The papers have finally caught up with what Guido said months ago, raising questions as to what the BBC knew about the Jimmy Savile child abuse allegations and why a Newsnight expose was spiked. It seems Savile was only too happy to openly make jokes about his reputation back in the early 1990s. Former Sun showbiz hack and Channel 5 TV presenter Matthew Wright has revealed:

“The first time I had to phone him up when I was at the Sun, which would be 1991, he had an assistant (I can’t remember her name now). She said ‘I’ll get Mr Savile for you’, put him on the phone, and the first thing he said before I’d even spoken to him was: ‘She told me she was over sixteen’. And that’s to a reporter. I’d like to think, and I did think at the time – and when I told Piers Morgan [then editor of the Sun’s Bizarre column] about it he just said ‘oh its obviously a joke’. I’d like to think that perhaps that was the case but this ITV documetnary contains the testimony of seven women who claim to be victims…”

Knowing what we know now, it doesn’t seem so funny…