Strange, chilling and unsettling - the day I interviewed Savile in his flat

In 2005, then M.E.N. features writer Simon Donohue travelled to Leeds to interview Jimmy Savile in his penthouse apartment to discuss rumours of an appearance on I'm a Celebrity... and a Jim'll Fix It comeback. Following the broadcast of a new BBC drama depicting the life of the disgraced TV star, Simon, left, looks back on the unsettling encounter

IN THE days before social media made pretty much anyone so easily accessible, a journalist’s contact book was an invaluable tool.

Any opportunity to add names and numbers was grasped. I’d worked on a ‘family friendly’ Sunday tabloid while in my first couple of years as a reporter and it was at the Northern News and Echo that I picked up the habit of collecting contacts. Colleagues would swap the numbers they had and we sometimes pretended we were from The Sun and borrowed their account with the Celebrity Numbers service (it really existed) when there were other people we wanted to get in touch with for a vox pop or comment. That’s how I ended up with the home telephone number of Sir Jimmy Savile.

A few years later, I was working as a feature writer with the Manchester Evening News. It was a quiet week. I was bored and looking for something interesting to write about. Speculation was rife about who might be heading into the jungle on I’m A Celebrity, including Savile. He had links to Manchester – he’d lived and worked in the city as a DJ. He was in my book of contacts.

I made the call. The phone was answered and it was Savile – the contact was still live. Would he give me an interview? ‘Yes, come to my place tomorrow,’ said Savile, or at least something similarly surprising.

This was 2005. People didn’t know what we do now. Plans were made to head to Leeds and it felt like a little adventure.

I’m the generation of Jim’ll Fix It and Top of the Pops. As a kid, I’d joined hundreds of others in looking out for Savile as he passed the top of my road in the convoy of black cabs bringing kids with learning difficulties back from their annual trip to Blackpool. People loved to see him.