

because the physical evidence no longer exists.

The locations, the buildings in some cases no longer exist.

But what you've got is a pattern of abuse.

Also under investigation was Rolf Harris,

who had played a starring role in the Queen's Diamond Jubilee

and was by then the star of Rolf's Animal Clinic.

The vets here are on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Rolf Harris first came onto our radar

through information that came in from a third party,

so it wasn't directly from somebody affected by him.

And it turned out that this was

a good family friend of the Harris family.

The officers went to visit that individual,

and she provided an interview, and in that,

serious sexual allegations were made against Harris.

The problem with celebrities

is that their fan base believe they know the person,

and Rolf Harris had a very personable public profile,

and it didn't dovetail at all with a paedophile.

The net was tightening on Rolf Harris and Gary Glitter,

and police were about to turn their attention to Stuart Hall.

In early 2012, Stuart Hall received the OBE

for services to broadcasting and charity.

Shortly afterwards, journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

received an anonymous letter about his behaviour.

It was a three-page letter

of such...simplicity

and clarity and detail

and pain

that I couldn't stop thinking about it all night.

"I write to tell you that Stuart Hall

"is another television presenter whom you can investigate.

"He groomed and then sexually exploited me

"when I was a young teenager in the 1970s.

"Why am I writing about this now?

"Because finally, it seems,

"our culture is thinking differently about sexual predators.

"I was enraged when I saw that he had received the OBE this year.

"He was invited by the head of my school

"to come and present the prizes one year

"and presented a prize to me, amongst others.

"Stuart had asked

"if I would have permission to visit the local BBC studios.

"I went off alone to the studios.

"Alone.

"It was at the end of the working day,

"and Stuart took me to his dressing room,

"where he gave me plenty of champagne...

"..before having sex with me."

The letter went on to allege that Stuart Hall groomed

and had sex with the young teenager multiple times.

"I didn't find him sexually attractive, quite the reverse.

"That crepey skin, that vanity.

"But I craved what he gave me in other ways -

"attention and a sense of being wanted.

"Stuart made me complicit in my own abuse.

"He seemed kind and interested in me

"while sexually exploiting a girl more than 25 years younger than he."

She didn't say what she wanted me to do.

There was nothing in there saying, "Expose him."

Yasmin decided to take the letter to the police.

Just a few weeks on, I had a call from Lancashire Police,

saying they were investigating this

and that Stuart Hall had "never been on their radar".

Those were their words.

This letter opened the investigation.

Police were now exploring the past behaviour of Stuart Hall,

and following the Savile scandal, hard questions were being asked.

Public reaction was a loss of trust in the BBC,

and in the middle of that, we were making a Panorama about Savile,

and that started to focus in on the BBC and its culpability.

The Panorama special investigating Savile and the BBC,

which contained interviews from the shelved Newsnight documentary,

was later broadcast.

An inquiry examining the failed Newsnight programme

claimed that it wasn't part of a BBC cover-up.

The Newsnight investigators got the story right.

They had found clear and compelling evidence

that Jimmy Savile was a paedophile.

The decision by their editor to drop the original investigation

was clearly flawed, and the way it was taken was wrong,

though I believe it was done in good faith.

By the end of the year, the BBC had lost its boss,

many senior executives had resigned or moved jobs,

and the BBC was really left in chaos.

The BBC was in turmoil after the Savile scandal.

Now another of their former big names, Stuart Hall,

was about to face his comeuppance.

Lancashire Police came to see me and my teams,

and they had at that time the letter and three potential victims,

all of them in their early teens at the time of these alleged offences.

As a result of that, I was able to authorise the charges.

Stuart Hall was arrested in December 2012.

He faced multiple counts of indecent assault and one count of rape.

His youngest victim was nine years old.

May I just say the allegations are pernicious and callous and cruel

and, above all, spurious, I'm...I'm not guilty,

and I shall be defending the accusations.

It was quite a pivotal case,

because if we were able to successfully prosecute this case,

then all the others that were being investigated

by the Met in London by Yewtree had a hope and had a chance.

Mr Hall, anything you'd like to say to the victims?

That put an additional pressure on us, because we had

everybody else's hopes and expectations on our shoulders, too.

It was almost like we were leading the way.

Will you apologise, Mr Hall?

I have no comment to make, I'm sorry.

Despite initially protesting his innocence,

faced with all the evidence, Hall changed his plea.

Eventually, he realised the writing was on the wall,

and he agreed to plead guilty to 13 sets of victim accounts.

He wasn't going to plead guilty to the one rape allegation.

The police were instructed to talk to that victim.

She said that she was content, in those circumstances,

to allow her case not to be proceeded with.

And we had ensured our victims were content

with the approach we were taking,

and then we went into a courtroom, where he entered those pleas.

Stuart Hall was sentenced to 15 months in prison

after pleading guilty to multiple offences

against 13 young girls, dating back to the 1960s -

a sentence later doubled by the Court of Appeal.

Whether in public or private,

Hall would first approach under friendly pretences

and then bide his time until the victim was isolated.

He can only be described as an opportunistic predator.

The following year,

Hall was convicted of indecently assaulting another underage girl

and sentenced to a further two and a half years.

Was it justice?

Yes, a court found he was guilty - he was sentenced, he went to jail.

But, you know, victims are living with lifelong trauma.

Nothing can make up for that.

Vanessa Walker was sexually assaulted by Stuart Hall

in Yugoslavia in the 1980s.

Because the attack was overseas,

Hall couldn't be prosecuted for the offences.

Was him being sent to prison, has it made a difference?

Do we know for certain it's made a difference?

I hope so.

On behalf of those other women and myself

and all other women

who get abused, assaulted, raped by men

who just simply think that they've got a right to do that.

Following his conviction, the official BBC inquiry broadened

to investigate Hall's time at the Corporation.

It found that he abused 21 females in relation to his work there

and that the BBC culture at the time

allowed Hall's conduct to go unchecked.

His abuse of celebrity power had finally caught up with him.

And detectives also now had enough evidence

on Gary Glitter to make an arrest.

Mr Glitter, what did you have to tell police today?

In court, Glitter would face ten counts

relating to historic child sex abuse,

including several counts of indecent assault

and the attempted rape of an eight-year-old.

Clearly, he spent many years living his life as he wanted to -

a prolific sexual offender and a predator.

Any comments, Mr Gadd?

Using and abusing his position

to assault young girls that were looking up to him as an idol.

And detectives were closing in on another national treasure.

The rumours were then

spreading like wildfire that it was Rolf Harris.

We've just lived through the Savile era,

where one of the most prolific paedophiles of our times

has been able to die and never face justice.

So there was a real public interest to getting this guy out in the open.

As Operation Yewtree gathered momentum

in the wake of the Savile scandal,

allegations of criminal wrongdoing began piling up

against men who'd been household names for decades.

Men who had been able to hide their abuse

from all those around them.

Being a celebrity puts you in a position of power,

and it also gives you the access.

If you work in the entertainment industry,

you've got the access to young women.

So I think the fact that they were celebrities helped them no end.

It shouldn't give an excuse to use that power to abuse people.

We should all live under the same rules of respect,

whatever we do for a living, however much money we have.

I prosecuted thousands of rapes and sexual assaults during my career,

and not one of them was about sex.

They were all about power and control.

It's toxic masculinity, it's misogyny.

It's all of the things that we know.

That will continue until time immemorial unless we address it.

March 2013, over a year after the death of Jimmy Savile,

police release a statement.

An 82-year-old man from Berkshire had been arrested.

The rumours were then spreading like wildfire

that it was Rolf Harris.

We've just lived through the Savile era,

where one of the most prolific paedophiles of our times

has been able to die and never face justice.

So there was a real public interest to getting this guy out in the open.

I remember my news editor gave me a ring at maybe six o'clock,

saying, "Yeah, we're going to press the button."

So we finally named this national institution

in that morning's newspapers.

This was a world exclusive,

and to publish it, and with more victims coming forward as a result,

was an important moment.

Can I ask you for your reaction

to the reports in the Sun newspaper this morning

that you've been arrested on suspicion of sex offences?

No comment.

Another national treasure was in the spotlight.

I remember being really pleased, cos I thought,

"They're getting them, they're picking them off now,

"and there will be more, but he's a really important one,

"because he is seen as such a teddy bear,

"such a national treasure.

"He's a national disgrace, actually.

"And they've got him."

Harris was interviewed by police and charged.

At court, he faced 12 counts of indecent assault

against young girls, dating back to the 1960s.

When I was told that the defendant in the case was Rolf Harris,

my initial reaction was astonishment.

I thought it couldn't possibly be true.

And then I read the evidence.

Too famous, too powerful.

It made him untouchable.

He arrived at court, his wife and daughter holding his hands,

to hear allegations he was a Jekyll and Hyde character.

The court heard Rolf Harris was known as The Octopus,

because of the way he had his hands all over women.

They all described a very jolly, jovial, very friendly man,

who would hug them very intensely.

The bear hug was one of his MOs,

and then, once in the clutches of the bear,

he had access to do more sinister things.

He was more powerful than his victims.

As the trial got under way, Rolf Harris seemed unfazed.

He really played on his celebrity status,

and you could see that people in court were impressed by that.

There came a time when he sang a song

during the course of his evidence.

I remember him talking about popularising the didgeridoo,

this Aboriginal instrument that we now know an awful lot more about

and the sound, because Rolf Harris made it popular.

So his defence counsel, this was part of their tactic,

just to show people that, you know, "How could he have done this?"

Harris put on an avuncular front,

despite the evidence and allegations against him.

One of the key pieces of evidence against Rolf Harris

concerned his daughter's friend when she was in her teenage years,

and the allegation was that Rolf Harris, for a number of years,

had repeatedly indecently assaulted this girl.

She decided to make a disclosure,

and she told her own parents,

who in turn wrote to Harris,

complaining of his conduct.

And he replied to them in a letter,

admitting that he had had a sexual relationship with their daughter,

but said that it had only taken place

after she was beyond the age of consent

and that it had always been consensual.

That was quite an admission by Harris,

because it pinned him to the fact

that he had considered somebody who was his daughter's friend -

so an entirely different generation -

as somebody as a sexual partner.

Key witnesses from all over the world

were brought forward to corroborate the victim's testimonies.

I really wanted to be there for the other women who were little girls

and I might not have said anything then,

but I'm sure as hell saying something now.

Suzi Dent was repeatedly assaulted by Harris in Sydney in 1986.

She was one of several women flown to the UK to give evidence.

Rolf Harris did not make eye contact with me once.

I don't know whether he remembered me or not.

Who knows? Don't care.

I was the one in the courtroom.

At the very end of my testimony, I got off the stand,

and the only person I looked at was Rolf Harris.

I didn't look at anybody else, cos my testimony was over,

and it all poured out of me, all the emotions.

Tony Porter also came forward to provide witness evidence

after he saw Rolf Harris grope a make-up artist in the early '80s.

Rolf was sitting in a glass enclosure at the back.

He was just sitting there quietly, looking down, taking it all in.

It was almost as if he was in his own little world.

Despite the mounting evidence, Rolf Harris showed no remorse.

Perhaps he was in denial.

Perhaps he genuinely didn't remember.

Or perhaps he was just trying to say, you know,

"Who are you? You're not important.

"You're not credible, because you mean nothing to me."

A key moment in the trial came when one of the women claimed

Harris had assaulted her in Cambridge in the 1970s,

but Harris insisted he'd only visited the city

for the first time very recently.

When Harris gave evidence,

he was adamant he had never been to Cambridge,

but that all changed when a member of the public

came forward during the course of the trial.

I got a phone call from my sister, who said, "Have you heard

"that Harris is saying that he's never been in Cambridge?"

I said, "He has been in Cambridge, that's where he assaulted me."

She said, "I know, what are you going to do?"

And I said, "Well, I've got no choice, have I?"

So I rang...the police.

Karen Gardner was allegedly sexually assaulted by Rolf Harris

three times as a 16-year-old

whilst filming TV show Star Games in Cambridge in 1978.

I had to ring Operation Yewtree,

and I just said, "I've got evidence, I can tell you the TV programme,

"roughly the date, and I have got some evidence."

Police tracked down the episode of Star Games

and trawled through the footage.

It proved without doubt that Harris had been to Cambridge.

That was quite a turning point in the trial,

because it was difficult simply to suggest

that he had made a mistake about it,

but that that had been a deliberate lie.

Do you have anything to say to your victims, Mr Harris?

After a seven-week-long trial,

Rolf Harris was found guilty of all 12 counts of indecent assault

against four young girls

and was sentenced to five years and nine months in prison.

What have you got to say for yourself, Harris?!

Mr Pervert, come on, say something!

Although one of the charges

was later overturned by the Court of Appeal,

Harris's reputation was in the gutter.

In terms of public falls from grace in British life,

it's one of the saddest and most spectacular.

In 2017, Harris faced a second trial,

which included the assaults on Karen Gardner.

But the jury failed to reach a verdict.

They couldn't reach a majority verdict,

so therefore the trial fails,

and the judge then puts down a verdict of not guilty,

although - let's be clear - he walks away from the court as not guilty,

but the jury didn't find him not guilty.

Now Gary Glitter faced his day in court,

accused of abusing girls as young as eight years old.

The last of four national treasures was about to be brought to justice.

This was very much a case

that had its roots in the fallout of the Jimmy Savile saga,

because complainants came forward

as a result of all of that publicity.

By the time we got to court, we had a very strong case.

The death of Jimmy Savile prompted one of the biggest police inquiries

into paedophiles in Britain.

It led to Stuart Hall and Rolf Harris being convicted for decades

of historic sexual abuse.

Between them, they faced over ten years in prison.

These people were celebrities and people thought that they knew them.

They brought to light some really unpleasant and uncomfortable truths

about what goes on.

Gary Glitter, whose real name is Paul Gadd, appeared

at Southwark Crown Court in 2015, accused of abusing three women

who had all been under the age of 13.

It was the third time he'd faced prosecution for sexual crimes

after being convicted of molesting young girls in Vietnam

and having 4,000 images of extreme child sexual abuse on his laptop.

He looked utterly disgusted to be there,

disgusted with the press interest.

He was utterly cold until the point that the prosecuting counsel got up

and asked the first question of the cross-examination.

The first question is often the most important

cos it sets the tone for what's to come.

And the question was, why were you looking at pictures of grown men

having penetrative sex with children?

He burst into tears.

His answer was how he'd been having a hard time at work

and he'd been drinking too much

and life wasn't treating him particularly fairly.

And so it was necessary to point out to him that we all go

through difficult periods in our life, but we don't all reach

for our laptops and download images of that kind.

The evidence against Glitter was overwhelming.

You can never predict anything with certainty,

but I was confident that providing the witnesses came to court,

providing they gave the evidence in the way that I expected them to,

there was every opportunity for a jury to say

that they were quite satisfied that these women were telling them

the truth, as indeed they did.

After a three-week trial, 70-year-old Paul Gadd was sentenced

to 16 years in prison for sexually abusing three young girls.

There has never been a flicker of emotion or an ounce of remorse

from Paul Gadd for the numerous childhoods he has blighted.

The only person he has ever felt sorry for is himself.

When he was sentenced to 16 years,

I couldn't have been the only one who said, "That's not long enough.

"It should have been life."

You can't abuse children and walk free eventually.

Glitter, Harris and Hall were now all behind bars,

but with Savile dead, he never faced justice for his crimes.

In 2016, the Dame Janet Smith Review was published.

She found that the culture of the BBC enabled Savile and Hall's

offending to go undetected, and it missed at least

five opportunities to stop the abuse.

There was a culture of not complaining or of raising concerns.

BBC staff felt - and were sometimes told - that it was not in their best

interests to pursue a complaint.

There was a reluctance to rock the boat.

The BBC said that it was now in a different place

and that they would seek to change their policies and culture.

Again, it comes back to understanding why they offended,

how they offended, the means that enabled them to offend

because we need to be looking at those issues,

looking at those questions in order to learn from what happened,

otherwise we run terrible risks.

The fact that all these men got what they deserved kind of broke

a spell that these people are untouchable.

Britain today is a different place from the 1970s and '80s,

where these four national treasures started their careers.

Male-dominated Britain has receded, but not disappeared.

The culture was different.

By and large, there were far too few women in authority.

There was a sense in which, you know, they had to suck it up.

And you did.

Not any more.

It's, to me, quite interesting,

with the MeToo movement, how many people in this country complained

and how they were disbelieved.

The culture of disbelief is still very strong.

We've discovered, with the things that have come out,

just how pampered and supported some of these men have been

to get away with the things they've got away with

because it's about money and it's about power and fame.

He used that fame, the celebrity and the love of the British public

and manipulated it so that he could molest young girls.

Hall and Harris have now been released from prison,

having served over two and almost three years, respectively.

It's reported Gary Glitter may be granted day release

from prison in the coming months.

Savile, Hall, Glitter and Harris abused their power and fame

to molest and assault repeatedly.

They escaped justice for years, hiding behind a cloak of celebrity,

only punished for their crimes decades later.

If you think what he did to me took 45 seconds, a minute

in the space of two hours in 1978...

And if I go back to Cambridge now, I can't walk that way.

I don't walk that way.

And yet it had such happy memories for me,

but completely overlaid by...

..what happened.

When I look at him now, I just think, you sad old man.

God, you know, you had a career, you had everything.

Why did you think that was OK to do that?

Why did you think it was acceptable?

We gave them that status, we put them on these pedestals.

Of course, it was a different time, a different age in some respects.

In other respects, things don't change.

I think it'd be very complacent to say that celebrity is a thing

of the '70s and '80s.

If any good has come out of the horrors, it's that

I think people in authority - whether that's the police,

social services, people in organisations, executives -

really know now they have to listen.

The fact that we can say this now, about Savile, about Rolf Harris,

about Gary Glitter, makes it easier for people to come through now.

Anything we can do to help those victims is vital.

It took so long for justice because it needed the right women

to step up and take a stand.

It needed society to change and to want to listen to women

and historical stories and believe that they are not telling a lie,

that they are telling the truth, that they need to be listened to.

Where we've gone wrong as a society and institutions and professionals

is we weren't listening and we weren't acting upon what we heard.

That's what the predator preyed upon.

The predator would think, "I can carry on abusing with impunity."

We created that landscape

and so we needed to unravel everything that we had done wrong.

Sometimes those childhood images of people you loved watching

when you were very young are indelible.

You can't get rid of them.

And then I think, "Oh, God, no. No, he was a horrible pervert."

They have been punished, but never forget what they did.

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